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artist in, say, the sixteenth century, who would have known the painting of his native city, who could have known a small number of works of art through copies or engravings. With the "Musee Imaginaire" of today Picasso has, almost all his life, been able to see every form of art known to man; but, if he has been presented with this huge variety, he has always chosen what he needed with the most exact instinct and judgment, finding precisely the material that he needed for what he was doing at that particular moment and invariably moulding it to his own purposes. He has always realized that it is only with an artist of feeble imagination that eclecticism is a danger; a great artist can absorb and be nourished by what he takes from others and uses to his own ends” (Blunt 6).

Picasso offered an explanation for his combining images from traditional art “When I paint, I always try to give an image people are not expecting and beyond that, one they reject. That's what interests me. It's in this sense that I mean I always try to be subversive. That is, I give a man an image of himself whose elements are collected from among the usual way of seeing things in traditional painting and then reassembled in a fashion that is unexpected and disturbing enough to make it impossible for him toescape the questions it raises” (Picasso qtd. in Gilot 66).

A failure to recognize the scope of Picasso's dependence on the practice of transforming the work of others has generated a myth about his creative powers which would have us to believe that his inventions were totally original, unprecedented and inexplicable. Gertrude Stein even promoted the idea that Picasso had no help in his revolution in art but later she contradicted her statement “Picasso was the only one in painting who saw the twentieth century with his eyes and saw its reality and consequently his struggle was terrifying, terrifying for himself and for others, because he had nothing to help him, the past did not help him, nor the present, he had to do it all alone...

Later she modified her statement by saying:

...he returned and became acquainted with Matisse through whom he came to know African sculpture” (Stein 22) .

As her statement demonstrates, Picasso was often presented as the solitary genius creating an unprecedented art for the twentieth century. This was just

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