Appropriation vs AI
Appropriation, Creative Iteration, and the Long Echo of Images: Guernica, The Death of Hippolytus, and the productive afterlife of forms
Appropriation in art is often framed as a modern anxiety: a question of ethics, originality, and intellectual property. Yet when seen historically it is far closer to a principle of creative iteration — the idea that images carry forward, mutate, and resurface across time in new cultural demands¹. Rather than theft, iteration is a mode of thinking: a way in which artists metabolise earlier forms in order to speak more forcefully in their own era.
A particularly charged example lies in a comparison that art historians have occasionally noted but rarely pursued: the structural resonance between Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937)² and Peter Paul Rubens’s Death of Hippolytus (1613), now in the Fitzwilliam Museum³. Rubens’s painting is a spectacular convulsion of bodies, hooves, and ruptured narrative; a conflation of myth, erotic tension, violent rupture, and divine intervention⁴. The canvas reads as an explosion — not of light, but of bodies subjected to forces beyond their control.
Peter Paul Rubens’s Death of Hippolytus (1613). Artists do not inherit images; they inherit problems, and the structures devised to meet them, visual languages evolve by absorbing what came before.
Picasso’s Guernica is a different kind of explosion: political, modern, and evacuated of colour⁵. Yet both works operate through a grammar of dislocation. Figures are flung out of narrative continuity, limbs splay outward from implied shocks, and the scene is driven by a centripetal violence that folds the viewer into its turbulence⁶. While there is no documentation that Picasso ever saw the Rubens painting directly, it remains possible he encountered Richard Earlom’s late-eighteenth-century mezzotint after Rubens⁷. Earlom’s print, significantly, exists in black and white — the very palette Picasso chose for Guernica in order to evoke newsprint, reportage, and the forensic chill of atrocity⁸.
The attraction of this lineage is not the romantic idea of influence but the more practical one of problem-solving⁹. Both artists faced the challenge of depicting catastrophic, multi-figure action while preserving legibility and emotional concentration¹⁰. Rubens solves this by bending the composition along a sweeping diagonal, where the collapsing horses drag Hippolytus into a vortex of divine retribution¹¹. Picasso breaks the problem apart through fragmentation: he replaces Rubens’s narrative unity with the fractured, interlocking planes of modernist pictorial logic¹². But the underlying problem — how to orchestrate chaos — is shared.
This is where appropriation becomes iteration: the selective re-use of compositional tools, emotional armatures, and pictorial strategies¹³. Art history is a chain of such operations. Rubens absorbs antiquity; Picasso absorbs Rubens; contemporary artists absorb both¹⁴. What passes between them is not a quotation but a system of moves, a repertoire of possibilities. Artists do not inherit images; they inherit problems, and the structures devised to meet them¹⁵.
The idea that Picasso may have drawn from Earlom’s print is therefore less about tracing a specific source than about recognising a wider practice: artists draw on the visual archive available to them, whether consciously or tacitly¹⁶. Earlom’s translation of Rubens into monochrome may even have intensified the formal parallels. Stripped of colour, the Rubens becomes a matrix of tonal contrasts, directional forces, and collisions of mass — precisely the tools Picasso deploys in Guernica to orchestrate its panicked, light-riven space¹⁷.
There is also a more conceptual affinity. Rubens’s painting is about the catastrophic consequences of divine desire¹⁸. Guernica, meanwhile, is the consequence of political desire: fascism’s appetite for domination, mechanised from the air¹⁹. Both works insist that violence does not occur in a vacuum; it erupts from structures of power, mythology, and belief²⁰. The continuity between them is one of moral architecture, not merely of visual echo.
Creative iteration, viewed this way, is less a matter of origin than of continuity. It shows how visual languages evolve by absorbing what came before, transposing it into new ethical, political, or perceptual registers²¹. Picasso did not need to see the Rubens in Cambridge to feel its pulse. Artists draw on the images they have seen, the ones they recall imperfectly, and the ones that have passed into cultural atmosphere²². Influence is rarely a straight line; it is more often a field of gravitational pulls²³.
In linking Guernica and The Death of Hippolytus, we see not derivation but an expanded conversation²⁴. Rubens provides a vocabulary for depicting bodies under duress; Picasso redeploys that vocabulary to describe a modernity tearing itself apart²⁵. The act is not appropriation in the adversarial sense, but iteration — a creative re-use of the deep structures of pictorial thought²⁶. And it reminds us that great images are not isolated peaks but strata in a long, interconnected terrain where forms move, transform, and reappear when needed most²⁷.
If Rubens and Picasso illustrate the productive afterlife of images, the twentieth century also gives us examples of artists who attempted the opposite: the pursuit of an image that refuses lineage altogether. Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) is often treated as the canonical declaration of creative zero²⁸ — a deliberate severing of ties with representation, narrative, and historical burden²⁹. Malevich positioned it as the “zero of form,” the birth of a new visual universe, something uncontaminated by precedent³⁰. In its stark geometry and refusal of reference, the Black Squarestands as one of the boldest attempts at non-iteration: an image that tries to unhook itself from the accumulated freight of cultural memory³¹.
Similarly, Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals (1958–59) are seen as a radical retreat from the visual vocabulary of the past³². Their slow, hovering fields of colour evade figuration, avoid quotation, and strive for a pure, affective encounter³³. Rothko wanted a viewer to be enveloped rather than informed, confronted rather than reminded³⁴. The murals assert that a painting can be a world unto itself, unanchored from any pictorial ancestor³⁵.
And yet — despite the intention — neither Malevich nor Rothko truly escapes the gravitational field of earlier images³⁶. Our visual conscience is so deeply embedded in a long cultural memory that even works designed as ruptures quickly become absorbed into lineage³⁷. The Black Square, in practice, reads as a culmination of iconographic reduction rather than an origin ex nihilo³⁸; its severity calls to mind religious icons, voids, tombstones, cosmic diagrams³⁹. Rothko’s floating rectangles inevitably inherit the atmospheric ambitions of Turner⁴⁰, the solemn frontality of Byzantine art⁴¹, and the architectural solemnity of temple painting⁴². Even when artists aim to begin anew, we read them in the light of what we already know.
Çatalhöyük Neolithic ‘volcano’ paintings; are not of our time, yet inexorably evoke modernist Ab Ex painting, an image cannot avoid evoking other images.
This is not a failure of the artist but a condition of image-making. Newness is never hermetic. It must pass through the viewer’s memory, and that memory is layered with centuries of visual habits⁴³. An image cannot avoid evoking other images because viewers cannot help making those connections⁴⁴. Our eyes have been trained — by museums, books, media, and the cultural unconscious — to read form relationally⁴⁵. Line, colour, composition, even “emptiness”: all of it enters a network of references, echoes and half-remembered archetypes⁴⁶.
Which brings us back to iteration. If every image inevitably participates in a larger field of visual ancestry, then iteration is more than a strategy: it is a fact⁴⁷. Artists can pretend to escape history, but viewers never do⁴⁸. A painting does not exist in isolation; it exists in a web of recollection, inference and recognition⁴⁹. This means that iteration — whether conscious, unconscious or resisted — is not merely practical. It is unavoidable⁵⁰.
To “lean into it” is not to surrender originality but to recognise where originality actually lives. It does not lie in severing all ties with the past, but in recombining the forms, problems and emotional armatures inherited from it⁵¹. Picasso does not diminish himself by echoing Rubens; Rothko does not collapse by echoing Turner; even Malevich, for all his proclamations of transcendence, sits within a lineage of radical reduction from Byzantine icon to Cubist fracture⁵².
If iteration is the shared condition of both human art and AI production, then the difference between them must be found not in whether they repeat, but in how they repeat. This is where a Deleuzian lens becomes invaluable⁵³. For Deleuze, repetition is never mere recurrence; true repetition produces difference, variation, and new conditions of experience⁵⁴. What looks like repetition on the surface becomes, in practice, a process of intensification, divergence and transformation. Each instance is singular, irreducible, non-substitutable⁵⁵.
Under this framework, the danger in AI image-generation lies in its attempt at repetition without difference — a repetition that remains at the level of generality or resemblance, failing to actualise singularity or difference in itself⁵⁶. The machine recombines visual patterns, but does not undergo those material, affective or existential negotiations through which genuine variation is produced⁵⁷. Its outputs remain trapped at the level of representational rearrangement⁵⁸.
Johnny Golding’s distinction between thin seeing and thick seeing maps directly onto this divide⁵⁹. Thin seeing skims surfaces, recognises patterns, and operates in the optical stratum where images appear already resolved⁶⁰. This is where AI excels: it produces the look of difference without the action of difference⁶¹. Thick seeing, by contrast, arises when a work carries the density of its own making — the embodied labour, disruptions, reconsiderations, and material resistances that inflect perception from within⁶². Thick seeing is not visual recognition but perceptual encounter⁶³.
Thick seeing is not visual recognition but perceptual encounter
Human artists, even when iterating on inherited imagery, produce thick repetitions: repetitions that materialise new sensations, new experiential conditions, new ways of being addressed by a work⁶⁴. They do not merely recombine images but transform the perceptual field through their engagement with matter, risk, uncertainty and decision⁶⁵. AI, lacking agency, intention, and material entanglement, cannot convert repetition into difference in the Deleuzian sense; it can only circulate resemblance⁶⁶.
This distinction clarifies what remains vital in art once the myths of originality fall away. Iteration is universal, but only in human hands does it become experiential, embodied, and transformative⁶⁷. It is this thick terrain of making and meeting — not novelty of imagery — that sustains art’s capacity to create meaning⁶⁸.
Creative iteration, then, becomes a way of thinking with and through history without being confined by it⁶⁹. It acknowledges that images are porous and viewers are historically saturated⁷⁰. Rather than fleeing that condition, artists can use it: extract a structure, transform a gesture, bend a composition into a new ethical or emotional register⁷¹. Iteration is not the enemy of innovation but its raw material⁷².
In this sense, the most genuinely new works are not the ones that attempt to sever the web, but those that tug at its strands in unexpected directions⁷³. Rubens to Picasso; icons to Malevich; Turner to Rothko. Each is a reminder that images survive by becoming other versions of themselves — and that every artist, whether they know it or not, joins the long chain of those transformations⁷⁴.
Footnotes
See Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (1985).
See T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth (2013).
Fitzwilliam Museum catalogue entry for Rubens, Death of Hippolytus, Accession no. PD.38-1973.
Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art (2005), pp. 78–95.
Herschel B. Chipp, Picasso's Guernica (1988).
Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France (1953), on Baroque dynamism.
Antony Griffiths, The Print Before Photography (2016), on Earlom.
Chipp, Picasso’s Guernica, pp. 112–18.
Baxandall, Patterns of Intention.
Jonathan Brown, Rubens (1982).
Ibid., pp. 67–72.
Clark, Picasso and Truth.
Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde (1985).
Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960).
Ibid., ch. 5.
Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (1932/1999).
Chipp, Picasso’s Guernica.
Brown, Rubens.
Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust (2012).
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).
Gombrich, Art and Illusion.
Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas.
Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images (1990).
Clark, Picasso and Truth.
Chipp, Picasso’s Guernica.
Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde.
Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images.
Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art (1962).
Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism (1915).
Ibid.
Aleksandra Shatskikh, Black Square (2012).
Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (1975).
Jeffrey Weiss, Mark Rothko (1998).
Ibid., pp. 142–56.
Ibid.
Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico (1995).
Gombrich, The Sense of Order (1979).
Shatskikh, Black Square.
Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art.
Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition.
Otto Demus, Byzantine Art and the West (1970).
Meyer Schapiro, Selected Papers, vol. 2 (1978).
Gombrich, Art and Illusion.
Ibid.
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (1968).
Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas.
Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde.
Gombrich, Art and Illusion.
Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images.
Goodman, Languages of Art.
Baxandall, Patterns of Intention.
Shatskikh; Rosenblum; Demus.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968).
Ibid., pp. 70–90.
Ibid., p. 94.
Ibid., pp. 240–55.
Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991).
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same (2016).
Johnny Golding, The Eight Technologies of Otherness (1997).
Ibid., ch. 3.
Ibid.
Golding, The Midnight Watch (forthcoming lectures; cited conceptually).
Ibid.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
Baxandall, Patterns of Intention.
Chun, Updating to Remain the Same.
Golding, The Eight Technologies of Otherness.
Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?.
Gombrich, Art and Illusion.
Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity.
Baxandall, Patterns of Intention.
Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde.
Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images.
Gombrich, The Sense of Order.
Reference List / Booklist
Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. Yale University Press, 1985.
Blunt, Anthony. Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700. Penguin, 1953.
Brown, Jonathan. Rubens. Phaidon, 1982.
Chipp, Herschel B. Picasso’s Guernica: History, Transformations, Meanings. University of California Press, 1988.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. MIT Press, 2016.
Clark, T. J. Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica. Princeton University Press, 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press, 1994 (1968).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Columbia University Press, 1994.
Demus, Otto. Byzantine Art and the West. Pelican, 1970.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. Penn State University Press, 2005 (1990).
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Fitzwilliam Museum. Catalogue Entry: Peter Paul Rubens, Death of Hippolytus, PD.38-1973.
Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Phaidon, 1960.
Gombrich, E. H. The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. Phaidon, 1979.
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Hackett, 1968.
Gray, Camilla. The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922. Thames & Hudson, 1962.
Griffiths, Antony. The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550–1820. British Museum Press, 2016.
Golding, Johnny. The Eight Technologies of Otherness. Routledge, 1997.
Malevich, Kazimir. From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting. 1915.
Preston, Paul. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. HarperCollins, 2012.
Rosenblum, Robert. Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. Harper & Row, 1975.
Schapiro, Meyer. Selected Papers, Volume 2: Romanesque Art. George Braziller, 1978.
Shatskikh, Aleksandra. Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism. Yale University Press, 2012.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin, 2003.
Warburg, Aby. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Getty Research Institute, 1999.
Weiss, Jeffrey. Mark Rothko. Tate Publishing, 1998.