Art Is Either Plagiarism Or Revolution

The fuller statement, found in Daniel Guérin's edition of The Writings of a Savage (1978), reads: "In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?" The sentiment was first popularized in English by the critic James Huneker, who paraphrased it in The Pathos of Distance (1913). Gauguin spoke from experience: the Impressionist movement he had been part of in Paris — once scorned — had by the 1890s become the new establishment, which partly drove his departure for Tahiti in search of a more radical break.