Vermeer, Portrait of the Artist in his Studio

“Vermeer, Portrait of the Artist in his Studio” is a copy of a copy of a painting. Starting with a museum poster of Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, c. 1666, Malcolm Morley divided the image into smaller sections and then placed the individual sections in an expansive grid across the canvas. Using a magnifying glass, Morley slowly reconstructed the image, piece by piece. When Morley’s “super-realistic” paintings appeared in the late 1960s, they were among the first works to explore issues of appropriation and originality in art, critical ideas that would come to define decades of discourse.