Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) includes the memorable simile: “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” A neat turn of phrase.
The artist Donner speaks it during a chatty intellectual argument with this friend and rival Beauchamp. Once a Dadaist, Donner has turned to paint representational scenes. It’s too much for Beauchamp and their mutual friend Martello, so they conspire to murder him in a manner alluding to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) by whacking him on the head so that he falls down a staircase dead.
Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) (1912)
Stoppard’s simile alludes to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), an allusion to Edward Burne-Jones’s The Golden Staircase (1880), neither of which are even vaguely picnicky.
Featured Image: Playbill for the New York production of T Artist Descending a Staircase. Directed by Tim Luscombe. New York, 1988.
See Tom Stoppard. Artist Descending a Staircase. BBC (1972); Artist Descending a Staircase. London: Faber & Faber, 1988