Move Over, Picasso

OK, let’s just say from the start that art forgery is never going to be my thing. For one thing, nobody’s going to believe that Picasso painted with icing, not even during his experimental blue period (which was fortunate for him since blue food colour absolutely never washes off your hands. I generally just tell people I’ve had a run-in with a Smurf.)

Racheli, a young woman celebrating her graduation from art school, requested a cake for the occasion. Since none of her own artwork was available for me to copy, I figured why not just steal an image from the public domain and reproduce that? (Woman Seated in a Chair – 1941) Well, as it happens, Picasso died in 1973 and his work will not enter the public domain until 2043! (Fortunately, I think it unlikely that Picasso’s estate is as litigious as Marvel Comics, which recently sued a small shop in Jerusalem for selling kippot with a Spiderman image on them. I guess they needed to make back some of the money they lost on that lousy Spiderman 3.)

Still, as striking as this painting is, I did want to personalize it for the occasion. What better way than to include the graduate’s name among the giants of the art world? I carefully copied the signatures of the greats – Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, and the rest of that crowd, onto the sides of the cake and slipped in Racheli’s signature as well (not visible in the photo, but there all the same). Apparently she and her family were so pleased with the cake that they refused to cut it for a week.

I’d rather not know how it tasted by that point.