News — SuzanneMalherbe

Creativity may be hard to define, but it’s sometimes even harder to attribute. The museum mistaking a minor work for a masterpiece or the collector discovering a forgery may measure provenance in millions. Yet solving mysteries around authorship reveals something even more valuable about how innovation actually works. Sometimes the myth of “artistic genius” hides a more complicated story. Suzanne Malherbe and Lucy Schwob, two early 20th century French avant-garde artists have presented this dilemma. Was one the visionary and the other merely an aide to greatness? That’s often how biographers present them, portraying Lucy as a powerful intellectual forging...