Obituary of Gerald Laing, one of Britain's best-known pop artists of the 1960s

His painting, still based on photographs, developed a sour edge during the Iraq war in studies of atrocities such as Abu Ghraib, illustrated by a toothpaste advertisement model taking the place of the grinning female soldier in a scene of torture. It did not impress the media. He professed himself mildly embittered by the absence of critical esteem in his later years, and began to despise the whole notion of the avant garde.

If I were in Manchester I would go to this exhibition of the work of Adolphe Valette. He was a French painter in the Impressionist style who made his home in Manchester, England. If he is remembered at all It's for having befriended and influenced local art hero L S Lowry. Thus the title of yesterday's Guardian article, Exhibition for 'Monet of Manchester' who inspired Lowry, in which our artist is an unknown location, pinpointed in ideaspace by using three other proper names as coordinates.


Valette, self portrait circa 1917.

The man who couldn't stop drawing
Jon Sarkin was working as a chiropractor when a stroke changed him. Suddenly, he was self-absorbed, rude and fighting a compulsive desire to create artedited extract from Shadows Bright As Glass, by Amy Ellis Nutt, published next week by Piatkus Books.

i backed myself into a corner of stupidity a couple of days ago. The comic book world, which is an area of Hell to which I appear to have been consigned for all Eternity, temporarily broke my head. I thought it might make my sentence more bearable if I stopped blogging. I managed to hold to that for only one day and now I'm back with a completely new subject. PUBIC HAIR. What got me started was this very amusing opinion piece from The Melbourne Age by Cordelia Fine ("that rare academic who's also an excellent writer" -Library Journal),

The final frontier of womanhood is under siege from the "beauty" police.
EXPERTS estimate that if deforestation continues to increase at current rates, by the year 2037 there will be no female pubic hair left in Australia.
Every day, in salons across the country, an area of pubic hair the size of Richmond is covered in hot wax and ripped out from the roots. Some of it may be old growth that has been flourishing undisturbed for years, perhaps even decades. But in literally minutes it is gone.

I feel compelled to view that wonderful painting "L'origine du Monde' by Gustave Courbet (1866).


I love the way that paintings attract to themselves strange but glorious histories:

The commission is believed to have come from Khalil Bey, a Turkish diplomat, former ambassador of the Ottoman Empire in Athens who had just moved to Paris... After Khalil-Bey’s finances were ruined by gambling, the painting... was first bought by antique dealer Antoine de la Narde. Edmond de Goncourt hit upon it in an antique shop in 1889, hidden behind a wooden pane decorated with the painting of a castle or a church in a snowy landscape. Hungarian collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany bought it at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1910 and took it with him to Budapest. Towards the end of the Second World War the painting was looted by Soviet troops but ransomed by Hatvany who, when he emigrated, was allowed to take only one art work with him, and he took L'Origine to Paris. In 1955 L’Origine du monde was sold at auction for 1.5 million francs. Its new owner was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. After Lacan died in 1981, the French Minister of Economy and Finances agreed to settle the family’s inheritance tax bill through the transfer of the work to the Musée d'Orsay, an act which was finalized in 1995. According to postcard sales L’Origine du monde is the second most popular painting in the Musée d’Orsay, after Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette

While googling the title of the painting I came across this rather striking book cover:


Behind this cover you will find the story of a "dwarf named Bergamme" who "set fire to the Grand Central Museum on March 23, 2020." and " in his half-burned state sneaked off with Courbet’s famous work L’Origine du monde." (this is juicily close to our own Zany the dwarf being convicted for stealing the Mona Lisa in Leotard) "All that may ever be understood of the Bergamme case is contained in the confession he made to the narrator/reporter of this account before he died from the burns. L’Origine du monde is a puzzling, tragicomic detective novel, and a criminal investigation into philosophical musings, which delves into the nature of modern art. It has been nominated for the Prix Interallié."

It took a minute to strike me as odd that the above summary of a French language book is in English. I was on the site of an organization called The French Publisher's Agency, which i hadn't heard of before "If you want to sell foreign books to American publishers, complaining at length or denouncing America's so-called 'cultural isolation' won't be of any help: I thought we just had to go by the rules, I mean the American rules of a reliable agent, of personal contacts and a harsh book selection. While some French professionals mocked the idea, as it always happens in our country, some others agreed, and this is how it all started.". I bet you'd have to change that cover though, mes amis. 

Before we leave this rambling consideration of female pubic hair, it must be added that among the most strangely and charmingly erotic images in the history of art are those in the series of ladies muffs engraved by Wenzel Hollar (1607-1677):

invisible man. I've only just heard about Liu Bolin.

LIU BOLIN is a young beijing based artist who has exhibited primarily in china until last year’s solo show at Paris’ Galerie Bertin Toublanc and a group show with the gallery in Miami. he recently finished up a show at Eli Klein Fine Art in New York showcasing a variety of his pieces including some form the series ‘Camoflague’. This series is an exploration of human nature and animal instincts which features Chinese citizens painted to blend into their surroundings. The subjects are covered head to toe in paint, camouflaging themselves in front of the Chinese flag, a billboard or downtown Beijing.

"One hundred years ago, each Chinese man had a long plait behind his back. At that time, this was normal. If a man had no plait or cut it short, it was a symbol of his innovative ideas. But now, the plait behind the back previously was the the hallmark of artists, recently becomes the patent of the hairdressers in hair salon, all of who would be disparaged by the majority people with short hair. Long hair and plait themselves are meaningless. Their meaning depends on the outside environment. Human beings are born in society, so our thinkings are fixed by traditional culture. Human beings are so miserable that even their thinkings are copied unconsciously to the next generation.
The mental enthrallment is more terrible than the physical disappearance."