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2/ .. interested or moved him, he could be a fabulous painter. Unusually, he was a superb portraitist of both women and men. Bottom left, is his wife Madeleine. Top right, is the the grumpy and bourgeois Monsieur Bertin. Boy could he do clothes and cloth!
Beep beep. It's the birthday of the fecund surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1910 -2012). During her life - she lived to 101! - she was overshadowed by macho husband Max Ernst. But a recent Tate show proved she was the one with the deeper and wider talent.
https://t.co/7vBBQjShT7
Beep beep. It's the birthday of the extraordinary Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614), the first fully professional female artist. Get this - she had 11 children, and made her husband stay at home and look after them while she painted! Probably the first female artist to paint a nude!
Beep beep. It’s the birthday of that strange German painter Christian Schad (1894-1982). He’s on the left in the see-through top! In the interwar years he painted edgy society portraits. Later, he was commissioned to copy Grunewald’s Stuppach Madonna. And did it brilliantly.
Beep beep. It's the birthday of the American fantasy artist Maxfield Parish (1870-1966). To be honest - he does nothing for me. But top left is apparently the best selling print of the 20th century! It hung on 1 in 4 American walls! And I quite like his portrait of Greg Wallace.
10/ This great sequence of paintings by Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is surely the finest display of fat art anyone has ever attempted. Made in the 1990s, they show Sue Tilley, who worked in a Jobcentre at the time as a benefits supervisor. Nowadays she's an artist. #Fatties
4/ Diego Rivera (1886-1957) is probably best known today as Frida Kahlo's husband. She was his fourth wife. After her death, he took a fifth. Rivera was huge. How he managed to climb the scaffolds to paint his Mexican fresco cycles I'll never know. But it's great art. #Fatties
2/ Jenny Saville (b. 1970). I'm old enough to remember Jenny Saville's arrival in art, and the big splash she made at the Saatchi Gallery with her first self-portraits. Her art seems to be about fat bodies, but it's the psychological edginess that packs the wallop.#Fatties
I've put on so much weight in the Great Lockdown I'm tempted to throw away the scales. But that's a loser's strategy! So, instead, I've been consoling myself by celebrating those people in art who are even fatter than me! Here's my Fat Top Ten. It's a glorious list. #Fatties