George Condo – American Contemporary Artist

George Condo, born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire, is one the great American contemporary visual artists. Both a painter and sculptor, Condo has had his work exhibited at the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, and Whitney Museum, among dozens of other museums. His work investigates the genre of portraiture, pulling inspiration from American caricature, European history portraits, and Greek mythological figures – often in a dark, yet humorous style. 2010 has proven to be a year of major mainstream collaborations, with Condo teaming up with Supreme New York to create 3 skateboard decks and most recently, working with Kanye West on his latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Below Condo sits down with New York Magazine to discuss each of the 5 covers he put together with Kanye and the story behind each one.

Cubist-style portrait of Kanye

On Kanye’s first visit to Condo’s studio, he blasted “Power.” “Immediately,” Condo explains, “I started having all ideas about these mythological creatures and volcanic landscapes. Parts and pieces from Macbeth. Parts and pieces from some sort of sci-fi landscape.” But when Condo heard the song’s hook, from King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” he told West he wanted to paint a portrait. The next afternoon, West came back and posed. “It’s sort of cubist, you know, this portrait with all these different dimensions to it. Like an African mask with almost a modern face. I wanted to get that feeling that he’s almost a Miles Davis-like guy.”

Naked sphinx straddling Kanye

“That’s a good painting,” Condo says matter-of-factly. “She’s a kind of fragment, between a sphinx, a phoenix, a haunting ghost, a harpy. And then Kanye is also in some sort of strange 1970s burned-out back room of a Chicago blues club having a beer — so far away from the real Kanye West that it’s just a scream.” In painting Kanye in such an outrageous situation, Condo says, “I was challenging him with the imagery as well. He said, ‘I’m shocked, but I like it, and I gotta go with my gut feeling.’” This cover’s already been banned by Wal-Mart and Apple’s iTunes Music Store, much to Condo’s disgust. “The superimposition of people’s perceptions on a cartoon is shocking,” Condo scoffs. “What’s happening in their minds should be banned. Not the painting.”

Ballerina

Condo remembers that West came to his studio between eight and ten times over the course of the summer. The ballerina — a concept that later worked its way into West’s “Runaway” film and performance at the VMAs — came from one of those visits. “We were hanging around one night, and we were listening to that tune ‘Runaway,’” Condo recalls, when his wife, Anna, showed West a a shot of French dancer Sylvie Guillem moving in slow motion. “And somehow Kanye grabbed onto that idea of the ballerina,” Condo explains. “He just said, ‘Hey man, I’d like to have a great ballerina painting.’ I thought of a ballerina toasting. You know, ‘let’s toast to the scumbags.’”

Head with sword

“I really like that idea of a Shakespearian thing,” West told Condo about this painting of a severed head wearing a crown. The piece’s two contrasting styles — “cubism and classicism forged together in a single painting” — dovetail, Condo says, with West’s music, with its “layers of different styles happening simultaneously.” What did Kanye see in the picture that made him like it? “His tragedy was a kind of exile that Kanye imposed upon himself,” Condo says. “He was free from exile by having the cathartic moment in the image. He’s alive in the painting, you know what I mean? In a strange way it’s like, he opened his eyes.”

Priest

Surprise! Def Jam sent us this photo on Friday, telling us to use it to replace the painting of the headless crown. Explains Condo: “[Kanye and I] talked about paintings in the early baroque era depicting religious figures, and wanted to push that out into the open in today’s world. It mirrors the ‘paranoid’ riff on one of the tracks.”