satire

From Life, Perec on the (most likely) fictional painter Franz Hutting:

The wall on the left, facing the longer arm of the L, is hung with cork paper. On the track fixed about nine feet up, several metal hangers run, and on them the painter has hung a score of his canvases, mostly small ones: they almost all belong to one of the painter's earlier styles, the one he refers to himself as his "haze period" and which gained him his notoriety: they are, generally, minutely executed copies of well-known paintings—Mona Lisa, The Angelus, The Retreat From Russia, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, The Anatomy Lesson, etc.—over which he has then painted a more or less heavy haze, producing a greyish blur beneath which you can only just make out the silhouette of his celebrated originals. The private viewing of his Paris exhibition at Gallery 22 in 1960 was complemented by artificial fog, made even denser by the crowds of cigar- and cigarette-smokers amongst the guests, to the great joy of the gossip-columnists. It was an instant success. One or two critics carped, for example Beyssandre from Switzerland, who wrote: "Hutting's greys hark back less to Malevich's White on White than to bad jokes by vulgar comedians about black men in unlit tunnels." But most of them enthused over what one called his romantic meteorology, which, he said, placed Hutting on par with his famous quasi-namesake, Huffing, the New York pioneer of Arte Brutta. Astutely advised, Hutting kept nearly half his canvasses himself and will consent to parting with them only on exorbitant terms.

That's GP pictured above with his goatee and his awe-inspiring jewfro.