Description

George Condo knew more about old-school rap than about Kanye West when West turned up at his New York studio in 2010 and played him the new album for hours. Over the next few days the painter produced eight or nine works in response. West had one specific request: a phoenix. What he got was stranger. The main cover, framed by a thick red border, shows West slumped on a blue couch with a green beer bottle while a nude, armless, winged creature with a long spotted tail straddles him. Condo called her "a kind of fragment, between a sphinx, a phoenix, a haunting ghost, a harpy."

According to Condo, the provocation was the plan. West wanted an image explicit enough for retailers to refuse, and in October 2010 he tweeted "Yoooo they banned my album cover!!!!! Banned in the USA!!!", asking why Nirvana's naked baby was acceptable when he could not have "a PAINTING of a monster with no arms and a polka dot tail and wings." Walmart said it had never rejected the record, but the stunt worked: the cover became news before the music was heard.

The album ended up with six faces. Condo painted five covers, all of them sold with the record: the couch scene; a pale ballerina in a black tutu holding a drink, first meant for the single "Runaway"; a Cubist portrait of West with four mouths full of bulging and gold teeth; his crowned, severed head pierced by a sword against a cloudy sky; and The Priest, a drab portrait of West dressed as a reverend. The sixth is the version shown here, a pixelated censor of the main painting used on some shipped copies and on the digital release. Billboard later ranked the artwork the 30th best album cover of all time.

Credit

Paintings by George Condo