WHEN Nicolas Sarkozy’s artist father telephoned the newly elected French president about a portrait he wanted to paint to mark the occasion, he had only one question: “Is it all right if I paint the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour hanging from your ear?”
His son thought about it for a moment, then replied tersely: “Okay.”
In his first interview with a British newspaper, the Hungarian-born aristocrat Pal Sarkozy de Nagy Bocsa, 80, who opens an exhibition of his paintings in Madrid this week, talked about his reconciliation with the “hyper-president” from whom he had been estranged for many years.
He said he now got on well with Nicolas and credited the president’s third wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the Italian model turned singer, with reuniting his family. (((I can't doubt that this is the truth.)))
Speaking with passion of his surrealist canvases, which feature naked, tattooed women in various provocative poses against fantasy backdrops, (((oh come on, who can't like THAT?!))) he declared: “Women inspire me more than other subjects.”
His flat on an island in the River Seine in Neuilly, which he shares with his fourth wife Ines, 20 years his junior, is filled with modern paintings and abstract sculpture by French and foreign artists.
In a gravelly voice that betrayed only a trace of a Hungarian accent, he denied he was cashing in on his son’s status, saying he would exhibit his work in Paris only if the Madrid show, entitled Out of Mind, was “an artistic success”. But he admitted he would like the Espace Cardin, a venue behind the Elysée Palace, “because the president only has to cross the street to come and see us”.
He became heated as he denounced biographies of his son, which shed an unflattering light on his own turbulent private life, his bitter divorce from Nicolas’s mother and his rows with the future president when he was growing up.
One glossy French magazine has labelled Pal’s art “erotico-mystico-animist” but he laughed this off....
Was he proud of his son? “Yes, of course, but I’m proud of all my children - people talk a lot about all of them,” he replied. The president’s older brother Guillaume, 57, now heads a healthcare and pensions group. His younger brother François, 49, is a biology researcher and a former paediatrician. (((And besides art, there's science.)))
Pal started painting when he arrived in Paris as a penniless immigrant in 1948. “When Hungary was occupied by Stalin after the war my mother made me leave because otherwise I’d have been sent into forced labour in Siberia aged 18. I joined the Foreign Legion briefly and I spent my first December night in Paris on the grate of a Metro air vent near the Arc de Triomphe, trying to keep warm,” he said.(...)
