George Condo has been friends with all the greats, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and (perhaps the greatest of these) Kanye West...?

Born in New Hampshire in 1957, Condo hit the New York scene at precisely the right moment, after he had tired of studying guitar and the lute...whatever that is. He started working at Andy Warhol’s sweatshop of a factory applying diamond dust to his silkscreens. He would start work at 10 a.m. and finish at midnight, which was definitely illegal, but Andy Warhol gave slim to no sh*ts. He was Andy Warhol after all. After nine months of this Condo decided that he was going to follow his girlfriend to Los Angeles. This only lasted a few months and then Condo went to Europe where he started pulling some solo exhibitions. All of a sudden he was famous and flouncing back and forth between Paris and New York.

Condo was a huge fan of collaborating with other artists and he seems to have met a collaborative soul mate in none other than Kanye West. Condo created a series of paintings for West’s 2010 album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which have since been banned by both iTunes and Walmart - not not their initial intention. The two also collaborated on Kim Kardashian’s 2013 Christmas present - an Hermes Birkin bag with a Condo painting on it. The painting draws inspiration from the mythological story "The Judgment of Paris," in which Paris must decide who is the prettiest between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. In the Condo version, we can only assume that Kanye is Paris and Kim, being the only one without a distorted face on the bag, is the winner of the beauty pageant. Kim proudly posted the bag on her instagram and received a thorough ass-whooping in the comment section - being accused of devil worship and ruining a perfectly good Birkin bag (which is worse, I’m not sure). The best comment on the post was simply and elegantly put: “Holy sh*tballs. That is ugly.”

I guess it was Condo’s style that offended Kim’s fans. Condo describes it as, “psychological cubism.” He explains, “Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states. Four of them can occur simultaneously. Like glimpsing a bus with one passenger howling over a joke they're hearing down the phone, someone else asleep, someone else crying – I'll put them all in one face." It’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea.