Goudemalion and his Galateas

Jean-Paul who? That would be the common reaction of many of those born after the late ‘70s when the name Jean-Paul Goude crops up. But for those who partied at Studio 54 in New York, Club Sept in Paris, or Coco Banana in Manila, they know that he was the man who created the mind-blowing images and music videos of Grace Jones, that androgynous, eccentric disco phenomenon who was catapulted from the underground New York scene to international superstardom. 

Goude was also known for revolutionizing the advertising world from the ‘80s to the ‘90s, reinventing the visual identities of big brands like Kodak, Perrier and Citroën. Who can forget his slick commercial of a 1985 Citroën CX2 zooming out of a giant robotic Grace Jones Head in the desert? Or his commercial of a woman on safari in Africa, climbing up a hill to reach for a bottle of Perrier at the pinnacle, only to be met by a roaring lion. But alas, she outroars the beast which retreats as she points to him singing the refrain from the Nina Simone classic, I Put a Spell on You!

He was also responsible for the 1990 cult commercial of Chanel’s Egoiste cologne for men with impeccably styled women on the verge, popping out of the balconies of a Belle Epoque building screaming as they repeatedly opened and shut French doors behind them. Thinking the young Vanessa Paradis looked like the cartoon bird Tweety Pie, he immortalized her in a gilded cage, whistling and swinging away with long plumes cascading from her black leotards. As she splashes Chanel’s Coco perfume all over the cage, a white Persian cat looks at her with longing and desire.

Through the noughties, you wouldn’t miss Goude’s wacky Galeries Lafayette billboards whenever you took the metro. They were a refreshing sight in the underground with their wit and exuberance. He also shook the fashion world with his editorials and videos of the top designers — Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier, Christian Lacroix, Valentino, Azzedine Alaïa, Marc Jacobs, among others.

Couturier Azzedine Alaïa and Farida, the North African supermodel, 1984. Photos courtesy of Musée des Arts Décoratifs

He is still in demand today, directing Prada’s Candy perfume film starring the current darling of French cinema, Léa Seydoux as an impulsive piano student who seduces her teacher with a hypnotic dance like a modern day Salomé.

As illustrator, graphic designer, photographer and director of TV commercials and events, Goude has actually captured our imagination for the past 40 years with powerful ideas and witty, irreverent images that have reflected the spirit of the times. It was no surprise then, that “Goudemalion,” an exhibition of his lifetime work, was finally mounted at the Musee des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. It was a long time coming. “Before, I was falsely modest, always saying ‘I’m but a humble artisan’ and so forth, hoping that everyone would say, ‘No, no, no. You’re an artist,” Goude told the media at an interview before the opening. “Now, I’m sick of waiting, and proclaim it myself.”

“Goudemalion,” the title of the retrospective, was coined by philosopher Edgar Morin to describe Goude in relation to his muses. It alludes to the mythical sculptor Pygmalion who fell in love with Galatea, a statue he created and brought to life. In Goude’s case, Grace Jones was his foremost Galatea whom he reinvented in various photocollages, music videos and live shows. Her strong, angular and masculine features were perceived by many to be bordering on the grotesque but Goude’s magic wand made her look cool to the disco generation.

“I’ve always been drawn to so-called atypical beauties,” recalls Goude. But Grace was different; we were boyfriend-girlfriend. I have an ego like all simple-minded heterosexual men, and I had mates in fashion who kept saying, ‘Goude’s dating a trannie.’ To prove them wrong, I had to show Grace’s beauty was wherever you didn’t expect to find it. If you put a muscular woman in a mini-skirt, she’ll just look ridiculous. It wasn’t about masculinizing Grace, but using artifacts usually reserved for men, which in fact put her femininity forward.”

Goude’s models in couture gowns and heels racing to the fashion finish line

One of his most iconic images is that of Grace in an impossible pose for the cover of her “Island Life” album. “I photographed her in a variety of positions, which I combined into a montage that made it possible to show her simultaneously full-frontal and in profile, like an Egyptian bas-relief. Then, having transferred the montage to photographic paper, I used it as the preliminary sketch for a painting meant to give the photographic illusion that she alone, like a contortionist, could assume the pose, though on a closer look you can see that from a strictly anatomical point of view, the pose is impossible to achieve.”

This approach has been used for his other muses, reconfiguring portions of their anatomy so as to achieve, what for him, is the true conception of their beauty instead of the one that is obvious or normally visible. The model Toukie has a contorted torso and a butt exaggerated so as to turn her behind into a table for a champagne glass. Farida’s torso and limbs are stretched to giant proportions as she holds a baby-sized Azzedine Alaïa in her arms.

These were all done way before Photoshop, recreating their images by elongating their bodies, legs and necks while downsizing their heads, hands and feet. In the beginning, he would use props like 30-centimeter platform shoes unseen beneath long skirts but later developed a technique of cutting up negatives and putting them together again to achieve the illusion of elongated perfection. This technique which he calls his “French Correction” was employed so that he can “rework the women till their perfection becomes supernatural,” according to Goude.

The “French Correction” started with Goude’s obsession with improving his own body which he found short, scrawny and with a “sorry looking butt.” “I had practically become a walking prosthesis,” Goude related as he pointed to a pair of old sneakers he had fitted with hidden lifts.

A Russian “princess,” beside the locomotive used for the 1989 French Bicentennial Parade in Paris

But his drive to achieve the supernatural already had its beginnings since he was a child in Saint-Mandé, a suburb of Paris where he lived with his French father and American mother who used to be a dancer on Broadway and reared him on Hollywood musicals which exposed him to the world of fantasy, dance and form. He already had a creative mind and would in fact always be scolded by his father who would try to teach him the difference between fact and fiction. His mother of course would intervene with “Let the child dream,” starting arguments which would end up with mother and son crying. The young Goude obviously never stopped exploring the world of make-believe, with his mother there to encourage him and obviously acting as his very first muse.

The American magazines they received at home also made a huge impact on Jean-Paul: “The advertising in the 1960s was extraordinary. The first time an issue of Esquire arrived with a cover by George Lois, I said to myself, that’s what I want to do.”

Studying fine arts at university, he was a huge fan of Balthus but was somehow more drawn to the advertising world: “I found it more interesting to turn to publicity as a means of expression. For me, there was no difference between Lois and Balthus. The oeuvres were different, but the degree of artfulness was the same in both.”

After sending his impressive drawings, he was eventually hired by Esquire in New York, working as illustrator and later, art director. Here he produced some very memorable images like Mao bathing in the Yangtze with a rubber ducky (1972). There were also photographs of the African-American and Hispanic communities which became the subject of his first book, “Jungle Fever.”

Laetitia Casta, once named as Marianne, a prominent symbol of the French Republic, is turned into a man in this photocollage by Goude, 2004

Goude has actually always been fascinated with multiculturalism, something which met some resistance in the 70s. When he met Andy Warhol during a shoot, he told the pop art icon about the model Pat Cleveland whom he described as “mixed race, funny, Olive Oyl-like.” According to Goude, Warhol didn’t care much for “caramel girls” but when he proposed that she walk up the runway with microphones in her dress, he was ecstatic. “His opinion really mattered,” Goude says of Warhol. “Thank God, because with all the beer-drinking machos of Esquire, and me and my love of dresses, I don’t know what I’d have done. They would have just thought I was a screaming queen. They didn’t understand me. I had created this notion of the ‘straight faggot’. That’s what I am and they had trouble grasping that, I suppose.”

His multicultural fixation reached its apotheosis in 1989 when he was commissioned by then-President Francois Mitterand to mount the parade commemorating the Bicentennial of the French Revolution — that awesome spectacle of North African women with larger than life mechanized ballgowns spinning down Champs Elysees, battalions of Soviet revolutionary guards marching beneath flurries of artificial snow, Chinese dancers doing their newly-learned break dance from the West and Senegalese dancers with their version of Swan Lake.

“His artistic world is powerful,” declares Béatrice Salmon, the director of the museum. “His transversal approach across various techniques and art areas makes him exceptional. And this exhibition enables people to look at his work as that of an actual artist.” Salmon’s favorites are his Ektachrome cutouts like the portrait of Grace Jones with bloodshot eyes and a naked body shaped into a sharply angular, two-dimensional form which is Goude’s “corrected version of ideal beauty.”

Vanessa Paradis as a bird in a gilded cage for Coco parfum by Chanel, 1991

Goude’s manipulation of his Galateas have always been the most controversial to this day: His cartoonish portrayal of some models like Toukie’s exaggerated butt, turning her into what he calls a “primitive, voluptuous, girl-horse”; the photo of Grace Jones with milky white skin and orange hair; the collage of supermodel Laetitia Casta as a man with a crewcut and five o’clock shadow; his current Korean wife, Karen as “The Queen of Seoul” doll in a wooden box stuffed with hay. These recurring rifts on shifting races and genders have earned him labels like racist and misogynist.

“As a European, I have the advantage of being able to describe my romantic conception of blackness from a white point of view,” he clarifies. “My conception is free of all social connotations, because I’m European. Americans cannot dissociate themselves from the social implications of their artistic evaluations of black people. So I really find myself in a strange situation, because on one hand, liberals are embarrassed by my attitude, while racists ironically misinterpret me as one of them. And the blacks, I think my conception may appeal to some of them, I’m not sure.”

On being a woman-hater, Goude insists that his work is “purely aesthetic, focusing exclusively on beauty, on balance and on shapes.” He vehemently denies that his drive to improve the image of his models “come from any place darker than pure love and admiration.”

A fashion tribute to Mae West by Goude for Harper’s Bazaar US, 2010

“If I fall in love, but the person doesn’t take care of her appearance, or she says silly things, I’ll try to help her. The same goes for her image. A tweak here, a nip there…I’m still enthralled by women,” Goude proclaims. “I don’t want to change them. I want to make it so they are loved by others.”

As opposed to Pygmalion who falls in love with a statue and loves it so much that it comes to life, Goudemalion falls in love with real women and attempts to turn them into statues. “It never really works,” says Goude, “They just move on, and he’s stuck there with nothing, or just a couple of photographs.”

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