Picasso? More like an artful bodger

THE FRIDAY THING

LIFE AND OTHER BITS: THE Friday thing may well be buttonholed into the Philistine tendency by the arty intellectuals among you (and what are you doing reading this column if you think art is a pile of old bricks or a bed covered with used tissues?) but what is all this nonsense about Picasso?

Some more-money-than-sense loon (American needless to say) has just paid £70 million for “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” which the art aficionados say, breathless with admiration, was painted in a single day.

It looks as though it was knocked up in 20 minutes after spending too much time sniffing the paint thinners, but then what do I know?

Women, I know from too much personal experience, come in many different shapes and sizes but Picasso must have known some pretty strange women if the specimen in the picture — allegedly his teenage muse — was the Cheryl Cole of her day.

She looks more like some horrific genetic accident than a sex symbol.

Maybe she could sing which would at least give her the edge over Ms Cole.

Apparently there are 42,999 Picasso works out there somewhere; there used to be 43,000 but another American loon who was about to sell his king’s-clothes-masterpiece for 139 million dollars accidentally put his elbow through it and finished up with another work, “Picasso gets the elbow”. Now that should have been a best seller.


Silence of the Tory big guns

THE Chronicle bean counters are smiling broadly this week. Three full pages of advertising for the elections had them wishing for a hung parliament and a new election in six months’ time.

But where were the moneybag Tories? Were they smugly complacent?

Didn’t they want to win? Or did Lord Ashcroft’s money not percolate as far down the seat-winning pecking order as Oldham.

We had visits from Gordon Brown and even Tangoed Tony Blair; Nick Clegg was around to shake a few hands but there was an absence of big Tory guns. George Osborne might have been here of course, but no one recognised him.

It’s criminal


FINAL WORD: Telling June Howarth that if she phones again to report her windows being broken by yobs or yobs throwing eggs against her windows she will be arrested is, you have to admit, a brilliant way to bring down the crime figures.