'It's a self portrait'
'Who of?'

So as bit of light relief I thought I'd have a go at recreating one of Hancock's 'Infantilist' masterpieces from 'The Rebel'. 'Only take a couple of hours', I thought. Wrong! It turns out that getting it 'wrong' can take two days. I don't know how forgers have the patience.

Hope you enjoyed that gratuitous use of an iconic 60s tune to introduce this blog post, all will be made clear in due course. In the meantime here's a detail from another bit of (literally) iconic 60s artistry re-interpreted by your's truly. Almost finished, this is from Tarkovsky's 'Andrei Rublev' . See what I did there, 'iconic' you see, because it's about an icon painter? Never mind.

Bad jokes aside, we come to the title of today's blog post, a film that contains some very good jokes, many of them about art. So I'm going off message for the next in the 'History Painting' series and working from a film about a fictional artist. Prompted by Ben Miller's BBC documentary on Tony Hancock I'm having a crack at the lad himself in 'The Rebel'. Now it might be supposed that a film satirising the excesses and pretensions of the 'Art World' wouldn't be particularly popular amongst artists, this would be incorrect (at least in my experience). I've never met an artist who didn't enjoy it and I've spoken to several who volunteered it as their favourite movie. It's full of quotable lines (as you'd expect from Galton and Simpson), some of which I've used myself on occasion. Probably my favourite comes from the distinctly Daliesque Dennis Price, as leader of the Parisian existentialists, the enigmatic Jim Smith, 'English names are so mysterious don't you think?'

The artwork featured in the film, both' good'  and 'bad' (I must admit I've a soft spot for Hancock's 'infantilist' work) was produced by Alistair Grant, later a professor at the Royal College of Art. 

In 2002, the London Institute of 'Pataphysics organised an exhibition based around the recreation of all the art works seen the film and presented the exhibition as if it were a retrospective of a real unknown artist called Anthony Hancock. (directly copied from Wikipedia).

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be an available widescreen release the film so a little aspect ratio jiggery pokery may be on the cards. In the meantime here's a sample from the film, enjoy.