| Description
| Painting in acrylic, watercolour, ink and crayon on watercolour paper. Subject is a full length portrait of fat man with moustache, map of Europe on jacket. Painting is framed, glazed and signed at lower right.
From statement (possibly by artist) from accession file:
"The title of the painting refers to the fact that by the time of the work's completion - and even during the painting of it - the map which decorates the figure's jacket no longer represented a true picture of the make up of Europe - East and West Germany had unified (again), Yugoslavia had disintegrated as had the Soviet Union. Central Europe was in a state of flux and atlases were going out of date faster than they could be revised, reprinted and published. The colours, as it were, on his fine golden jackert were all wrong. Due to the political upheaval the map illustrated was made redundant, the sartorial eloquence of the wearer silenced, made passe, an illustration of an older and past order.
The figure depicted in the painting is fat, a compositional device to afford a broad enough 'canvas' to accomodate the map of Europe. (Perhaps more fancifully, his bulk could refer to the bloated, over-indulged societies of the West, of the 'First World', and perhaps hints at an unhealthy state of being, a state where change is both necessary and desirable.)
The pose and inspiration for the painting came from two postcards - possibly from the early 1930s - showing 'Egon Cannon-Erven, 'The Fattest Man of All time' and 'Reymond, Le Colosse Jurasien. L'Homme Le Plus Gros de Monde'.
'How quickly his jacket went out of fashion' is the fourth (and final) in a series of 'map' paintings. The titles of the others are:
'Of His Big As The World Overcoat' (Purchased by the Lillie Gallery)
'How Small We Are, How Big The World' (Private Collection)
'Philosophy, Alchemy, Cartography (Such a Big Title, Such a Small Painting)' (Private Collection USA)."
Painting created during a time when the artist was working on a series of side-show and circus-themes paintings. Billcliffe's Dictionary of RGI exhibitors shows that Anderson was a Hamilton-based artist.
How Quickly His Jacket Went Out Of Fashion is a political painting. It was created during the 1980s, when the boundaries and political structures of Eastern Europe seemed to change almost daily. Countries were renamed and restructured at an amazing rate, as when Czechoslovakia became the Czech Republic.Because of the imposing way in which the figure fills the canvas, many people are surprised to find that the painting itself is only 66 centimetres high. |
