Hiring A New York Divorce Lawyer In Queens
Everyone goes through significant life changes when their marriage ends, but for elites, the turns life can take in the aftermath of a divorce can be surprising.
For renowned painter George Condo, that transition has opened the door to a romance with a much younger, but extremely influential woman.
His ex-wife, Anna Condo, has similarly seen her professional creative fortunes rise in spite of the upheaval in her family.
It was a painful split for her and their two daughters, but it’s possible that the shift in the currents may lead to happy endings in the long view.
George, a New Hampshire native, studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts, graduating and joining a punk band called The Girls with painter Mark Dagley.
It was through The Girls that George first met Jean-Michel Basquiat, when the band opened for Basquiat’s band Gray in 1979.
They became friends, and the relationship was hugely consequential for George, who moved to New York City soon after to focus on his art.
It was the early 1980s in the East Village, and George’s circle included another rising painter named Keith Haring, to whom he remained close until Haring’s death in 1990.
George worked a job at Andy Warhol’s silkscreen production studio, where he applied diamond dust to Warhol’s Myths series, and refined his technique, which at the time he called “Artificial Realism.”
Exhibitions of his early works at various East Village galleries spawned a wider following, and in 1983 he left New York for Los Angeles and a solo exhibition there.
Then, he went to Europe, renting space in Cologne, Germany, and launching exhibits over the next decade across Europe as well as the United States.
His style made waves, as he applied classical techniques and sensibilities to a wildly hybridized, sometimes grotesque, reinterpretation of the visual world.
His portraiture is profoundly imaginative, veering from cubist and surrealist modes to images almost drawn from caricature.
Features bulge or are simply absent; limbs are not limited in number; and some of his works take fantasy and seem to reflect it through a disturbed, almost nightmarish lens.
During a stint in Paris in the mid-1980s, George met actress Anna Achdian, an Armenian national whose star was on the rise on the continent.
She was ten years younger, but both were driven by their own creative visions and they seemed to understand each other.
In 1987, a film in which Anna starred won a string of awards at European film festivals, including a prestigious film critics’ prize at Cannes.
In 1989, the couple married, leaving Paris and coming back to George’s home base of New York.
The connections they had made in Paris persisted, however, and George returned to America as a collaborator of beat writer William S. Burroughs, working on sculptures and sketches together.
They also created a collection of writing and etchings they called “Ghost of Chance”, which was later published by the Whitney Museum.
While his work with Burroughs was personal, George has been cited as an influence on a host of other writers, including Salman Rushdie, David Means, Donald Kuspit, and George’s close friend Allen Ginsberg, who asked George to paint his portrait for a 1996 volume of selected works.
As George’s reach through his artistic talents expanded, he broadened the concept of his work to what he calls “psychological cubism,” telling London’s The Guardian in 2014 that his old neighbor, the writer Felix Guattari, had explained something integral about his art to him once: “Felix said I was the only portrait painter who ever painted entirely imaginary subjects. Picasso was always painting Dora Maar or whoever, Bacon’s portraits could always be traced to some existing person. But not my portraits. They were all imaginary.”
He went on to explain the idea behind “psychological cubism,” saying, “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.”
The resulting art has made George a kind of low-key pop culture icon, providing designs for book covers and a number of music albums.
He achieved perhaps his greatest notoriety in 2010 when Kanye West commissioned cover art for his album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”
George provided four works, one of which ended up censored on Apple’s iTunes store because of its sexy, demonic imagery.
At home, things were equally fruitful between George and Anna for more than decades.
They became parents twice, raising two daughters, Eleonore and Raphaelle.
While Anna seems to have mostly focused on being a mom in the early years of their marriage, her involvement as an actress, writer, and filmmaker never fully waned.
In 2013, Anna released her directorial debut, an improvisational story about nine New Yorkers, short on cash, who forego their usual Aspen Christmas and opt for a more budget-friendly murder-mystery weekend in Pennsylvania. Titled “Merry Christmas”, the film also featured daughter Eleonore as a cast member.
It was around this time that the marriage was degrading, and the couple separated in 2013.
While the specific issues in the marriage have not been disclosed publicly, in 2016 Anna hinted to Radar Online that their obstacles were made harder by George’s growing celebrity.
“When somebody becomes famous,” she said, “people gravitate around them. I realized that a lot of the people gravitating around him were not the people I wanted to be associated with. They were not my cup of tea. I thought it was time to move on. I wanted to be with people I admire.”
Anna formally filed for divorce in 2015, after 26 years of marriage.
It seems to have taken George very little time to move on, having been seen around town with former child actress and sought-after fashion designer Ashley Olsen throughout 2016, just weeks after the divorce became final.
In the same interview, Anna expressed ambivalence about her ex-husband’s new paramour.
“Ashley and her sister used to ask me to go to their fashion shows. They made a bag with my initials on it.”
Though the divorce was hard, both creatives have big new projects on the horizon, with Anna directing a feature film and a documentary and George launching an ambitious exhibition of “New Works” at the Skarstedt.
Mid-life changes are complicated, but sometimes they can also be freeing.
When Is It Time To Hire An Attorney In A Queens Divorce Case?
If your marriage in Queens is ending, an experienced divorce lawyer can make a big difference for you.
A lot of people have questions about how assets are divided in a Queens divorce case. If you have questions about family law and divorce in Queens, we are here to help.
Call the attorneys at Zelenitz, Shapiro & D’Agostino today at 718-523-1111 for a free consultation.
