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poufs, and a drinks trolley equipped with bottles, glasses, and an ice bucket from the famous Beirut nightclub The Star : it portrays a short, fat, seated monk holding a goblet in his right hand; he is dressed in a long grey robe tied with a cord; his head and shoulders are enclosed in a black hood which forms the bucket’s lid.
    The wall on the left, facing the longer arm of the L, is hung with cork paper. On the track fixed about nine feet up, several metal hangers run, and on them the painter has hung a score of his canvases, mostly small ones: they almost all belong to one of the painter’s earlier styles, the one he refers to himself as his “ haze period ” and which gained him his notoriety: they are, generally, minutely executed copies of well-known paintings – Mona Lisa, The Angelus, The Retreat from Russia, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, The Anatomy Lesson , etc. – over which he has then painted a more or less heavy haze, producing a greyish blur beneath which you can only just make out the silhouette of his celebrated originals. The private viewing of his Paris exhibition at Gallery 22 in 1960 was complemented by artificial fog, made even denser by the crowds of cigar- and cigarette-smokers amongst the guests, to the great joy of the gossip-columnists. It was an instant success. One or two critics carped, for example Beyssandre from Switzerland, who wrote: “Hutting’s greys hark back less to Malevich’s White on White than to bad jokes by vulgar comedians about black men in unlit tunnels.” But most of them enthused over what one called his romantic meteorology , which, he said, placed Hutting on a par with his famous quasi-namesake, Huffing, the New York pioneer of Arte brutta . Astutely advised, Hutting kept nearly half his canvases himself and will consent to parting with them only on exorbitant terms.
    There are three people in this little lounge. One is a woman, fortyish; she is coming down the gallery stairs; she is wearing black leather dungarees and holds in her hand an intricately carved oriental dagger, which she is cleaning with a piece of chamois leather. Tradition has it that this is the dagger used by the fanatic Suleiman el-Halebi in the assassination of General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, at Cairo on 14 June 1800, when this strategist of genius, who had been left on station by Bonaparte after the semi-success of the Egyptian Campaign, had just replied to Admiral Keith’s ultimatum by winning victory at the Battle of Heliopolis.
    The two other occupants are seated on poufs. They are a couple in their sixties. The woman is wearing a patchwork skirt reaching down to her knees, and wide fishnet stockings; she stubs out her lipstick-stained cigarette in a cut-glass ashtray shaped something like a starfish; the man is dressed in a dark suit with red pinstripes, a pale-blue shirt with matching tie, and breast-pocket handkerchief in blue with red stripes; pepper-and-salt hair cut short and brushed up; tortoiseshell spectacles. On his knees he has a booklet bound in red, entitled Internal Revenue Legislation .
    The young woman in the leather dungarees is Hutting’s secretary. The man and woman are Austrian clients. They have come especially from Salzburg to negotiate the purchase of one of Hutting’s most highly rated hazes , the one which began as nothing less than The Turkish Bath , supplied by the Hutting process with a superabundance of steamy vapour. From afar, the canvas looks curiously like Turner’s watercolour Harbour near Tintagel , which, at the time he was giving him lessons, Valène showed to Bartlebooth as the most accomplished example of what can be achieved in water-colours, and which the Englishman went to copy exactly, on site, in Cornwall.
    Although he is not often in his Paris flat, dividing his time between his New York “loft”, his château in the Dordogne, and a country mas near Nice, Hutting has returned for the Altamonts’ reception. At the moment he is at work in one of