Mr. Jean-Paul Goude was the art director of Esquire magazine in its heyday. He was hired by Harold Hayes, perhaps the greatest magazine editor of the twentieth century, when he was a young gadabout illustrator in Paris. I loved Esquire and I loved his work, and I tried very hard to get into the magazine to work with him. I wound up working on an incredible piece with him called "America Dances" and we've been friends ever since. (Decades!)

Pop Art was supposed to blur if not erase the distinctions between fine art and commercial art, and it did in a way, but not really. It was not the revolution it was cracked up to be. And Mr. Goude has always practiced an art that is perceived as commercial. He loves an audience, and he has delighted millions with his magazine work, his album covers, his music videos for artists like Grace Jones (whose svengali and mate he was at her peak), his amazing commercials for clients like Chanel and Kodak, and perhaps the greatest parade ever staged, down the Champs Élysées on the occasion of the French Bicentennial.

Goude is a great artist, a genius, an eccentric, and a great charmer. He recently published an excellent book called So Far So Goude (Assouline, 2006) that documents his work, his career, and his life. (It also has a CD so you get a film, for his filmic side.) Being a commercialist, he has spent the last decade or so running around Paris and the world making amazing TV spots that reach millions, and so he never really exhibited his work, and it hasn't been possible to buy it.

All that changes today. Goude has finally broken down and made some pictures and put them in a gallery, Hasted Hunt at 529 West 20th Street. It opens today. Many of his most amazing images are on display, examples of his remarkable fusion of painting and photography. Goude was doing Photoshop twenty years before Photoshop was invented, with photographic prints, paint, paste, and razor blades. And Photoshop has never surpassed his extraordinary imagination and wild sense of humor.

Here's Jean-Paul at the gallery last night, with writer Joan Buck, formerly the editor of Paris Vogue and one of our newer New Yorkers.