Celebrated British photographer David Bailey is swapping his camera for a paintbrush. Known since the swinging Sixties for his iconic black and white portraits of The Beatles, Peter Sellers, Michael Caine, Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger and London gangsters, the Kray Brothers; and his decades of fashion work, Bailey’s new show of his paintings, his first ever, is titled “Hitler Killed The Duck.”

Bailey was interviewed by Dazed Digital’s Sue-Wen Q:

Can you tell us the story behind the great title, ‘Hitler killed the Duck’?
David Bailey: The Germans bombed the cinema that I went to see Bambi and cartoons in with a V2 rocket in 1944, so I thought Hitler had killed all the Disney characters.

People tend to be drawn to religion during those times, but you’re not religious are you?
David Bailey: Of course not. God’s just a daisy on the sidewalk. There are many good religions; I like Taoism because it’s more a philosophy. The Carthars were interesting. They were Christians who didn’t believe in killing and that nonsense and were wiped out by the Catholics. I’m completely against capital punishment, because you could get it wrong and that’s enough not to do it.

More than half this country will bring it back because they don’t think; they watch football and get drunk every other night. There’s not a chance many times they’ve made a mistake and the state’s part of you so in a way, you become the killer. Similarly, we’re responsible for Blair, because we - I didn’t, but I’m still part of society - voted him in. So we have to live with that arsehole.

Any final words with regards to the exhibition?
David Bailey: Whether you like or not, there’s nothing I can do. There might be people, whose collection or view on the world I dislike, that end up buying something. That would be sad. Imagine if Hitler or Bush or General Mao or Stalin came along and bought one. All the arseholes in history are famous, weird, isn’t it?

You can see a gallery of some of Bailey’s new paintings on Dazed Digital. I’m a big David Bailey fan (a first edition of his 1969 book Goodbye Baby and Amen that wasn’t cheap sits behind me as I type this) but from what I have seen of it, I must say this new work doesn’t do much for me. Bailey claims he was influenced by Francis Bacon, but all I can see is the influence of German weirdo painter Blalla W. Hallmann, who did this same sort of thing much better. Bailey should probably stick to his Rolleiflex.

“Hitler killed the Duck” from October 7th to November 12, 2011 at Scream, 34 Bruton Street, London W1J 6QX

Below, a delightful David Bailey interview from 2010:
 

 
Yesterday when I was looking for images for the Nico post, I came across the famous photo of Nico and Andy Warhol dressed as Batman and Robin, and that led me, in short order, to Roy Lichtenstein’s Batman TV Guide cover and then to this video clip, a (nearly!) musical performance by one-time fashion model, “It Girl,” Warhol superstar and wealthy young Park Avenue housewife, Baby Jane Holzer, singing on the Hullabaloo TV show.

I suppose you could look at this the same way as Paris Hilton’s short-lived pop music career.

Below, Baby Jane Holzer sings Frankie Valli’s “(You’re Gonna) Hurt Yourself” on HullaballoMarch 28, 1966:
 

 
Holzer was famously photographed by David Bailey, she made the cover of Vogue and appeared in a handful of Warhol’s early films, such as Couch and The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women. She was largely absent from The Factory scene after Edie Sedgewick’s arrival, when Warhol’s entourage became too druggy for her tastes,although she and the artist stayed close friends. The essay “Girl of the Year” from Tom Wolfe’s anthology The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is about Jane Holzer and Roxy Music later referenced her in the the lyrics to “Virginia Plain” (“Baby Jane’s in Acapulco / We are flying down to Rio” and “Can’t you see that Holzer mane?”). She is now a real-estate developer in Manhattan and an avid and celebrated art collector.
 

 
To tie this back into Batman again, there was actually a character based on Baby Jane Holzer, in an episode called “Pop Goes the Joker.” “Baby Jane Towser” is a rich girl preyed upon by The Joker (who has inadvertently becomes an acclaimed Warhol-esque pop artist after defacing some art ala Marcel Duchamp) to lure in millionaire patrons to buy the Joker’s art! It’s obvious that the writers for the (arguably) most “pop art” TV show in history were well aware of the “Pope of Pop’s” movements.
 

 
Part one of “Pop Goes the Joker” is below, the rest follow on YouTube. The second half of this typical Batman cliff-hanger was called “Flop Goes the Joker.”
 

 
Below, one more Batman/Warhol/Baby Jane Holzer tie-in: In this excerpt from Batman/Dracula a long-thought lost collaboration between Andy Warhol and that icon of the perverse, Jack Smith, Baby Jane Holzer plays, one can assume, “Catwoman,” with Smith in the title role. This pre-dates the 1966 Batman series by two years.