DealZone

Nudity, commerce and ego: Artist Natasha Archdale ticks all the boxes for her  clients in the financial sector. The London-based artist creates “nude female figures from coral-hued fragments of the Financial Times,” Bloomberg reports.

Blackstone Chairman Stephen Schwarzman received an Archdale portrait of his wife, Christine, as a present from Dorrit Moussaieff, Iceland’s first lady. The Financial Times snippets that Archdale used were all about the Blackstone Group chairman.

“It’s in his Park Avenue apartment, between a Rembrandt and a Picasso,” Moussaieff told Bloomberg. “I have yet to meet someone who does not want a naked picture of their loved ones with text about themselves.”

A Blackstone spokesman told Bloomberg that Schwarzman “prefers not to talk about what he may or may not own,” and Archdale declined to name any of her clients. But she did say that she has commissions for the next two years, charging up to $30,000 per portrait.

“Lots of people think I had this clever agenda of mixing the female nude with the Financial Times because the correlation is good: sex and money and business, and art at the moment is so prolific,” Archdale told Bloomberg. “But it wasn’t that well thought out.”