Goude News

Godard is Jean-Paul Goude, the dynamic and ingenious multimedia and graphic artist, now back in New York after a decade spent mostly in his native Paris. Famed for a bold revamping of Esquire and the creation of his (then) amour Grace Jones, Goude says with a shrug, "I'm overrated. What l do is what I do. " We know better: he's a virtuoso draftsman, and his earliest work in video won awards and influenced the medium profoundly. Nou> this Svengali and author of Jungle Fever (his classic book on black and Hispanic exotica) will be honored with a retrospective in Paris, quite appropriately titled "No Ordinary White Man. " Nor even an ordinary Frenchman!

RICHARD MERKIN