The Pussy Painting (1991)

This painting marries the notorious 1866 masterpiece by Gustave Courbet, L'origine du Monde , with René Magritte's seminal 1929 painting, La Trahison des Images .

The Pussy Painting has an interesting history. In the early Nineties, when he was an art student at Hunter College, Noterdaeme invented an eccentric alter ego for himself, a certain Marcellus Wasbending-Ttum, a painter and self-proclaimed "Homoplagiarist." Under this alias, Noterdaeme created multiple works, some of which he painted himself, some of which, like The Pussy Painting (originally titled Self-Portrait), were executed to his specifications by a hired professional. When Noterdaeme, acting as Marcellus Wasbending-Ttum, presented the Hunter faculty with this "Self-Portrait," he found himself accused of plagiarism and was prematurely expelled from the MFA program. Embittered, Noterdaeme destroyed all his artworks - with the notable exception of Self-Portrait - and, for the next ten years, abstained from making art, working as a museum educator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. In 2002, Noterdaeme created his own museum, the Homeless Museum of Art (HoMu). When he eventually turned his rental apartment in Brooklyn into a showcase for HoMu, he gave the painting a place of honor in the apartment's High Gallery.