WHEN Nicolas Sarkozy’s artist father telephoned the newly elected French president about a portrait he wanted to paint to mark the occasion, he had only one question: “Is it all right if I paint the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour hanging from your ear?”

His son thought about it for a moment, then replied tersely: “Okay.”

In his first interview with a British newspaper, the Hungarian-born aristocrat Pal Sarkozy de Nagy Bocsa, 80, who opens an exhibition of his paintings in Madrid this week, talked about his reconciliation with the “hyper-president” from whom he had been estranged for many years.

He said he now got on well with Nicolas and credited the president’s third wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the Italian model turned singer, with reuniting his family.

Speaking with passion of his surrealist canvases, which feature naked, tattooed women in various provocative poses against fantasy backdrops, he declared: “Women inspire me more than other subjects.”

His flat on an island in the River Seine in Neuilly, which he shares with his fourth wife Ines, 20 years his junior, is filled with modern paintings and abstract sculpture by French and foreign artists.

In a gravelly voice that betrayed only a trace of a Hungarian accent, he denied he was cashing in on his son’s status, saying he would exhibit his work in Paris only if the Madrid show, entitled Out of Mind, was “an artistic success”. But he admitted he would like the Espace Cardin, a venue behind the Elysée Palace, “because the president only has to cross the street to come and see us”.

He became heated as he denounced biographies of his son, which shed an unflattering light on his own turbulent private life, his bitter divorce from Nicolas’s mother and his rows with the future president when he was growing up.

One glossy French magazine has labelled Pal’s art “erotico-mystico-animist” but he laughed this off. In the past four years he and his German colleague Werner Hornung have created 40 works that he describes as “digital fine art”, with prints fetching £4,700 each. The price rises to £24,000 if a customer wants only one print to be made.

Leafing through photographs of his works - all but two of the originals had left for Madrid that morning - he pointed to one entitled Happy Dolores, a naked woman with a wooden leg. “You see the flower growing from her wooden leg? That symbolises hope, it’s hope coming out of pain,” he said.

He turned to Vice and Virtue, a lightly clad blonde figure, palms joined in prayer. Her hands are tied and she wears suspenders. “I absolutely wanted to do this. I’ve had this idea for a long time. There are loose women who are very virtuous, who have a pure soul,” he said.

Pal dotted his son’s portrait, in which his face floats above an underwater Elysée, with 80 photographs drawn from family albums. Pal’s first wife and their three sons feature alongside President George W Bush and Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister.

When I pointed to a Tower of Babel-like structure next to his son, Pal explained: “Yes, that’s for going to heaven. You can’t get higher than where Nicolas has got - but with him you never know.”

Where was the painting now? “It’s with Nicolas; it’s at the president’s home,” Pal replied, as if unsure what to call his son. “He’s very pleased with it. He had all his staff file past it and he had our picture taken.”

The photograph sits on a coffee table in the sitting room. The president is in a tie and shirt sleeves, Pal in a smart linen suit. It is the only picture of Pal’s children in the room.

Was he proud of his son? “Yes, of course, but I’m proud of all my children - people talk a lot about all of them,” he replied. The president’s older brother Guillaume, 57, now heads a healthcare and pensions group. His younger brother François, 49, is a biology researcher and a former paediatrician.

Pal started painting when he arrived in Paris as a penniless immigrant in 1948. “When Hungary was occupied by Stalin after the war my mother made me leave because otherwise I’d have been sent into forced labour in Siberia aged 18. I joined the Foreign Legion briefly and I spent my first December night in Paris on the grate of a Metro air vent near the Arc de Triomphe, trying to keep warm,” he said.

He painted models, his grandmother and a scene in Montmar-tre before realising he needed a proper job. “I married Dadu [the president’s mother] at 21. I was very young and I had my first son, Guillaume, at 22. I absolutely had to earn money,” he recalled.

He designed advertisements for Singer sewing machines before creating one of the first antiwrinkle creams.

Biographers have written of a tense relationship between Pal and Nicolas, who was three when his father left his mother for an ambassador’s daughter who became his second wife. He reportedly reprimanded Nicolas for his poor schoolwork and once said to him: “With your name and your marks at school, you won’t get anywhere in France.”

Nicolas Sarkozy once confided to an interviewer: “I didn’t like the fate that befell my mother.” He has also said of his childhood: “I was humiliated during all those years and I feel no nostalgia for them. I suffered.” However, he said, he and his brothers became stronger as a result: “The need to fight for ourselves, which all three of us had to, proved to be a powerful boost in the end.”

One biographer wrote that despite owning a house in Ibiza, two boats and a limousine, Pal refused to increase alimony payments to Dadu, who was short of money. He once told his sons: “I owe you nothing.”

Nicolas continued to live with his mother until he married his first wife, Marie-Dominique Culioli, in 1982. The family has long since been reconciled. Pal took Dadu and their sons to Hungary for his 70th birthday. Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken of Pal as “my father, a hero”.

In the interview, Pal declined to be drawn on his son’s early life. He said: “I don’t read these books because there are so many lies in them. At the start I was upset about them, but Nicolas calmed me down a bit. They’re grotesque, but I won’t sue because that would just give them more publicity.

“These books hurt, but at the same time I don’t care about them,” he said. “What matters is that I get on well with my children and I see them often. I spent an afternoon with Nicolas on May 8. It was a bank holiday and he was all alone at the Elysée. Carla was busy working on her next album.”

Pal added: “Of course, it’s out of the question for Nicolas to have a normal life. How can it be normal, given that he works 18 or 19 hours a day?”

He paid a warm tribute to Carla: “She is an adorable girl, kind and charming. She has reunited our whole family. At Nicolas’s wedding with Carla, there were only two families present: Carla’s and ours. On Sunday we all had lunch at the Elysée.”

In Madrid, Pal will be guest of honour at a reception hosted by the French embassy. Among the show’s sponsors is the state-run French Institute. The mayor of Madrid is hosting a dinner for 300 guests.

Did Pal not worry that the opulence of such a welcome might result in talk that he was exploiting his son’s elevated status? “This is the reason why we’re showing in Madrid,” he replied. “In no way do I want to profit from the president of the republic. Either we have a big artistic success and we show in Paris; or we don’t and we don’t show in Paris.

“It’s as simple as that. I’m 80, I’ve worked enough already and I don’t need a new career. I want to establish my name as an artist. Perhaps I, or my son, should change our surname.”

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