the Magritte in all of us
Kapeman
Magritte I know I learned new and interesting insights about JL reading this
Barbara
An Exhibition of Drawings Celebrates Lennon at 64
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: October 7, 2004
t isn't a milestone anniversary, exactly; it doesn't end in zero or five. But
John Lennon would have been 64 on Saturday. And given that one of the chestnuts
of the Lennon-McCartney song catalog was the 1920's-style "When I'm Sixty-Four"
- a song actually written by Paul McCartney, but like all their Beatles-era
work, credited to both - it seemed to Yoko Ono, Lennon's widow, that the
occasion demanded a public celebration.
Ms. Ono had prepared two new recordings, one a remastered and expanded version
of Lennon's 1975 "Rock 'n' Roll" album, the other "Acoustic," a collection of
familiar and unreleased versions of 17 of his songs. Those, however, aren't due
until early next month.
So for the anniversary itself, Ms. Ono is presenting "When I'm Sixty-Four," an
exhibition of drawings, caricatures and sketches that Lennon almost
compulsively created throughout his life. The show opens Thursday at 102
Wooster Street (between Prince and Spring Streets) in SoHo and runs through
Sunday.
"I don't think most people know John's artwork," Ms. Ono said in a telephone
interview Monday. "Most people know his music, but I think this is a very
strange society, still. They want to box people in - people say, 'Oh, he's a
musician,' but they don't want to know that he's an artist as well. At first it
was very difficult to show his work, because galleries would say, 'Oh, we don't
take pop stars,' and that was the end of it.
"But you know, John started as an artist. He studied at the Liverpool College
of Art, which was a difficult school to get into. Then he fell in love with
rock 'n' roll, and the rest, as they say, was history."
Lennon's art is probably better known than Ms. Ono believes. Anyone who
followed the Beatles closely in the 1960's would have run into it in Lennon's
books of strangely comic drawings, and of short prose and poetry, "In His Own
Write" (1964) and "A Spaniard in the Works" (1965).
A London gallery that showed his "Bag One" lithographs, Lennon's suggestive
drawings of himself and Ms. Ono, was raided and charged with obscenity in 1970.
In the years since Lennon was murdered, in 1980, Ms. Ono has published several
books of his drawings and has used his sketches on greeting cards, silk ties
and even the covers of several CD collections, including the soundtrack for the
biographical film "Imagine: John Lennon" and the "Lennon Anthology" outtakes
compilation.
The show, which includes handwritten lyrics (finished and in process) as well
as Lennon's drawings, has been touring the United States for about a decade.
Ms. Ono said that she changed a few pieces at each stop, and that she probably
still had drawings that nobody had seen.
"Every now and then," she said, "I discover a drawing in the pages of a book
that he was reading, kind of like a quick ad-lib.
"I have no idea how many drawings there are. I've never done a definite
catalog. Sketching was like John's security blanket. The guitar was as well. He
was always strumming, but when he wasn't playing the guitar, he was drawing.
Guitar and pen."
Lennon and Ms. Ono appear to have saved every scrap of paper that he doodled
on, and in marketing these drawings in books and on cards, Ms. Ono has
sweetened them slightly, adding washes of color to what were originally simple
line drawings. The idea, she said, was not hers. It was suggested by marketing
consultants, and at first she objected.
"When they first brought in pictures that had been colored, I thought it was
sacrilege," she said, "and I asked them why. And they said that shops would not
put the pictures in windows if we didn't add color. So as an artist, I
objected. But after being with John, and the rock 'n' roll world, I knew that
sometimes record companies called and suggested doing this or that, and
sometimes we would agree and sometimes we wouldn't. But we had to be practical.
So I said, O.K. we'll add color - but let me do it. The way they had done it,
the colors were so loud, it distorted John's work. I've added just a touch, in
a way that would not be a hindrance to the art."
His earliest drawings appeared in "The Daily Howl," an exercise book that
Lennon surreptitiously passed around his classroom for laughs. There, and in
the books he published during the Beatle years, he tended to draw bizarre
creatures, often with huge heads, long, skinny limbs and clawed feet. By the
late 1960's, he had largely abandoned these peculiar visions in favor of
autobiographical sketches, including a set of drawings of his wedding to Ms.
Ono in 1969 and the more sexually explicit line drawings of the "Bag One" set.
Quickly dashed-off self-portraits - often just an image of long, flowing hair
and round glasses - became a steady motif for the rest of Lennon's life, as did
domestic scenes. During a 1977 visit to Japan with Ms. Ono and their son, Sean,
he created a set of snapshotlike family scenes using traditional Japanese
bamboo brushes and sumi ink, which Ms. Ono calls the Karuizawa series. These
were clearly meant to be more than doodles: Lennon signed and dated them, and
gave several of the pictures titles.
During his final years, Lennon's drawing took a more didactic turn. Partly to
illustrate his own Japanese lessons and partly to entertain and educate Sean,
who was born in 1975, he began to draw animals and common objects, including
aphoristic captions describing them.
"I think John was always reflecting his experience in his artwork," Ms. Ono
said.
"In the beginning, when he was doing the exaggerated stuff - the
monster-looking people, and all that - those come from a time when he felt that
Mimi was always looking over his shoulder," she said, referring to Mimi Smith,
Lennon's aunt, who raised him. "He said that was how he came to surrealism. He
would write things in his diary that he wouldn't want Mimi to understand, and
the drawings were an extension of that. He was getting into an unreal, illusory
world.
"Then when he met me, he felt that reality wasn't that scary anymore, so he
began drawing us. And eventually, because he was learning Japanese, his
drawings were a reflection of that experience too, but the more prominent
change was that he began doing a lot of animals, and that was for Sean."
It was art that brought her and Lennon together. They met on Nov. 9, 1966, when
Ms. Ono was presenting a show, "Unfinished Paintings and Objects," at the
Indica Gallery, in London. Lennon visited the gallery before the show opened.
"In the beginning, art was what we talked about," Ms. Ono said. "He told me he
thought he was like Magritte. Why? Because, you know, you have the image of
Magritte with the bowler hat and the suit, looking very square, but really his
work was very surreal and far out. John was living in suburbia, and he was very
embarrassed about that, because he felt as if he was not very hip. When he
invited me to his house the first time, the first thing he said when I got
there was, 'I think of myself as Magritte.' "
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Who Me
>John Lennon would have been 64 on Saturday. And given that one of the
>chestnuts
>of the Lennon-McCartney song catalog was the 1920's-style "When I'm
>Sixty-Four"
I find that not only quite funny, but a perfect example of how people today
seem to think that the more words you use, the more you prove your
""intelligence."" Why not just make the connection right up front, instead of
saying it's NOT a milestone, then contradicting yourself???
Bill
"Now I've always been the kind of person that doesn't like to trespass but
sometimes you just find yourself over the line."
"I don't have any regrets, they can talk about me plenty when I'm gone."
Gerard Eastwood
news:20041007121752...@mb-m06.aol.com...
> I find that not only quite funny, but a perfect example of how people
today
> seem to think that the more words you use, the more you prove your
> ""intelligence."" Why not just make the connection right up front, instead
of
> saying it's NOT a milestone, then contradicting yourself???
your statement here reminds me what I like most about Paul Simons lyric
writing, especially from the first solo albums Paul Simon thru Still Crazy
LPs compared to before. His writing became more economical in the words he
used and the length of sentences, yet conveying just as much information and
emotion if not more. Proving that often less is more.
Gerard
SNUMBER6
>Proving that often less is more.
>
A famous tombstone reads ...
Here lies Les Moore ...
2 slugs from a .44
No Les no more ...
So in that case ... no Les is no more ...
Be seeing you
In the Village
Number 6
BLACKMANNY1
>saying it's NOT a milestone, then contradicting yourself???
Good writing today resembles the coelacanth: while you can't prove it's
extinct, no one has seen it alive for many years, either.