[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: An Exhibition of Drawings Celebrates Lennon at 64

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An Exhibition of Drawings Celebrates Lennon at 64

October 7, 2004
 By ALLAN KOZINN 



 

It 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.' " 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/arts/design/07lenn.html?ex=1098147378&ei=1&en=e1cf8fbd219eaa85


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