Most artists make a name for themselves in one field: visual art, writing, music, etc. But creative impulses don't have tidy boundaries, so they often spill over into other forms. Picasso wrote poetry, for example, some of it quite good. Henry Miller made paintings, most of which are not very good.
But when artists are great in one medium we tend to be interested in everything they do. When they become cultural icons, we're even more interested.
John Lennon tapped into his childlike side with his lithographs that are now a part of the permanent collection in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
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John Lennon was both, of course. Among pop songwriters, only Dylan can match the breadth and depth of what Lennon and Paul McCartney did working together. And as icons go – that is, people who changed the world – few people from the second half of the 20th century loom as large as Lennon.
He had a stint in art school, during his Liverpool youth (from 1957 to 1960) and by all accounts, he never stopped drawing. Even if he had only scribbled on napkins, auction houses and art dealers would have been interested, not to mention his fans.
Lennon used drawing paper instead of napkins, but most of what he composed were charming doodles: caricatures of himself and Yoko or whimsical little scenes populated by amusingly misshapen figures.
Like many geniuses, Lennon had a childlike side to himself, which he felt to be a source of inspiration. He said as much (the line is quoted on a Web site devoted to his art): “If art were to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life, and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.”
Drawing, for him, was clearly a release from seriousness. Some of that impulse, a yearning for a simpler, more essential state of being, is captured in such luminous songs as “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “All You Need Is Love.” But there, the notion has an emotional complexity, a poignancy, lacking in his art.
The works in the many posthumous exhibitions of his work are lithographs and other kinds of prints made by others from Lennon's originals. The coloring of them happened later, too, and so we can never know if he would have felt this was true to their original vision.
Lennon himself made only one lithograph in his lifetime, the frontispiece for the “Bag One” portfolio, a set of 14 lithographs made from drawings he created to celebrate his marriage to Yoko as well as their honeymoon. Several are erotic and Scotland Yard closed down the first exhibition of them in 1970. They were published in an edition of 300, which he approved and signed.
What gets exhibited nowadays as Lennon's art isn't literally his art, in the way we customarily refer to an exhibition of someone's work. It is probably best to characterize it as derivations of his images – made by others to replicate or approximate his originals. They are also objects that depend on his enduring aura of celebrity for their commercial appeal.
But it's hard to reconcile them with the Lennon who sang All I want is the truth / Just gimme some truth.
