John Lennon Lithograph "Erotic #8" Bag One Portfolio (1970)

lot/john lennon lithograph erotic 8 bag one portfolio 1970 V3jJBS6 633313346 / Price history

lot/john lennon lithograph erotic 8 bag one portfolio 1970 V3jJBS6 633313346

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lot/john lennon lithograph erotic 8 bag one portfolio 1970 V3jJBS6 633313346

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John Lennon Lithograph "Erotic #8" Bag One Portfolio (1970)

John Lennon (English, 1940-1980). "Erotic #8" from the "Bag One" series. Lithograph on BFK Rives Paper, 1970. Edition 196 of 300 plus 45 Hors Commerce. Hand-signed at lower right and numbered at lower left. An original lithograph from John Lennon's Bag One portfolio, printed on BFK Rives paper and referred to alternately as "Erotic #8" and "Erotic #4." It is hand-signed in pencil at lower right and numbered at lower left. This is one of the openly erotic plates. The scene is drawn from the man's own point of view: his legs run down the sheet toward a reclining female figure, presumably Yoko Ono, who is performing fellatio, with her hands and features gathered in a knot of looser strokes. Lennon draws in a single continuous line with almost no shading, so the empty paper stands in for skin, sheets, and air. The effect is intimate and playful rather than clinical, a private diary entry from the honeymoon. The sheet is framed and matted. John Lennon (1940-1980) was born in Liverpool and studied at the Liverpool College of Art from 1957 to 1960. During those years his skiffle group the Quarrymen turned into the Beatles. With Paul McCartney he wrote much of the most influential popular music of the twentieth century. Drawing was never just a hobby for him, though. His comic sketches illustrated his books In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965), and by 1968 he had gone back to the visual arts in earnest, preferring the quick, loose line drawing. Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969. They spent their honeymoon in bed at the Amsterdam Hilton, the first of their Bed-Ins for peace. As a wedding gift for Ono, Lennon drew a sequence covering the ceremony, the honeymoon, and their private life together. Hundreds of drawings were edited down to a portfolio of fourteen lithographs, including a title sheet and a calligraphic alphabet poem. The edition ran to three hundred sets. The prints were made with lithographic transfer paper, so Lennon could draw as he normally did before the images were moved to printing plates. Each set came in a white leather bag designed by the Paris couturier Ted Lapidus, which gave the portfolio its name. Bag One opened at Eugene Schuster's London Arts Gallery on New Bond Street on 15 January 1970. The next day Scotland Yard officers seized eight of the lithographs on the grounds of indecency. Schuster, an American, was tried at Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court. Prints by Picasso were put before the court for comparison, and the prosecution's witnesses described being shocked to the point of blushing. The case was dismissed and the prints were returned. Schuster summed up the gallery's position: "Good or bad that's up to the critics. It's not for the police to say." Critics now often see the failed prosecution as a moment when the establishment lost a public fight with 1960s youth culture. The series is the only significant body of graphic work by any of the Beatles. Item # 205199

Estimate:£1,135.11

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