Magazine Article

Open eye, open palette: the art of Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Landauer, Susan, Landauer, Carl

2015

Overview

The phenomenon stretched from Venice Beach to Topanga Canyon and from Big Sur to San Francisco, thriving in the studios of Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen and their younger peers Ferlinghetti, Wallace Berman, Stuart Perkoff, and George Herms, as well as many now forgotten, whose \"vow to Holy Poverty\" in the face of the intolerant, unethical culture of the Cold War era meant rejecting commercial discourse.3 By his own account, Ferlinghetti's first foray into art began in the late 1940s almost by accident while in Paris working on his doctorate in literature at the Sorbonne. The Audiffred Building was one of the city's most energetic hubs of activity, at various times housing Hassel Smith (whose studio Ferlinghetti had taken over), Frank Lobdell, Ernest Briggs, Jack Jefferson, Sonia Gechtoff, Julius Wasserstein, and Joan Brown. [...]Ferlinghetti served as West Coast correspondent for Art Digest, often writing reviews of exhibitions of San Francisco painters-even being described as the group's \"spokesman.\" [...]he believes that his recent show named after his painting The Lyric Escape (1985) was especially politically powerful.8 The same could be said of his exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco, filled with sensuous nudes.9 In that show, only one painting contained a specific reference to politics-the single word, \"boobeoisie,\" H.L. Mencken's sniping term used by Ferlinghetti for further comic effect.10 Explaining the political objective of the shows, he said: \"My work is now about finding a way to escape from the present morass of disaster or whatever is descending upon us.\" Many of his paintings feature borrowed texts in graffiti handwriting, whether a passage from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in City Full Passing Away (2002), the final words of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in Welcome O Life! from James Joyce (2008), or a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay's Sonnet XXVIII, \"We rose from rapture but an hour ago,\" wrapping a silkscreen image of Millay in Edna St. Vincent Millay (2008).

• Publisher: Long Island University, C.W. Post College,Long Island University
• Subject: Artists / Ferlinghetti, Lawrence / Ginsberg, Allen (1926-1997) / Joyce, James (1882-1941) / Kerouac, Jack (1922-1969) / Mencken, Henry Louis (1880-1956) / Millay, Edna St Vincent (1892-1950) / Pound, Ezra (1885-1972) / Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882) / Works