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Beatnik bard with a brush

Beat icon Ferlinghetti adds visual barbs to his poetry
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
March 7th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Women are literally and figuratively nailed to the cross in many pieces.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been famous as an American poet and publisher since the early 1950s. He’s also been drawing and painting for at least as long. However, it was not until 1980 that he had his first large exhibition. Since then he has shown his paintings around the world, especially in San Francisco at the George Krevsky Gallery.
As a writer and performer, Ferlinghetti has been associated with the Fluxus movement internationally since the 1960s. But his paintings are more influenced by the generation of modern painters who were at the forefront a decade earlier, most notably the Abstract Expressionists of his own generation, such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.
Ferlinghetti’s paintings have also been compared to those of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, a circle of artists around the San Francisco Art Institute. However, now that he’s nearly 90 years old and still busy as a writer and painter, it seems beside the point to ask whether his paintings and drawings are figurative or Abstract Expressionist. As he has said about his work: “The process of creation is not important, nor is the question of form.”
In his current show at Prague City Gallery, Ferlinghetti’s strong passion for purely figurative art is most dominant. He remains a social activist, and his socio-political awareness is apparent in many of the works on display. The paintings are divided by social themes: human (especially women’s) rights and freedom and critiques of U.S. foreign policy and capitalist consumerism. The majority of the works, though, have a more personal theme — love and sex, though not erotic or even romantic in nature. They are mostly nudes, both female and male.
Ferlinghetti’s inimitable poetry is abundant on his canvases, as well as stenciled onto the wall (in Czech and English), heard from overhead speakers and recited by the bard himself in two separate video rooms. The literary aspect serves to help guide the viewer from theme to theme.
In his series dealing with women’s rights, there are paintings of naked women crucified, some with the severed heads of men on the ends of the cross. All of the women are bleeding profusely where women bleed, and a text is written over the crosses: “Por la liberación de la mujer,” which calls for the liberation of women.
In the civil liberties room, the U.S. national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” is heard as Ferlinghetti reads a social protest poem over the music. Paintings in this room include one with a dark female figure on a red background holding a sign that says: “Sex is the nurse of the working class,” and Policia Oaxaca, which shows a crowded Mexican police bus driving over dead bodies.
But the most memorable works in this show are in the love and sex area. There are a couple of figural variations using the same text, which begins, “I left my memory in Hock, on the rooftops of Paris.” On one painting, the text covers a naked woman’s face from the nose down. On others, it appears on a woman’s thigh, and under a woman’s bum.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Paintings & Poems

at Prague City Gallery–House at the Golden Ring
Ends May 13. Týnská 6, Prague 1–Old Town. Open Tues.–Sun. 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

His drawing A Fishy Person (1985) looks like a woman with a dog’s head, and it appears that the head was put on afterward. Apparently, the original woman’s head was painted over with white then replaced by a fish head (which looks like that of a dog). More than anything, it suggests revenge on the model, who presumably was involved in the artist’s personal life.
In a back room are photographs and documentation that underscore the importance of Ferlinghetti as an inspiration to the pre-1989 Czechoslovak underground, which gives this exhibit a layer of local significance.
In 1987, Ferlinghetti wrote a letter to Czechoslovak President Gustav Husák, requesting the release from prison of Jazz Section members who had been jailed for publishing independent literature. They were released soon enough (though not necessarily due to Ferlinghetti’s efforts).
As a sign of gratitude, and in coordination with the Prague Writers’ Festival, Ferlinghetti came to Prague in 1998 for the first time, at the age of nearly 80. In his honor, there was a nonstop reading of his poetry for four days and nights in the Church of St. Salvador. At this happening, organized by the Jazz Section (former dissidents and samizdat publishers), people from all walks of life — poets, professionals, students, homeless people, musicians, professors, political celebrities (including now President Václav Klaus) and blue-collar workers — took turns reading from Ferlinghetti’s works. Photos from this event are on view.
Overall, Ferlinghetti’s paintings are not stunning, though the nudes are interesting enough. His simultaneous exploration of life stories in text and on canvas shows him at his best. A painting from 1982 has the text, “I now begin the broken sentences,” and shows a naked man holding a messy bundle of green human figures in his hands. Does he intend to mold them or order them? With his poetry, Ferlinghetti can vividly tell their stories; in his paintings, he can only try to figure them out.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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