LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
Études
August 27th - October 23rd, 2020
Click HERE for PDF
New Release is pleased and honored to present Études, a solo exhibition of works by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti (b. March 24, 1919) is an acclaimed poet, painter, activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco. While Ferlinghetti has been painting for over six decades, this is his first solo exhibition in New York City. On April 7th, just a few weeks after his 101st birthday, Ferlinghetti said, “I'm super happy that I'm having a show in New York, where I started out as a poet and turned into a painter.”
Études will include Ferlinghetti’s works on paper and paintings from the 1980s to present day. The small selection of works has been chosen to represent the knowledge, care and passion Ferlinghetti has given to poetry, writing, mythology and history.
In a painting titled The Young Yeats (2008), Ferlinghetti has created a sallowed Yeats portrait reminiscent of a blue period Picasso with the words Maud Gonne gone written on his chest. Gonne, an Irish suffragette and actress, was said to be a muse of Yeats.
“…Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.”
Gonne played a part in many of Yeats poems embodying famous female literary figures such as Deirdre, Leda and Helen of Troy. Seventeen years prior to The Young Yeats painting, Ferlinghetti created a work on paper titled Leda and the Swan (1991), also in the exhibition.
Icarus, Karl Marx, Orestes, Freud, Clytemnestra and some “Unrelenting Destinies” also make appearances in Études, just a spark of the vast “strains of unpremeditated art” that Ferlinghetti holds at a mere century.
Please email erin@newreleasegallery.com for more information. Also please check out Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s website HERE
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his studio. Photo by Richard Nagler, 2012
In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See . . .
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
‘imagination of disaster’
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed
And they do
Only the landscape is changed
They still are ranged along the roads
plagued by legionnaires
false windmills and demented roosters
They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
The scene shows fewer tumbrils
but more strung-out citizens
in painted cars
and they have strange license plates
and engines
that devour America
from A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958
