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John Lennon's Works

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For John Lennon, art was actually his first love. Lennon started drawing long before he played a musical instrument. Drawing served as an escape for Lennon, who was abandoned by his father, visited occasionally by his mother Julia, and brought up by his aunt Mimi Smith. As a child he turned out an entire series of line drawings and all of the pent up hostility he felt came pouring out of him rearing its head as caricatures of authority figures, especially his teachers. At the age of 5 John was expelled from school for misbehavior.

John was later introduced to the harmonica and accordion, and his mother taught him to play a guitar using banjo chords. Even after becoming interested in music, John’s passion for art kept growing, and only a few years after he met Paul McCartney, who soon after introduced him to George Harrison, John enrolled in the Liverpool Art Institute, a prestigious school he attended between 1957 and 1960.

After the Beatles became household names, John published two books. “In His Own Write” in 1964 and “A Spaniard in the Works” in 1965, and both books were fantastic examples of Lennon’s ability to weave narratives that challenged the reader to find meaning or bring their own meaning into the text. Along with the stories were line drawings, and they served as the first introduction of John’s art to the general public.

It was no coincidence that John would be attracted to an avant-garde artist named Yoko Ono, who he met in 1966 at the Indica Galleries in London, and who was already well known in the art world. Two years later they were married, and along with the last few Beatle albums that John recorded, came a whole series of drawing that Lennon produced, 14 of which later became the “Bag One” portfolio. Although they were originally meant as a wedding gift for Yoko, they were later produced as signed limited edition stone lithographs which were to be shown in galleries all over the world.

When the drawings were released to the public, they were considered not only erotic, but obscene by some countries standards, and were confiscated by the police. The charges against Lennon were later dropped but after the accidental destruction of some of the art, the experience was so unpleasant for Lennon, that he became very reluctant to show his art to the public from that day forward.

After John’s murder in 1980, Yoko began releasing his art and several exhibitions of Lennon’s work are travelling the world and being shown to anyone who is interested. Some pieces are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and in museums all over the world. In the mid eighties Yoko Ono published John’s last book “Skywriting by Word Of Mouth” which John produced between 1975 and 1980, and it contains many of his last miscellaneous writings and drawings.