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Jun 29, 2023, 06:27AM

Then That Got Played Out

A 1965 ArtForum interview with painter Helen Frankenthaler vs. a 1970 Rolling Stone interview with musician John Lennon.

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Helen Frankenthaler: It was a jukebox bar on 8th Street, filled with celluloid palm trees and five-and-ten-cent store Hawaiian decor.

John Lennon: It was that lonely, it was fantastic. Acid will box your head open.

Frankenthaler: The unsized area doesn’t have to do the work.

Lennon: Which one? I don’t believe in the dream anymore.

Frankenthaler: By then I had been exposed to enough of it so it hit me and had magic but didn’t puzzle me to the point of stopping my feelings.

•••

Lennon: Because somebody said do some lithographs and I was in a drawing mood and I drew them.

Frankenthaler: Then that got played out. So what?

Lennon: So I came up with two lines, two or three lines which was the masturbation scene.

Frankenthaler: I was too much aware of, let’s say, what read as sex organs arranged in a room.

Lennon: We both had our fingers in each other's pies.

•••

Frankenthaler: Dabs of color had to stand for real things; it was an abstraction of a guitar or of a hillside.

Lennon: I thought that wasn’t a very clever way of getting what they wanted.

Frankenthaler: A few people knew your work.

Lennon: Yeah, sure. Financially, it’s business, or whatever.

Frankenthaler: Outside, there were Art News, Arts Digest, The Times, and the Parsons Gallery, Janis, Kootz, Egan.

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