By John Giorno
Located in Surfside, FL
John Giorno
On the Bowery, 1969 - 1971
silkscreen on Schoeller's Parole Paper, edition of 100 + 20 A.P.
25.5 x 25.5 inches, signed, numbered 21/100
Screenprint in color on wove paper
Hand signed, published by Edition Domberger, Bonlanden, West Germany (with their blindstamp)
Provenance: Collection of Tom Levine
On the Bowery, 1971. The portfolio consists of nine screenprints in colors (one with mylar collage), on wove paper, by representative artists of the Pop Art period. Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman, Will Insley, Robert Indiana, Les Levine, John Willenbecher, Charles Hinman, Richard Smith, Gerald Laing, and John Giorno. The ten artists were photographed by Eliot Elisofon (1911-1973), who also lived on the Bowery and was a founding member of the Photo League in 1936.
In the late 40s and 50s Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Fernand Leger and Jean Dubuffet, among others, had studios on the Bowery, and Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Reginald Marsh worked nearby. In the early 60s, Louise Nevelson took a place on Mott Street just off the Bowery and was joined not long after by other artists attracted by the lofts for reasonable rents and the relaxed, small-time quality of the area. - William Katz, from the introduction for the portfolio.
Among other artists, writers and photographers who have lived or worked there are: Arman, Jack Brusca, Larry Calcagno, Pierre Clerk, Tom Doyle, Jean Dupuy, Janet Fish, Robert Frank, Adolph Gottlieb, Eva Hesse, Roy Lichtenstein, Jay Maisel, Ed Meneeley, Malcolm Morley, Kenneth Noland, Angelo Savelli, and Tom Wesselmann.
John Giorno (1936 – 2019) was an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, including Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol's film Sleep (1964). He was also an AIDS activist and fundraiser, and a long-time practitioner of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.
Giorno was born in New York City, and was raised both in Brooklyn and the Long Island town of Roslyn Heights. He graduated from Columbia University in 1958. While in his early twenties, he briefly worked in New York City as a stockbroker. In 1962 he met Andy Warhol during Warhol's first New York Pop Art solo exhibit at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery. They became lovers and Warhol remained an important influence for Giorno's developments in poetry, performance and recordings. Giorno and Warhol are said to have remained very close until 1964, after which time their meetings were rare. Their relationship was revived somewhat in the last year before Warhol's death. Inspired by Warhol, and subsequent relationships with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Giorno began applying Pop Art techniques of appropriation of found imagery to his poetry, producing The American Book of the Dead in 1964 (published in part in his first book, Poems, in 1967). Meetings with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin...
Category
1960s Pop Art John Giorno Art
MaterialsLithograph, Screen