Entertainment Drawing inspiration from Lennon

Poet by John Lennon

By BBC Arts Correspondent Madeleine Holt
John Lennon will be remembered first and foremost for his musical skill but a new exhibition shows he had artistic leanings too.
Drawings and prints by the Beatles legend are going on show just yards from the site of the original Cavern Club, where the band first made their name.

John Lennon as a young art student

It is the first permanent exhibition in the UK of Lennon's works, some of which were banned when first exhibited in the country 30 years ago. When John Lennon put his artwork on show in London in 1970, the Metropolitan Police were alerted within 24 hours.
They took away some of his more erotic sketches, and closed the whole thing down.
Now, some of those same works, including one of the most shockable, are being displayed in the Mathew Street Gallery in Lennon's hometown.
Beatles enthusiast Ian Wallace is the brains behind the gallery. As a collector of Fab Four memorabilia for more than 20 years, he says putting on the exhibition is a dream come true.

Musician

"This project has been something of a lifetime's ambition. I started collecting limited editions of John Lennon eight to nine years ago. My wanting to have a gallery has come from that. "And where else should you have a John Lennon gallery but in Liverpool - his birthplace," Mr Wallace explains.
John Lennon was a student at Liverpool art institute for three years, between 1957 and 1960. When the Beatles took off, drawing remained a passion.
But it was during his time with his second wife Yoko Ono, herself an artist, that Lennon produced most of his sketches.
His favoured subject was their everyday, but extraordinary, life together.

Sherlock Lennon

The Mathew Street exhibition is sure to reignite old arguments from the 1970s over just how much John Lennon was influenced by Yoko Ono. It will also resurrect discussions as to whether, as an artist, he was in fact any good.
Arts Editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, Philip Key, says Lennon's work will not be to everyone's taste.
"He's not an artist I'd collect. He's more a sketcher than a natural artist. The piece called Love from 1977 shows Sean meeting Yoko which is a sketch anyone could do," he says.

Bag One

Nevertheless, he adds that some works, such as Day in the Life from 1970, do show the influence of German artists from the 1930s, as well as a lot of satire. But whatever their artistic merit, some of the prints could set buyers back �950.
Anything by the Beatles sells, even if Lennon increasingly resented the fact.
At the same time, he always wanted a serious exhibition of his art.