BOOK:Kerouac-Beat Painting,Skira Editore
Jack Kerouac’s most famous book “On the Road” (1957), had broad cultural influence before it was recognized for its literary merits. The book captured the spirit of its time as no other work of the 20th Century had since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (1925). On a number of occasions, Jack Kerouac told friends that if he hadn’t been a writer he would have been a painter. Skira Editore reveals the hidden face of Jack Kerouac in the book “Kerouac. Beat Painting” edited by Sandrina Bandera, Alessandro Castiglioni and Emma Zanella, In its 176 pages with 87 color illustrations the book features 80 paintings and drawings by Jack Kerouac, most of which have never before been published, shedding a completely new light on the father of the Beat Generation, and showing how he brought the same energy to visual art as he did to all of his other endeavors. The Beats formed by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti rejected post-war technological idealism in favor of a new, almost tribal ethics based on spontaneity that would lead to the Hippie movement. The works have been chosen to illustrate the entire spectrum of Kerouac’s creative process, exploring in particular his relationship with the tradition of American visual culture.-Dimitris Lempesis
