Jack Kerouac, the Beat painter?
We will always associate the name Jack Kerouac with the Beat Generation literary movement along with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Kerouac released his first book, The Town and the City, in 1950, but garnered widespread critical success and fame with his 1957 novel On the Road.
While Kerouac was indeed primarily a novelist and a poet, he was also a painter, a reality that many of his fans might be unaware of. In fact, the American author sometimes wished that he was a painter rather than a writer and often filled his notebooks with doodles and drawings to accompany his prose.
When The Town and the City was released in 1950, Kerouac was less than impressed by the cover artwork the publisher opted for. By the time On the Road was finished, he’d designed his own cover, calling it “an appealing commercial cover expressive of the book”. The publisher for On the Road didn’t opt for Kerouac’s design in the end, but it showed his attention to visual art as well as the narrative.
After the success of On the Road, Kerouac continued to paint and draw. He painted Cardinal Giovanni Montini (who later became Pope Paul VI) based on a Time magazine photograph, but his real passion, like his fiction, was for the real people he met on his travels and in his day-to-day life.
There’s an oil painting entitled Woman in blue with black hat, which depicts a woman smoking a cigarette leant against a wall, based on actor Joan Crawford. After befriending artist Dody Muller, Kerouac became wrapped up in the world of 1960s New York Expressionism, and he employed a variety of materials, including oils, watercolours and pencils, to capture his artistic outlook.
Sandrina Bandera, editor of the book Kerouac: Beat Painting and curator of a previous exhibition in a gallery just outside Milan, once discussed Kerouac’s paintings with The Independent, admitting that “it would be wrongheaded to read these artworks using an art critic’s traditional method”.
“It would be a serious mistake to consider these illustrations and sketches as divorced from the artist’s writings, judging them, that is, from merely a stylistic point of view from that of the subjects they portray,” she said before putting forth the notion that Kerouac’s art should rather be viewed in tandem with his prose work.
“The artworks are an integral part of the writings and should be interpreted in the same way as Kerouac’s own writing style,” Bandera added, “For which he coined the term’ spontaneous prose’: the composition of sentences by association, in a stream of words free from syntactic constraints and with all the immediacy of a rushing river”.
Kerouac himself had penned a manifesto for his painting work, presented on a handwritten note at the Italian exhibition. It read, “Only use brush. No knife to mash and spread and obliterate brush strokes. Only use brush spontaneously, i.e. without drawing, without long pause or delay, without erasing… pile it on. Stop when you want to ‘improve’ – it’s done.”
So while Kerouac will always be celebrated for his contributions to Beatnik literature and poetry, he was also something of a dab hand at painting too. Sure, it’s difficult to sit back and admire Kerouac’s visual art objectively, removing the art from the artist, so, as Bandera suggests, one ought to view it as an integral part of his work in sum instead.