ART REVIEWS : Lennon Vehicle Only a Joy Ride to the Past

When we’re 64, we children of the ‘60s probably still will be nostalgic for the music that shouted, whined and mumbled about all the things that mattered back then. It was more than music to us--it was the pulse that beat through every day of our lives, reminding us of our energy and our passion and our impatience with anything that smacked of closed-mindedness.

Beatle John Lennon’s doodles and drawings reproduced in the print suites “Bag One” and “This Is My Story Both Humble and True” actually date from the early to late ‘70s. But his handiwork, on view at the Sarah Bain Gallery in Fullerton through Friday and then moving to the Pacific Edge Gallery in Laguna Beach, is a ticket to ride back to a fey, womblike realm where all you needed was love.

The closest the outside world gets in this work is the bristling line of cameramen focused on Lennon and Yoko in their “Bed-In for Peace.” Otherwise, the sometimes scribbly, sometimes sparingly calligraphic silk-screens and lithographs wallow happily in domestic bliss and sexual gratification, pausing only for a few private musings and a fantasy stage show by a two-headed Buddy Holly-Elvis Presley figure.

Lennon’s images of himself and his wife often have a stubby, peasant-like homeliness that’s partly due to his amateur artist’s tendency to skip over hard-to-draw body parts, but maybe also to a shy desire to condense himself down to his petite wife’s stature. She’s all hair and miniskirt; he’s a vaguer figure in familiar wire rims.

A visit to Japan sparked a portrait of the couple with son Sean in a spare handful of lines. In other prints, the famous twosome represent the Power of Love. In “The Hug,” the couple cuddle into a monogram of heads, knees (hers) and rump (his). In the few quick, slippery strokes of “Bag One,” Lennon shows himself squatting to embrace a broad-faced, smiling icon of Wifehood.

Yoko is also the pleasure center of a bunch of graphic sexual scenes that seem too innocently exploratory to be seriously erotic.

When Lennon got pensive, he drew such wistful, childlike scenes as “The Exile,” in which he saw himself as a pitiful pygmy in a burnoose leading an unlikely looking camel through the desert, with no Yoko in sight. In “Back-Off Bugaloo,” he surrounds his lonesome-cowboy alter ego with a see-through private cube under a sky with clouds, a sun and a snatch of floating musical notation.

Whether we’d be interested in all this if Lennon were just an average Joe is another matter. Knowing the saga of this working-class hero’s life as well as the lyrics of his songs, viewers come to the lithographs and serigraphs mainly seeking a taste of the old magic. Art, shmart. Just give us a replay of those far-off days when we were sure we’d never grow up.

Still, since this is a show at an art gallery (albeit one that stocks vapid femmes fatales by Nagle), a word about Lennon-as-draftsman seems in order: It scarcely seems likely that the scribbly, anatomy-be-damned drawings would pass muster without his celebrity status. And beguiling as they are, his economical doodles are too vague and cloying to be ranked with the serious stuff. “Matisse-like personal sketches,” as the gallery calls them in a handout, they surely are not.

But like psychedelic album covers, light boxes (remember those?) and R. Crumb’s comics, Lennon’s handiwork is part of pop culture, only fleetingly connected with the concerns of “serious” art, then or now. So we’ll take our cue from a song, and let it be.

Lennon’s prints (the entire 17 from “This Is My Story” and 11 from “Bag One”) remain at Sarah Bain Gallery, 223 N. Harbor, Fullerton, through March 11. Hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Admission is free. Call (714) 447-4484.

The same pieces will be on exhibit March 12 through April 8 at the Pacific Edge Gallery, 206 N. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. Hours: 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Admission: free. Information: (714) 494-0491.