Adam and Eve as Hippies

https://www.vnews.com/Column-Old-hippies-never-die-37584165

UPDATED: December 2, 2020

Helping a couple of ‘60’s hippies find a new home

Old hippies never die. They just go to Vermont and hang out in my guest room, naked.

I’ve had these two hippies in my home since 1992. They were thrown out of a Saks Fifth Avenue display window 51 years ago, in 1969, after they caused a scandal on the sidewalks of New York City.

They are life-sized, full-frontal nude paintings depicting Adam and Eve as hippies by the Manhattan artist Douglas Semonin, who had been commissioned by Saks to create a “Garden of Eden” display window representing the “hip” attitudes of the 1960s. He painted Eve as Jane Fonda, in her role as Barbarella in the 1968 film of the same name, and Adam as the Beatles’ John Lennon, with shoulder length hair, a beard and actual sunglasses. Eve has hair the color of a tomato, a silver snake crawling around her left leg, and three-dimensional breasts. Adam holds the apple from the tree of knowledge that Eve gave him, dooming humankind to fall from paradise — the Garden of Eden.

Sophisticated Saks shoppers would not have been offended by the nudity, or by biblical figures being depicted by celebrities. But they would not tolerate them being depicted by celebrities who were leaders in the protests against the Vietnam War.

Fonda and Lennon lasted all of three days in the Saks window.

Remember the 1960s? The Beatles dominated music, draft-age anti-war protestors choked American streets and Broadway shows like Hair and Oh! Calcutta! were performed in the nude. It was the Age of Aquarius and — like Adam and Eve in Semonin’s paintings — everyone “let it all hang out.”

Everyone except me. I sort of flunked the 1960s, even though I began them at 15 and ended them at 24.

I was a bystander not a participant. I wasn’t a Beatlemaniac, I never joined an anti-war protest and I never attended a nude Broadway show. Nudity made me squeamish. I even voted for Richard Nixon in 1968, and that sealed my fate as a ’60s failure. I was a “square.”

That’s why, in 1992, I jumped at the chance to save Adam and Eve.

The paintings had been on the wall of my English professor’s office at Ithaca College for 15 years. He had acquired them from the artist (who died in 1971), shortly after they had been evicted from the Saks display window. When my professor retired in 1984, at the age of 70, he put them in his attic to collect dust.

The paintings are kitsch, not high art, not the kind of art about which “the ladies come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo,” as T.S. Eliot writes in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. They are “pop” art, whose viewers are more likely to gasp “Cool!” or “Psychedelic, man!” than speak in complete sentences about artistic niceties.

I guess I hoped that if I owned them I would become “cool” too, and maybe make up for my poor performance during the 1960s.

Well, it’s 2020 now. Adam and Eve have been on the wall of my guest room in Hartford Village for 28 years, and I’m still not cool. So much for that.

But now that I am about to turn 76, I need to find a permanent home for Adam and Eve to carry on their hippie mission. I have offered them to the artist’s alma mater, Cornell University, and its Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. And I’ve offered them to the head curator of another institution, one where old hippies go to live forever. One where Adam and Eve can be the unabashed ambassadors of the psychedelic ’60s, they way they were intended to be before Saks Fifth Avenue threw them out on the street. One that didn’t even exist in 1969. I have offered them to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Paul Keane lives in Hartford Village.

Flunking the 1960’s (unabridged version)

Old hippies never die, they just go to Vermont and hang out in my guest room, naked.

I’ve had two 1969 hippies in my home since 1992, nearly 30 years.

They were thrown out of a Saks Fifth Avenue display window 51 years ago, in 1969, after they caused a scandal on the sidewalks of New York..

They are life-sized paintings of Adam and Eve as Hippies painted by the Manhattan artist Douglas Semonin (1925–71) who had been commissioned by Saks to create a Garden of Eden display window representing the “hip” attitudes of the 1960’s.

He painted Eve as Jane Fonda in her role as Barbarella in the 1967 film of the same name and Adam as the leader of the Beatles, John Lennon, with shoulder length hair and a beard.

Sophisticated Saks’ shoppers would not be offended by nudity or by biblical figures being depicted as entertainment celebrities. But they would not tolerate them being depicted as entertainment celebrities who were the symbols of anti-Vietnam War protest.

In 1969 John Lennon, was staging bed-ins for peace (one step up — or down — from sit-ins) with his bride, the performance artist Yoko Ono. They would invite reporters into their marital bedroom to interview them while they were in bed, often singing “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.” Jane Fonda was emerging as an anti-war protester on her own, who would earn the name Hanoi Jane when she visited the capital of North Vietnam in 1972.

Fonda and Lennon lasted three days as Adam and Eve in Saks’ display window and then they were banished forever.

The artist had painted Eve with tomato colored hair and a snake crawling up her leg at the very moment she tempted Adam to take the apple from the tree of knowledge, dooming humankind to fall from paradise, the Garden of Eden.

He painted Adam as John Lennon, with shoulder length hair and a chartreuse beard, wearing actual sunglasses. Using three dimensional items in his creations was a Semonin trait. He gave Eve — Jane Fonda — a three dimensional breast to lure Adam into his sin.

Remember the 1960’s? It was the decade when the Beatles took over the entertainment world, one million screaming and fainting teenagers at a time. It was the decade when draft-age anti-war protesters choked American streets chanting “one two three four, we don’t want your fucking war”. It was the decade when Broadway shows with names like “Hair” and “Oh! Calcutta!” were performed in the nude.

Semonin’s Adam and Eve as Hippies were the real BCE: Before Clothing Era.

The 1960’s was the phony Age of Aquarius when everyone “let it all hang out”.

Everyone except me. I sort of flunked the 1960’s, even though I began them at age 15 and ended them at age 24.

I was a bystander not a participant: I wasn’t a Beatlemaniac, I never joined an anti-war protest, and I never attended a nude Broadway show. Nudity made me squeamish.

I even voted for Richard Nixon for president in 1968 an act that sealed my fate as a sixties’ failure. I was a “square”.

That’s why I jumped at the chance in 1992 to save Adam and Eve. They had been on the wall of my English professor’s office at Ithaca College for 15 years when he retired at the age of 70 in 1984, and put them in his attic to collect dust for the next 8 years.

His name was John D. Ogden (“Dr. Ogden” to me) and he held a PhD in romantic literature from Yale (’58) .

The Cornell artist Douglas Semonin had painted Ogden in his blue doctor’s robe in 1958, eleven years before he painted Adam and Eve as Hippies, and he knew that Ogden was a kind of scholarly iconoclast.

In his PhD research, Ogden wanted to find out which of Lord Byron’s legs was the leg responsible for his limp. Right or left? Apparently scholars had previously neglected to record this information.

In a feat of Sherlock Holmes-detective work, Ogden unearthed the answer in Yale’s then 12 million volume library. He found the actual report of the autopsy performed on Byron at the time of his death, and he accomplished this Sherlock feat decades before computers were invented.

Imagine card catalog cases filled with 12 million physical cards. An entire nave of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library was filled with card catalogs in another BC era : Before Computers. I say “nave” because Sterling Library is designed as a medieval cathedral.

Dr. Ogden told me which leg it was. Shamefully I have forgotten.

But Ogden discovered something else, which many scholars would have primly ignored. All of Lord Byron’s body parts had been measured during the autopsy, and as Ogden read down the list scrutinizing every item, he noticed that one of the measurements was of such an impressive dimension that it explained George Gordon Lord Byron’s notorious reputation as a lover.

.

Dr. Ogden wouldn’t reveal exactly which part he was referring to but he delighted in telling this story in his elegant Ivy League prose, in a deep baritone, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

When Adam and Eve were thrown out of Saks Fifth Avenue in 1969, Semonin rightly reasoned that the mischievous Byron-scholar and professor of romantic literature whose academic portrait he had painted in 1958, would give the same safe harbor and scholarly respect to Adam and Eve as hippies that he had to lord Byron’s dimensions as a cad.

If Ogden could dig up Byron’s corpse so to speak, and inadvertently certify his lecherous reputation as a seducer, maybe he would give safe harbor to Semonin’s psychedelic rendering of the mother and father of sin itself: Fonda and Lennon.

Professor Ogden took the banished Adam and Eve in out of the cold, and they would hang quietly on his office wall in the English Department of Ithaca College’s academic building, Job Hall, for the next 15 years.

As a recent graduate of Ithaca College, I was dispatched in 1969 to pick up the two paintings at the artist’s’ Greenwich Village apartment. They were too big for an ordinary car, but I owned a convertible (1963 Buick Skylark) and the paintings would fit in my back seat if I drove with the top down.

Doug Semonin and I loaded them into my open car. To protect Eve’s three dimensional breast, we had to put her on top of Adam in the back seat of my car. Adam was hidden underneath. To keep the paintings from flipping and flopping in the wind, I had to drive 45 mph or below.

Anyone who has driven the 200 miles from Manhattan to Ithaca knows that most of the route is a two lane highway, Rt. 17, except for one fifty mile stretch of four lane thruway .

A car traveling at 45 miles an hour with life sized portraits of Adam and Eve hanging out of the back seat of a topless convertible was not only a slowpoke clogging up traffic, but an eye opening source of amusement or shock, especially with Eve’s exposed breast, BC era or not.

At one point a station-wagon full of nuns was stuck behind us as I drove at 45 mph. They seemed too polite to pass us in their obvious exasperation, but finally did so with prim propriety, almost tentatively inching along until they finally pulled in front after what seemed like five minutes of creeping along our side.

The artist and I exercised all our self-control not to stare at the nuns as they passed, fearing they would look at our back seat and its BC reclining passengers and be scandalized.

Nudity might be okay on Broadway in 1969 but it definitely wasn’t okay on the highway between the Roscoe Diner and Binghamton, N.Y., either for nuns or secular drivers.

We arrived in Ithaca in daylight and installed Adam and Eve in their new academic garden before dark.

At one point in their fifteen year life in Dr. Ogden’s office, a colleague in the English department stuck her head in Ogden’s door and complained about Eve who was shockingly visible from the hallway, declaring the painting was sexist.

Professor Ogden curled his aristocratic finger invitingly, beckoning the colleague to come all the way in to his tiny office. When she did so, the door slid into position and the other member of the BCE couple, Adam, was revealed from his hiding place behind the half opened door.

Dr. Ogden smiled and offered the pair as equal opportunity sexism. Art is art, whether kitsch or not, he said.

It is true. Adam and Eve as Hippies are kitsch art not high art. Not the kind of art about which “the ladies come and go, speaking of Michelangelo” as T.S. Eliot says in “J. Alfred Prufrock.” They are ‘pop’ art, whose viewers are more likely to gasp “Amazing! Cool! Psychedelic, man !” than speak in complete sentences about artistic niceties.

I guess maybe I hoped if I owned them I would become “cool” too, and make up for my poor performance during the 1960’s.

Well, it’s 2020 now. Adam and Eve as Hippies have been on the wall of my guest room in Vermont for 28 years, and I’m still not cool.

So much for that.

Now I am about to turn 76 and I need to find a permanent repository for Adam and Eve to carry on their hippie mission. I have offered to donate them without charge to the artist’s alma mater, Cornell University and its Johnson Museum of Art.

And I’ve offered them to the head curator of another institution too, one where old hippies go, not to die, but to live forever.

One where the ladies do not “come and go speaking of Michelangelo” but where Adam and Eve can be the unashamed ambassadors of the psychedelic sixties as they were intended to be before Saks Fifth Avenue threw them out on the street. I have offered them to an institution that didn’t even exist in 1969: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.