Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings

By Jack Kerouac and Ed Adler

Book Overview

This first-ever collection of Jack Kerouac's visual art includes nearly every existing full-color painting collected and preserved by the Kerouac estate in Lowell, Massachusetts. Also included are dozens of black-and-white line drawings, sketches, and facsimile reproductions of Kerouac's notations from his unpublished notebooks. In writing, Kerouac's restless and relentless experimentation--what he called "spontaneous bop prosody"--pushed language to the boundaries of meaning. In painting and drawing he found a complementary means of expression. A friend and admirer of painters Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, and Dody Muller, Kerouac was an ardent and deliberate student who worked to develop and refine his skills and his conception of the act of painting--a conception related to the spontaneous composition he had pioneered in his books. Ed Adler's essay offers an unprecedented view of Kerouac, the visual artist. Rich in anecdote and drawing on extensive quotation from Kerouac's letters, notebooks, and published writings, Adler's essay demonstrates the biographical and thematic preoccupations common to Kerouac's writing and painting, especially Kerouac's struggle to integrate the two spiritual traditions, Catholicism and Buddhism, to which he was devoted. No consideration of Kerouac will be complete without reference to this heretofor- unseen aspect of his life and work.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560256214
• ISBN13: 9781560256212
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 2.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.3" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

extraordinary Kerouac

This is a remarkable work about a remarkable artist - a real eye opener and worth every penny

Pictures of Transient Pain and the World Beyond

The text and paintings here are revealing of Keroauc's soul as an artist tho without doubt his greatest paintings were done with words... and the numerous paintings and drawings reflect talent... however, most of the off the cuff pencil drawings are cartoonish and at times viewable for no more than 10 seconds. One thing he could rarily get right was a person's face, particularly the nose...very weird... The writer's pedantic analysis of Kerouac's work is alright at first particularly in setting the historical artistic context for modernist American painting, but begins to wear..and his assessment of Kerouac's work is inflated...There is no doubt Kerouac took his painting seriously. Paintings like The Eagle, the Ghost over Lowell at tenament dusk, the abstract paintings, the Clothesline, the woman with guitar and the pencil drawing of Buddha are all accomplished works..really quite surprising! (I would have liked to have seen his painting of Charlie Parker..but that is not in this collection). This book is recommended because, for once in the last ten years, we have some new insight into the man and his artistic vision.