Kerouac`s spontaneous bop poetics in paint: a little-known side of the Beat icon

As well as being the author of novels that defined postwar America and helped launch the counterculture, Jack Kerouac was also a prolific painter and draftsman. But his artistic work―inspired by the artists of the New York School with whom Kerouac socialized in the late `50s―has remained largely unknown. Most of Kerouac`s artworks were inherited by a relative and remained unseen in the author`s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, for decades. Now, this new publication offers the chance to explore what Kerouac`s unique vision looked like in paint and pencil.

Jack Kerouac: Beat Painting features 80 paintings and drawings by 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.

Looking at Kerouac`s portraits (taking on everyone from Joan Crawford to William S. Burroughs) and exploring the artist`s relationships to Europe, religion, fashion and New York in the 1950s, Jack Kerouac: Beat Painting takes readers on a journey through Kerouac`s life, poetics and vision, analyzing his labyrinthine creative process and his place in American visual culture.

Alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg,

Jack Kerouac (1922–69) is considered one of the founders of the Beat Generation, a literary and artistic movement that arrived on the American scene in the late 1940s with an influential vision of spontaneity and liberation in life and art.