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.