‚Beat Generation‘

Paris

In 1944 William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac met at the Columbia University. It was the beginning of the Beat Generation. A literary and artistic movement that spread around internationally and is currently celebrated through Beat Generation, the retrospective exhibition running at the Centre Pompidou.

Created in a post World War II period, Beat Generation rejects standard narratives values, materialism and religions while exploring with psychedelic drugs and sexual liberation. Provocative, the movement shocked with Ginsberg’s Howl poem for which he was sew for obscenity. The retrospective exhibition embraces the complexity and integrality of the movement that mingled every medium from lectures, performances, concerts to films and represents a first decompartmentalization of the medium. The Californian leaders, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, George Herms and Jay DeFeo’s works are all presented along with the literary artists LeRoi Jones and Bob Kaufman. The photographs of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and movies by Christopher MacLaine and Bruce Baillie are few of the plethora of artists reunited by curator Philippe-Alain Michaud to celebrate the Beat Generation.

Robert Frank, „The Americans“, Trolley, New Orleans, 1955.


Bruce Conner, Bombhead, 1989, Pigment on RC photo and Somerset paper, acrylic, 32 x 25 in

Centre Pompidou

June 22 – October 03, 2016

Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris
France

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