Between 1963 and ’64, as the Beatles toured the globe, Paul McCartney snapped hundreds of photos of his daily life. In between candid shots of his bandmates and images of foreign locales, they offer a rare peek into Beatlemania, as seen from the inside. “There’s a sort of innocence about them,” the bassist reflected in 2023.
A trove of these photos has made its way across museums from the U.K. to the U.S. for the past two years. But there’s more where that came from. A show in Beverly Hills will soon surface yet more previously unseen images from McCartney’s archives, which will be offered for sale.
In April, Gagosian will present 36 works by McCartney, some of them newly rediscovered, created between December 1963 and February 1964. They were shot in Liverpool and London in the U.K., Paris, France, as well as New York, Miami, and Washington, D.C.
At this time, the Beatles had embarked on their first tour of the U.K., hot on the heels of their number one album, With the Beatles, released in November 1963. The following year saw them descend on Paris, then New York, where they made their now-legendary debut appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February. By the end of the month, they had made the cover of Newsweek, in a front-page story that trumpeted “Bugs About Beatles.”
Paul McCartney, . Photo: © Paul McCartney, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
“Everything was new to us at this point,” McCartney recalled of that era, adding of his photographs: “They now bring back so many stories, a flood of special memories, which is one of the many reasons I love them all, and know that they will always fire my imagination.”
The Gagosian exhibition features a mix of black-and-white and color photographs, among them self-portraits and intimate views of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. They also capture the pandemonium that greeted the band, with some images showing what it looked like through the windows of moving vehicles.
Paul McCartney, . Photo: © Paul McCartney, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Besides serving as an indelible document of Beatlemania, the pictures showcase McCartney’s deft photographer’s eye and his skill with his 35mm Pentax camera.
“Taking photographs, I’d be just looking for a shot. I’d aim the camera and just sort of see where I liked it, you know, ‘oh, that’s it.’ And invariably, you pretty much take one picture,” he told CBS last year. “We were moving fast. So, you just learned to take pictures quickly.”
In collaboration with Gagosian, the musician has also created signed prints of his photographs in small editions, which are available for sale and priced from $12,000 upwards. A portion of the proceeds will benefit relief and recovery efforts following the destructive L.A. wildfires.
A visitor looks at photographs taken by Paul McCartney in Miami. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London.
The Beverly Hills outing coincides with the ongoing touring exhibition, “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm.” After opening at London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2023, it has made stops at the Chrysler Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, as well as in Japan at Tokyo City View. It will travel to the de Young Museum in San Francisco on March 1 and Frist Art Museum in Nashville on November 7.
An accompanying monograph, 1964: Eyes of the Storm, brings together 275 of McCartney’s photographs along with his captions and reflections on living through Beatlemania.
“To look at the love and the wonder of what we went through that’s captured in a lot of these photographs is the whole thing,” he said of his trove. “It’s what makes life great.”
“Paul McCartney” is on view at Gagosian, 456 N Camden Dr, Beverly Hills, California, April 25–June 21.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
