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Oct 15, 2026US

John Lennon Lithograph "Erotic #5" Bag One Portfolio (1970)

John Lennon (English, 1940-1980). "Erotic #5" from the "Bag One" series. Lithograph on BFK Rives Paper, 1970. Edition 196 of 300 plus 45 Hors Commerce. Hand-signed at lower right and numbered at lower left. A hand-signed lithograph by John Lennon from the Bag One portfolio. The plate is catalogued variously as "Erotic #3," "Erotic #5," or "Erotic #6." Three figures lie tangled together in a loose knot of reddish-brown line, floating at the center of a wide, empty sheet. Long hair falls over shoulders, two faces press close in a kiss, and a third head rests lower down, half lost in a quick scribble of shading. This is the Bag One manner at its most intimate: a fast, wandering contour drawn on transfer paper and printed with every hesitation and flourish left in, so it reads like a page from a private sketchbook. The sheet is signed "John Lennon" in pencil at lower right and numbered 196/300 at lower left. It is presented matted and framed under glazing. John Lennon (1940-1980) grew up in Liverpool and in 1957 founded the skiffle group the Quarrymen, which Paul McCartney soon joined and which grew into the Beatles. The Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership and the group's run of records through the 1960s changed popular music for good. Before all that, Lennon had studied at the Liverpool College of Art from 1957 to 1960. Drawing had absorbed him since childhood, and by 1968 he was coming back to it, choosing the quick, unrevised sketch over the worked-up picture. Bag One appeared just as the Beatles were breaking up. Lennon went on to a solo career and a long collaboration with Yoko Ono until he was murdered in New York in December 1980. Lennon and Ono married on 20 March 1969. The drawings behind Bag One, reportedly begun as a wedding gift for Ono, record the ceremony, the honeymoon, and the bed-ins they staged for world peace. The title nods to the couple's "bagism," the idea of hiding inside a bag so that people would be judged by what they said rather than how they looked. Anthony Fawcett and the publisher Ed Newman picked twelve images from hundreds of sheets. With a title page and an alphabet poem added, the portfolio ran to fourteen lithographs, published in an edition of three hundred sets. Lennon drew on specially treated litho paper. The images were transferred to sensitized zinc plates and printed in the traditional way, and each set came in a white leather satchel designed by the Paris couturier Ted Lapidus. The portfolio opened at Eugene Schuster's London Arts Gallery on New Bond Street on 15 January 1970, a gallery better known for prints by Durer, Rembrandt, and Picasso. The next day Scotland Yard seized eight of the fourteen lithographs as indecent, and Schuster was prosecuted. The case was dismissed months later and the prints were returned. Critics have since compared the line to Matisse and Picasso. Schuster's verdict on the affair was blunt: "Good or bad that's up to the critics. It's not for the police to say." Item # 205198

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John Lennon Lithograph "Erotic #5" Bag One Portfolio (1970)

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€1,339.15

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