[imagesource:roger/flickr]

Few people seem to know that the Beatles once created a psychedelic painting while holed up in a hotel room during a particularly chaotic Japanese Tour.

What was meant to be their ‘big introduction to the East’ came as a severe culture shock to the British band. Death threats made by Japanese nationalists, who considered the Fab Four ’emblems of an invasive Western culture’, saw the band confined for almost all of the five-day tour to the lavish Presidential Suite at Tokyo’s Hilton Hotel.

“I’ve never seen so many people guarding us,” drummer Ringo Starr commented at the time.

Escaping the chaos that erupted the moment the group stepped off their plane at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on 29 June 1966, The Beatles used a ‘moment of calm at a tumultuous time’, to create a different kind of art with the brushes, watercolours and oils that were left as gifts in their room.

To pass the time, the band members lay a piece of Japanese art paper on a table, secured it with a ceramic lamp in the centre, and began working on Images of a Woman, considered to be The Beatles’ sole painting.

Almost six decades later, the artwork is for sale, with the iconic four signatures scrawled in the circular spot where the lamp previously stood. The 54cm by 78cm painting will be auctioned at Christie’s New York on February 1st and is expected to fetch $600,000 (R11 million).

The painting forms part of the “The Exceptional Sale“, which also features a gold crocheted vest that belonged to Janis Joplin, and Elvis Presley’s guitar from his 1969 Las Vegas residency.

Casey Rogers, head of sales for The Exceptional Sales and senior vice-president for Christie’s, told the BBC, “Beatles mania continues in the market; we see that decade after decade.”

“It’s by the hand of all four Beatles together, collectively. It’s a piece of memorabilia and it’s a piece of fine art, and I think that’s what’s really unique.”

“It’s a time capsule of a moment taken from 1966. It’s something that I wish I had a soundtrack to.”

Outside the safety of their luxurious room, the atmosphere was a strange combination of madness created by their young admirers and icy animosity from Japanese conservatives. Approximately 3,000 police officers were deployed each night to secure the venue.

“They’d stop painting, go and do a concert, then it was ‘let’s get back to the picture!'” remembers Robert Whitaker, who joined the band on the tour.

According to Christie’s ‘the aroma of the Virginia tobacco the band chain-smoked still lingers with the scent of the paint’. It sounds like quite a piece of rock and roll history to own.

[source:bbc]