PARIS — Though almost entirely lacking a female presence — artist Jay DeFeo and poet Diane Di Prima being the exceptions that prove the rule — the Centre Pompidou’s airily laid out retrospective of the Beat Generation is otherwise flawless.
William Burroughs
On His 100th Birthday, a Conference Considers William Burroughs’s Humanist Legacy
PARIS — With determined indeterminacy, young Mathilde Louette initiated a perplexing but hip four-hour English-language celebration of William S. Burroughs’s 100th birthday on December 12 in Paris, where the writer lived, on and off, between 1958 and 1966.
Watching the Beats Grow Old
From 1953 to 1963 — a period that corresponds with the publication of his most celebrated works — Allen Ginsberg snapped photographs of his cohort of soon-to-be famous friends. These shots weren’t intended for exhibition; they were mementos, thrown in the back of a drawer. He unearthed them two decades later and had copies made, in the borders of which he scrawled relevant details in felt-tip pen. It is these photographs, amended with shots from the ’80s and ’90s, that are on display at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery.