The Beatles created a painting together while on tour in Japan. It sold at auction for US$1.7 million
It was the summer of 1966.
The Beatles were in the middle of a tour that had them play five shows in just three days at Japan’s famed Nippon Budokan arena — but when they weren’t performing, they were holed up in the presidential suite of the Tokyo Hilton creating a work of art that came to be known as "Images of a Woman."
That painting, believed by some experts to be the only artwork jointly made by all four Beatles (or at least signed by all four), was sold at Christie’s auction house in New York on Feb. 1.
"Images of a Woman" was estimated to fetch somewhere in the realm of US$400,000 to US$600,000 and “crystallizes a magic moment in Beatles history,” said Christie's specialist Casey Rogers during a phone interview. Its final sale price was nearly three times the high end of that estimate — US$1,744,000.
“It’s such a rarity to have a work on paper outside of their music catalog that is (a) physical relic, this tangible object with contributions from all four of The Beatles,” Rogers said of the 21.5- by 31-inch painting.
“It’s memorabilia, it’s a work of art, it appeals to probably a much larger cross-section of collectors… It’s a wonderful piece of storytelling.”
Source: Radhika Marya /ctvnews.ca
