4/3/2023 0 Comments Matchbook cover collectionMona’s 440, San Francisco, the country’s first lesbian bar. Sir Lawrence’s sweet message to all his ‘reefer’ smoking fans. Billy Austin.Ī matchbook personalized by female impersonator and pianist Sir Lawrence Lawson. One more fabulous matchbook cover from the Jewel Box.Ī matchbook from the Wonder Club in New Orleans advertising drag performer Mr. I’m especially fond of the matchbook personalized by drag performer/piano player “extraordinaire” Sir Lawrence Lawson who notes that every time you light your “reefer” with one of his gay matches you’ll read his poetic message reminding you that he’s “thinking of you.” AThe Torch Club, Sacramento, California. Occasionally these kinds of matchbooks do pop up on auction sites such as eBay and depending on their condition can sell for as much as $50. When it comes to the drag club matchbook covers I can’t lie-they are fantastic and as colorful as the female impersonators who graced the stages at venues like the Jewel Box Lounge in Kansas City (one of which is pictured at the top of this post), or the artistic interpretation of the leather boys that hung out at the Ambush in San Francisco back in the day. Like some of you, I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for matchbooks and have a large collection of them myself that I’ve collected over the years from places that no longer exist like the one of the greatest rock clubs in Boston, The Channel and other clubs and bars that closed their doors long ago. The disease forced him to turn from his signature super-realist style to a looser, more gestural technique, as in his Matchbook Covers and his recent landscapes, which verge on total abstraction.Vintage matchbook cover from the Jewel Box Lounge in Kansas City, Missouri.Ī few of my DM colleagues as well as myself have posted about vintage matchbooks previously-think of them as folk art-so I was pretty delighted when I came across a large array of vintage drag and gay club matchbooks-some dating back to the 1950s. In 2018 Baeder was diagnosed, as so many of my artist friends have been over the past two decades, with macular degeneration, an eye condition that continually weakens the vision. We stayed in touch, through the ups and downs of his artistic genre, his change in focus to other realms of popular culture, and his expanded mediums. Then he up and moved lock, stock and luncheonette down to Nashville, TN. We worked together on a dummy for his book that became Gas Food & Lodging(Abbeville) he introduced me to his book agent and friend, who became my book agent and friend we hung out and were excited by many of the same things. I only knew he was from the Midwest because he’d slip into a lilting twang from time to time. He was born in South Bend, IN, but he was such a New Yorker. He had come to New York to be an advertising art director from Atlanta, where he studied at the High Museum. The smell of linseed oil and cola syrup filled the room. On the walls were more diners-paintings and photos or paintings that looked like photos. The rest of the flat was filled with gems of vernacular, the inspiration for many drawings and prints. All that was missing was a soda jerk who looked like Andy Hardy. He had what amounted to a full-scale vintage soda fountain in his living room-chrome cabinetry, swivel seats, the works. This was the era of photorealism, and while I’d been impressed by the skill of many artists, I was in awe of Baeder’s passionate precision. Hanging in OK Harris in SoHo were large photorealistic canvases of the very diners I was dreaming of. Around 40 years ago, I was admiring those quintessential American roadside eateries, thinking what a great book could be made of such uniformly customized ephemeral structures, when I saw paintings that made me drool. Comprising five decades of work from 1972–2018, the show includes some of the most famous diner paintings from the artist’s personal collection, his final series of Matchbook Cover paintings and his luminous still-life photographs.įor me, Baeder was a match made in dinerland. “John Baeder: Looking Back” is the artist’s first exhibition at ACA Galleries in New York, and the first all-encompassing intro- and retrospective in a while.
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