William Seward Burroughs and Alan Ansen, two elegant gentlemen at entrance to defunct San Remo Café , N.W. corner Bleeker looking north up MacDougal Street, then the heart of Greenwich Village. Before vogue of the Cedar Bar, poets painters Kerouac's "subterraneans" Gregory Corso Carl Solomon myself Frank O'Hara Larry Rivers Maxwell Bodenheim drunk even Dylan Thomas ate drank and talked till 3 AM at this central café - superb inexpensive veal parmigiana and spaghetti a la vongole in rear restaurant, wooden tables - At that season W.S.B.'d published _Junkie_ and we were assembling _Yage Letters_ and _Queer_, Burroughs improvising earliest routines for _Naked Lunch_. Alan Ansen had been Polymath secretary to W.H. Auden a decade before, helping type "_Age of Anxiety_." One mid-afternoon, Fall 1953, fixed with trembling hand.
1953, printed 1993
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
image: 18.73 × 28.42 cm (7 3/8 × 11 3/16 in.) sheet: 27.94 × 35.24 cm (11 × 13 7/8 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of Gary S. Davis
Accession Number
2010.137.20
About the Artist
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), born in Newark, New Jersey, emerged as a multifaceted figure in American culture, best known as a Beat Generation poet but also a prolific visual artist whose photographs, drawings, and prints captured the raw energy of his era. His early life offers little documentation on artistic training, though he attended Columbia University in the 1940s, where he formed connectio...