Lennon lives, if only in black and white, at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in an exhibition of recently discovered photos of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 bed-in protest.
Forty years ago, the pair spent a week of their honeymoon in room 902 of the Amsterdam Hilton in protest against the war in Vietnam and as an avant-garde appeal for world peace.
“When we got married, we knew our honeymoon was going to be public anyway, so we decided to use that to make a statement,” Lennon said, just before his death in 1980. “In effect, we were doing a commercial for peace instead of a commercial for war.”
Lennon and Ono had turned up in a cream-colored Rolls Royce after their wedding in Gibraltar before taking instantly to bed.
The bed-in was not quite nonstop, as the housemaids made them get out when they needed to change the sheets.
The world’s media descended on the hotel, but Nico Koster was the only photographer who was invited personally by Lennon, spending almost the whole week with the couple. His original negatives were later lost, and it was only earlier this year that Koster’s daughter found them in an envelope with her baby pictures.
Koster’s photos show the warmth between the honeymooning couple.
“They breathed together, looked in the same direction. That’s why the pictures are very warm. This is an illustra-tion of their real life,” said Natalia Sergiyevskaya, curator of the exhibition.
Not quite in the spirit of the 1960s, Koster is selling all of the prints on Ebay. He has also put all of the photos up on his web site, Johnlennonhilton.com.
The photographs are symbolic of their times, Sergiyevskaya said. The exhibition provides a historical context with a multimedia installation about the turbulent period, said Sergiyevskaya, adding less academically, “We turned them into icons, varnished them. But the beating of their hearts, their thoughts, their insides are above all that gloss.”
“Nico Koster. 40 Years in Room 902” runs till Nov. 28 at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 25 Ulitsa Petrovka. Metro Chekhovskaya, Pushkinskaya. www.mmoma.ru.