The paintings had been on the wall of my English professor’s office at Ithaca College for 15 years. That’s why, in 1992, I jumped at the chance to save Adam and Eve. I even voted for Richard Nixon in 1968, and that sealed my fate as a ’60s failure. I wasn’t a Beatlemaniac, I never joined an anti-war protest and I never attended a nude Broadway show. I sort of flunked the 1960s, even though I began them at 15 and ended them at 24. It was the Age of Aquarius and - like Adam and Eve in Semonin’s paintings - everyone “let it all hang out.”Įveryone except me. Remember the 1960s? The Beatles dominated music, draft-age anti-war protestors choked American streets and Broadway shows like Hair and Oh! Calcutta! were performed in the nude. But they would not tolerate them being depicted by celebrities who were leaders in the protests against the Vietnam War.įonda and Lennon lasted all of three days in the Saks window. Sophisticated Saks shoppers would not have been offended by the nudity, or by biblical figures being depicted by celebrities. Adam holds the apple from the tree of knowledge that Eve gave him, dooming humankind to fall from paradise - the Garden of Eden. Eve has hair the color of a tomato, a silver snake crawling around her left leg, and three-dimensional breasts. He painted Eve as Jane Fonda, in her role as Barbarella in the 1968 film of the same name, and Adam as the Beatles’ John Lennon, with shoulder length hair, a beard and actual sunglasses. They are life-sized, full-frontal nude paintings depicting Adam and Eve as hippies by the Manhattan artist Douglas Semonin, who had been commissioned by Saks to create a “Garden of Eden” display window representing the “hip” attitudes of the 1960s. They were thrown out of a Saks Fifth Avenue display window 51 years ago, in 1969, after they caused a scandal on the sidewalks of New York City. I’ve had these two hippies in my home since 1992.
They just go to Vermont and hang out in my guest room, naked.
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