Helen Frankenthaler: It was a jukebox bar on 8th Street, filled with celluloid palm trees and five-and-ten-cent store Hawaiian decor.
John Lennon: It was that lonely, it was fantastic. Acid will box your head open.
Frankenthaler: The unsized area doesn’t have to do the work.
Lennon: Which one? I don’t believe in the dream anymore.
Frankenthaler: By then I had been exposed to enough of it so it hit me and had magic but didn’t puzzle me to the point of stopping my feelings.
•••
Lennon: Because somebody said do some lithographs and I was in a drawing mood and I drew them.
Frankenthaler: Then that got played out. So what?
Lennon: So I came up with two lines, two or three lines which was the masturbation scene.
Frankenthaler: I was too much aware of, let’s say, what read as sex organs arranged in a room.
Lennon: We both had our fingers in each other's pies.
•••
Frankenthaler: Dabs of color had to stand for real things; it was an abstraction of a guitar or of a hillside.
Lennon: I thought that wasn’t a very clever way of getting what they wanted.
Frankenthaler: A few people knew your work.
Lennon: Yeah, sure. Financially, it’s business, or whatever.
Frankenthaler: Outside, there were Art News, Arts Digest, The Times, and the Parsons Gallery, Janis, Kootz, Egan.