Paul McCartney Is Selling His Rediscovered Photos of the Beatles’ Rise to Fame
Ahead of the sale, the collection of 36 images—all taken between December 1963 and February 1964—will be exhibited at Gagosian
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/Sonja_headshot.png)
Photos shot by a young Paul McCartney that intimately document the Beatles’ rise to stardom in the ’60s are going on sale. Thirty-six images will soon go on display at the Gagosian gallery’s Beverly Hills location, each sporting a price tag of at least $12,000.
McCartney rediscovered the photos in his personal archives in 2020. All of the shots were taken between December 1963 and February 1964, according to Gagosian. The gallery’s show opens in April and “offers an indelible snapshot of Beatlemania as it was becoming a global phenomenon.”
“Looking at these photos now, decades after they were taken, I find there’s a sort of innocence about them,” McCartney said in a December 2023 statement. “They now bring back so many stories, a flood of special memories, which is one of the many reasons I love them all, and know that they will always fire my imagination.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/c4/5f/c45f7b4b-4dbb-4ae0-a12c-7a94ed40f56c/p1964h_13a_15a3b281d58.jpeg)
The Beatles’ rise to fame in the United Kingdom began in 1963. That March, the rock band from Liverpool released its debut album, Please Please Me, featuring “Love Me Do” and “Twist and Shout.” Their second album, With the Beatles, debuted in November. In February 1964, the Beatles performed live on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” launching Beatlemania in the United States.
This is the period McCarthy captured in his images. “We were moving fast,” he told CBS News’ Anthony Mason in 2023. “So, you just learned to take pictures quickly.”
McCartney’s found photos were first exhibited in 2023, when “Paul McCartney, Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm” opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Since then, the show has traveled to Virginia, New York, Oregon and Japan.
Back when curators were planning the exhibition, McCartney approached Larry Gagosian about later selling the images, as Joshua Chuang, a photography director at Gagosian, tells Bloomberg’s James Tarmy. “He said, ‘I’m putting together this museum show, and I would love to know your ideas about maybe releasing a selection of these,’” Chuang says. “And that’s how it started.”
The upcoming Gagosian show is separate from the museum exhibition, though Chuang tells Bloomberg that “there’s a large degree of overlap.” Prices will range from $12,000 to “the high five figures,” and some portion of the proceeds will go towards wildfire recovery efforts in Los Angeles. According to the gallery, its show will include unseen images not featured in the museum exhibition.
As Erik Neil, a director of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia, said in a statement last year, the images reveal ‘McCartney’s sensitivity to his subjects.” He added, “The empathy that is at the center of his music is equally evident in his photographs.”
The photos were taken over “an intense three-month period of travel” that McCartney was happy to relive, as he said in a June 2023 statement. “Anyone who rediscovers a personal relic or family treasure is instantly flooded with memories and emotions, which then trigger associations buried in the haze of time,” he added. “It was a wonderful sensation to be plunged right back.”
“Paul McCartney” will be on view at Gagosian Beverly Hills from April 25 to June 21.
