John Dunbar (artist)

John Dunbar self-portrait, 1967

John Dunbar (born in 1943 in Mexico City) is a British artist, collector and former gallerist best known for his connections to the art and music scenes of the 1960s counterculture.

Personal life and career

Dunbar was born in Mexico City in 1943,^[1] the son of the British filmmaker, Robert Dunbar,^[2] He has three sisters, Marina Adams, architect, and twins Margaret Dunbar and Jennifer Dunbar. He spent his first four years in Moscow, where his father was a cultural attache, before the family returned to England. He attended the University of Cambridge, where he met the singer Marianne Faithfull. They were married on 6 May 1965, with Peter Asher as the best man^[3] and spent their honeymoon in Paris with the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.^[4] The couple lived in a flat at 29 Lennox Gardens, in [Kensington]. On 10 November 1965, she gave birth to their son, Nicholas. She then "...left her husband to live with Mick Jagger..." telling the "New Musical Express that "my first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend. I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet."^[3] Dunbar and Faithfull divorced in 1970.

In 1965, Dunbar co-founded the Indica Gallery with Barry Miles. The gallery became known for staging exhibitions by cutting edge artists, including Boyle Family and Yoko Ono from the Fluxus movement. It was at Indica where he introduced Ono to John Lennon. Indica folded in just two years, after which Dunbar became an artist and exhibited work alongside Peter Blake and Colin Self. With Jill Matthews, Dunbar later fathered William Dunbar,^[4] now a journalist based in Tbilisi.

In January 2006, Dunbar participated in the International Symposium on LSD in Basel honouring LSD inventor Albert Hofmann on his 100th birthday. With John Hopkins and Barry Miles, Dunbar gave the seminar "LSD and its visual impact".

References