The Barefoot Sixties, Enrico's San Francisco
Artist
Frank Ashley
(1920 - 2007)
Date1968
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions49 x 52 in. (124.5 x 132.1 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LineThe Hilbert Collection
Object numberAsh-2
DescriptionFrank Ashley was best known for his paintings chronicling the worlds of jazz music and horse racing. While he lived in New York City and later in San Francisco during the 1950s and '60s, he befriended many of the era's jazz greats, including Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck. His paintings seem to vibrate with innovative colors and visual rhythms, akin to jazz improvisation.In this painting he portrays the eclectic scene during the 1968 "Summer of Love" at Enrico's Sidewalk Cafe, a famed San Francisco haunt of poets, politicians and people-watchers that featured live jazz every night. Enrico's continued for many years as an artsy hipster hangout until it closed in 2006. "Enrico's became one of San Francisco's "in" spots shortly after famed nightclub owner Enrico Banducci opened it in 1958," wrote Peter Fimrite in the San Francisco Chronicle when the hangout closed. "It was a short walk from Banducci's nightclub, the hungry i, where Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mort Sahl and Bill Cosby, among others, got their starts. Enrico's was a place where a reveler could sit back with a cocktail on the outdoor patio, listen to some cool jazz and watch the people walking by. It had a kind of avant-garde sex appeal born out of the Beat generation and fostered by the mod 1960s cocktail crowd."
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