The Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation

Bob Dylan once said that Norman Raeben “put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt… didn’t teach you so much how to draw … he looked into you and told you what you were.” From late March to August 1974, Dylan made the daily journey uptown to Raeben’s eleventh-floor studio above Carnegie Hall, developing a visual approach to writing that shaped seminal albums like Blood on the Tracks, Desire, and Street Legal. Reflecting on that creative period in a 1991 interview, Dylan added: “That was my painting period… that’s like taking a brush and painting those songs onto a canvas.”