Anthony Haden-Guest on Billy Apple

Billy Apple, Self Portrait (Apple Sees Red on Green), 1962–63, offset lithograph on canvas, one of twelve, 1020 × 770 mm, courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive

 

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST August 2, 2025

   So Apple once again is in the public eye, with the tech colossus having been told by President Trump to make their iPhones in the US or be slammed with a 50 percent tariff. Making this, I feel, a good moment to focus on the interesting stories of the Apple brands. The first was probably the Apple Bank, a venerable Harlem bank, which took its name from New York’s  moniker, the Big Apple, but the one I will kick off with here was created by an artist, Billy Bates, a New Zealander who moved to London in 1959 and went to the Royal College of Art. There he cast an apple in bronze at the foundry where Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth made their sculptures, bit out a chunk and cast it again, then ate it down towards the core and cast that also. He painted the skins glimmery red and titled the piece for how long it had taken him to nosh the fruit: 2 Minutes, 33 Seconds.

Billy Apple, 2 Minutes 33 Seconds (Red), 1962/2010, painted cast bronze, edition of three, 132 × 356 × 152 mm, courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive
 

   David Hockney was a friend of Bates at the Royal College and in 1961 both won cash prizes there. This funded two months in New York, where they watched a TV commercial for Lady Clairol hair lightener with the pert slogan Is it true blondes have more fun? Both bleached their hair right away and Bates, who had been devoting thought to how branding can work with an art career, took a photograph on Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 1962, to document this. That same day he changed his name to Billy Apple, a name choice which both referenced the Bible and seemed bang on for a product launch. Back in London in April 1963 his apple sculpture and twelve of his blond portraits were shown in London at Victor Musgrave’s Gallery One, an event photographed by Robert Freeman, who went on to shoot several record covers for the Beatles.

   Which takes us straight to, yes, the Beatles, who set up Apple Corps to handle a bunch of their enterprises in 1967. Paul McCartney, the group’s art eye, said he had got the idea for the name from a Rene Magritte painting and their enterprises included the Apple Boutique on Baker Street, London. The Beatles launched Apple Records the following year and their first releases were four singles, the two by the Beatles being "Hey Jude" and "Revolution".

Life magazine, 20 November 1964, double-page spread showing Calvin Tomkins, ‘Art or Not, It’s Food for Thought’, with photographs by Henri Dauman, courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive

  On to the Apple Computer Company, which was birthed by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976 and morphed into Apple Inc. in 2007 when activities had broadened. Why that name? Wozniak told of driving Jobs from the airport upon his return from a place in Oregon which he had told him was a kind of a commune and called an “apple orchard”. Apple bobbed up as a good name for their project. Why the bite in the apple? Some said this was a tribute to Alan Turing, the revered father of computer science who died from biting a cyanide-laced apple. Apple denied this but Steve Jobs said he wished it had been true.

   Back to Billy Apple who returned to Manhattan in the later 60s. He had a studio near my room in the Chelsea Hotel on West 23^rd Street so we met. In 1969 he opened the Apple Gallery up the road from the hotel at 161 West 23^rd Street to show artists whose work was idea-based and ephemeral, a practice he had himself initiated in 1960 by recording his shaving and lathering. The works he showed at the gallery, which he called Activities, included  “all sorts of things like that,” he said. “Sweeping the floor … wiping dirty spots off the wall.” His artists included Bob Watts, the Fluxus artist, who had tried to copyright the term Pop Art. Yoko Ono, who was then partnered with John Lennon, was Fluxus-associated so there was speculation that it was this rather than McCartney’s attention to a Magritte that had sparked the Beatles’ choice of a name.

 Billy Apple, Hathaway Shirt Man 1–4, 1964, four parts, xerography on stretched shirt fabric, 203 × 203 mm each, private collection, courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive
 

 Billy Apple, Neon Signature, 1967, neon gas, 7 mm glass tubing, 155 x 375 x 95 mm, courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive

Billy Apple, Neon Floor 3, 1969, argon, neon, mercury gases, glass tubing, electrical wiring, dimensions variable, APPLE Gallery, 161 West 23rd Street, 35 mm slide, courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive

 

Billy Apple, Floor painting, 1971, APPLE Gallery, 161 West 23rd Street, 35 mm colour slide, (photo: Jacki Apple), courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive

Billy Apple, Cleaning: Windowpane, Negative Condition Situation, 1973, APPLE Gallery, 161 West 23rd Street, 35 mm slide, (photo: David Troy), courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive

Billy Apple, Four works from the series Paid: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else, 1987–ongoing, printed invoices mounted on A3 paper with lithographed text, 565 × 420 mm framed (each), (Auckland City Council Rates, 2002; Auckland Art Gallery Conservation Services, 2000; Crockers Property, 1999; Herbert Fabrication and Engineering, 2003), various private collections, courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive
 

   I telephoned Billy Apple after his return to New Zealand with some questions. That about Yoko Ono was one of them. He smooshed the connection. “I never knew her,” he said. “She was really part of the Fluxus moment. Which was something I kept quite at arm’s length. Sort of silly art I always thought it was. Some of the people were exceptional. Like Bob Watts.”

   I asked about the making of his apple sculpture. An energizing question this, especially with regard to the bitten fruit. “I tried  to put the bite back in it. I tried to take the bite and make it the leaf,” Apple said. “But no matter which way I turned it upside down, back to front, I couldn’t get the bloody thing to fit. So it wasn’t the leaf. So I put the bite back in and it looked terrible with that funny leaf. So I took it away and I went to my bank, Apple Bank, which had a symbol which looked like a tomato really, with rather a nice leaf, so I grafted it on.”

 Billy Apple® The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else, 2015, exhibition signage, forecourt, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (photo: Jennifer French), courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive

   I remarked upon the resemblance between the bitten apple in his sculpture and the Microsoft logo. Billy Apple again smooshed away any notion that there was a connection. Indeed Edwina Sandys, the Manhattan-based British artist, who was utterly unaware of Billy Apple, made two witty sculptures in the 70s called Eve’s Apple in the which the green fruits have similar bites.

  Billy Apple returned to New Zealand, in 1990 and died there at 85 on September 6, 2021. Christina Barton, the Auckland-based author of a book on his life and work, told me that his interest in branding didn’t wane and he made the moves to be registered as a trademark. “So now we tend to  write his name as Billy Apple®,” she wrote me. “He went a long way through a process to get a new apple onto the market called a ‘Billy Apple’, when this didn’t succeed he worked with some cider makers to put a Billy Apple Cider on the market, so you can see that his ideas around branding continued right through.”

I sense wanna-be Apples are budding all over. WM