John Eastman ’64, an entertainment lawyer who represented Paul McCartney, the family of Willem de Kooning, and the estate of Francis Bacon, among other clients, passed away on August 10 at the age of 83. “John was a great man,” McCartney wrote in an Instagram post announcing Eastman’s death. “One of the nicest and smartest people I have had the good luck to have known in my life.”
“John was a brilliant and trusted counselor to his clients and a treasured member of the NYU Law community,” Dean Troy McKenzie says. “His vision and his kindness will be greatly missed.”
Throughout his long career, Eastman remained actively involved with the Law School, serving on his class’s Reunion Committee in 1999 and 2009 and participating in several Dean’s Roundtables. A Weinfeld Benefactor, he helped support NYU Law’s reading group program, which allows 1L students to connect with faculty members and other students on a topic of shared interest.
As co-president of the Willem de Kooning Foundation’s board of directors, Eastman helped arrange the loan of de Kooning’s painting The Key and The Parade from the foundation to the Law School. The work, a bold composition of sweeping orange and blue lines, has been on display in the NYU Law Library since 2019. At a reception to celebrate the painting’s arrival at the library, Eastman discussed the connections between law and art. “I’ve long held the belief—nurtured actually in this room by my mentor at the Law School, Norman Dorsen—that the law at its best really has an elegance intellectually,” he said.
Eastman formed the law firm Eastman & Eastman with his father as a recent graduate of NYU Law, entering the field of entertainment law in order to “do something different,” as he told a Law School audience in 2004. One of his earliest clients was McCartney, who had married Eastman’s sister Linda; Eastman advised the musician in the legal disputes that arose from the breakup of the Beatles and afterward during McCartney’s solo career. Eastman took pride in representing the interests of artists, he said in his 2004 talk. “As a lawyer,” he said, “you have the power to affect those things that are important to you.”
Posted August 12, 2022.
Art credit: Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), The Key and the Parade, 1985
oil on canvas
On loan from The Willem de Kooning Foundation