Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach
Category: Books,History,Americas
Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach Details
Amazon.com Review An unspoiled coastline bathed in spectacular light--just far enough from Manhattan bustle--made the Hamptons seductive for generations of creative types. Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach is an entertaining survey of the personalities who found a summer or year-round haven on the southeastern end of Long Island. Numerous color photographs--of artworks, personalities, and landscape views--offer inviting glimpses of the shifting tides of culture. The story begins with early 19th-century figures like James Fenimore Cooper, who abandoned a failing whaling business to take up writing novels. Then came the genteel landscape painters with their portable easels and sunshades. By the 1950s (the era of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and many others), bohemia was in full swing. Since then the Hamptons have become a clubby getaway for artists who've already made it, from Kurt Vonnegut to Julian Schnabel. --Cathy Curtis Read more From Publishers Weekly Though the title may provoke a good-natured scoff in people familiar with Long Island's tony, increasingly suburban East End, this lovely coffee-table volume, which charts the area's history of "artistic and literary activity," shows how decades of luminaries found either solitude or community (or both) in this "place that engages one's capacity for wonder." Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, and Denne, a professor at Baruch College, begin with the earliest known inhabitants, the Algonquin Indians, and devote a chapter on the American Barbizon painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but the book's heart lies in its narrative of the writers and artists who descended on the South Fork in more recent years. From the 1940s and '50s Fernand L‚ger, Jackson Pollock, John Steinbeck and Jean Stafford to the 1960s and '70s Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Kurt Vonnegut and E.L. Doctorow the authors recount beach excursions, gallery openings, art happenings and writers vs. artists softball games in breezy prose interspersed with wonderful photographs: Joseph Heller on the beach, Robert Motherwell in his Quonset hut. There's also gossip and hearsay (Willem de Kooning's daily check to see that Pollock, his former rival, was still buried in Green River Cemetery), and poem excerpts (Patsy Southgate, writing an elegy for Frank O'Hara after his death in a beach accident, longs for "those arrogant days/ before your grave"). For anyone who's ever driven east on the Long Island Expressway in summer, or wondered what life was like in "America's premier art mecca," this volume is as simple and pleasurable as a stroll down a Bridgehampton lane.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Read more From Library Journal A complement to this visual tome is the more narrative Hamptons Bohemia, which offers a successful account of the heritage of artistry in the area. Art historian Harrison and Denne (English, Baruch Coll.) offer an easy and enjoyable read, giving a historical slant on the writing, painting, sculpting, and various other creative activities that have emanated from the rotating "colony" of artists on eastern Long Island. The text, which covers two centuries of artists from Native Americans to Julian Schnabel is interspersed with poetry, pictures, and representations of artists' works, creating a catalog that fully documents this unique scene. As artists and residents of the East End, writer Colacello and playwright Edward Albee offer introductions to Studios by the Sea and Hamptons Beach, respectively, showing this rarified world from the inside. Both discuss the inspiration gained from living in a place once pure and rough but inundated over the last 20 years by city dwellers, who have changed not only the relaxed vibes of the country but the physical landscape as well. Both works offer insight into an ever-shifting art scene that somehow manages to retain its original ideals, living in beauty and creating it as well. Essential for strong art collections. Rachel Collins, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Booklist The southeastern end of Long Island is ravishingly beautiful and close enough to New York City to draw on its cultural ferment, and consequently the now fabled Hamptons have long been a destination for artists and writers. The art colony's lively history is neatly summarized in Hamptons Bohemia, a scrapbooklike volume that combines pleasing visuals with concise but informative commentary by art historian Harrison and American literature expert Denne. The illustrations embrace a pleasing mix of photographs of famous folks in bathing suits and a spectrum of artworks that mark the progression from the landscape paintings of Childe Hassam to the abstract expressionistic works of Willem de Kooning. The literary range is just as remarkable, spanning the work of Samson Occom, considered the " 'father' of modern Native American literature," Ring Lardner, and E. L. Doctorow. Harrison and Denne define the Hamptons not as a playground for the rich but as landmarks in the history of American arts and letters. Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Read more Review "The Hamptons." Ugh, that term. There can be few parts of the world more freighted with pejorative associations so contrary to the tru character of the place itself. The term is shorthand for Southampton, Bridgehampton and East Hampton, three towns on Long Island some 150 miles east of Manhattan, but it takes in the entire "South Fork," from Southampton all the way to Montauk on the island's easternmost tip, including villages with names like Sagaponack, Amagansett and the Springs. What you will find there is extraordinary beauty - blissful vistas across rolling fields, acres of ocean under an enormous dome of sky, beaches that meander out of sight in every direction, the rhythmic churn of water, a lustrous, all-pervading light. In the Hamptons, nature is the star attraction, the first reason for the summer's outrush of urbanites to the farther reaches of Long Island. Alas you will also find something else there. "The Hamptons" has long been shorthand for consumption of Napoleonic extravagance, preening celebrity and a genral order of behavior that rises, at best, to narcissistic self-centeredness and bottoms out at brazen depravity. Last summer, the big story was Lizzie Grubman's contretemps outside a trendy bar in Southampton, when she allegedly mowed down several revelers with her SUV in a haughty temper tantrum. Now that another summer is upon us, we can doubtless look forward to more bad behavior. Which is why it's good to have "Hamptons Bohemia," an engaging, and wonderfully illustrated, narrative of "artists and writers on the beach,' as the subtitle has it. Art historian Helen Harrison and English Prof. Constance Ayers Denne reclaim the Hamptons from "The Hamptons" by reminding us that part of the original attraction of this region, as early as the 18th century, was that it offered a place for serious people to escape the city and explore nature or their inner selves, or both, in relative peace. The artist most often associated with the place is Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist painter who moved out to the Hamptons in 1945 and was killed 11 years later when the car he was driving in an alcohol-fueled fury veered off the road and into a tree. In point of fact, the roster of Hamptons artists is long and distinguished. It includes Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Moran and, not least, Childe Hassam, whose famous beachscapes capture the dignified calm of the Hamptons shore early in the 20th century. Willem de Kooning came out soon after Pollock, to be followed by Fairfield Porter, Andy Warhol and the shooting stars of the 1980s art boom, like Julian Schnabel and Ross Bleckner. Among the writers who have been drawn to the place are Melville, Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, Ring Lardner, John Steinbeck and Edward Albee. Up to and during the rise of Sag Harbor as a whaling port in the late 18th century, art in the Hamptons consisted mainly of portraiture. Artists only began to turn their eyes to nature once the whaling industry declined a half-century later and the worthies could no longer afford their services. A half-century after that, in 1891, William Merritt Chase opened the Shinnecock Summer School to teach plein-air painting - that is, painting that starts and finishes outdoors, in a manner of the French Impressionists, rather than being composed in the studio from outdoor sketches. Chase would never have started his school were it not for the advent of the railroad, which pushed along the Hamptons' rise as both a avacation retreat and an artists' colony. The first rail line opened in 1874, running only as far as Bridgehampton. Twenty years later it was exteded all the way to Montauk, thus ending the South Fork's relative isolation. A trip from New York that had once taken four days by coach and horses could not be done in a day. Nature long informed the art that was made there, and not only Childe Hassam's or that of Chase and his school. After moving to the Springs in the early 1960s, de Kooning produced a body of work infused with light and thus noticeably different from what he had done before. Pollock even called one of his abstract paintings "Sounds of the Grass." But soon enough the art world changed, and its new currents swept away such nature-intimacy. With the rise of Pop Art in the 1960s, artists turned their attention away from nature and toward the man-made world, in particular toward the mass-prduced emblems of consumer culutre. For Hamptons artists, dunes and sky were supplanted by Campbell's Soup cans or by everyday objects in mixed-media works. Ms. Harrison and Ms. Denne mark this shift with an unintentionally hilarious anecdote about Pop artist Jim Dine. Asked in 1964 by a Time magazine reporter what he liked about the Hamptons, they write, "Dine did not mention the radiant light or rural tranquility." Rather he "singled out the local hardware stores, stocked with farm tools and fishermen's supplies, as the prime attraction. 'I've bought more than 20 axes to put in my new assemblages,' he reported." Another, equally important turning point came a year later, when the performance artist Allan Kaprow imported his trademark invention, the Happening out to Southampton. Kaprow, they write, "orchestrated a parade of rolling oil drums, giant balloons and hovercraft at the Southampton train station." The Happening climaxed at the East Hampton town dump with more oil drums in a sea of firefighting foam. The landscape was no longer something unique, a subject to be interpreted and mastered, but just another stage on which to act out. Something other than the art was changing around the same time: the social status of the artist himself. Unitl the 1960s, artists worked within view of fashionable society, but they were not part of it. Indeed, they were still "bohemians." Pollock, as famous as he was within his circle, had to finance his jouse with a loan from Peggy Guggenheim, the patron and collector. All this changed with Pop Art, which expanded the audience for contemproary art, made painters and sculptors wealthy - or at least moneyed enough to buy property in the Hamptons - and turned them into celebrities. by the 1970s, they even began to have their own Hamptons-based foundations, dedicated to avant-garde art and supported by the A-list of Wall Street and Park Avenue. Thus the Hamptons and the art world underwent a parallel tranformation - from quiet seriousness to celebrity noise. In 1922, the painter James Britton praised Sag Harbor for the relief it offered from "the strutting exhibitioners" of the New York art world. Although there is still plenty of good, serious work being done away from the limelight, no one could describe the Hamptons that way today. -Wall Street Journal The story of Long Island's glorious and notorious East End - best known as the Hamptons - is far richer than the celebrity-studded magazines and coffee-table books would suggest. What Helen Harrison, art critic, art historian, and director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, and Constance Ayers Denne, professor of English at CUNY's Baruch College in New York, offer instead is a wonderful, low-key, and intelligent portrait of an idyllic place and the creative personalities who keep succumbing to its lure. Ambitious and succinct, this volume offers nothing less than "a survey of artistic and literary activity on the East End from its earliest recorded times to the present," as playwright Edward Albee remarks in his introduction. That extends from the Native Americans, who lived there for 12,000 years before the settlers arrived, to the Europeans, Africans, and Polynesians, among others, who began arriving in the 1600s at the port of Sag Harbor, to late-19th- and early-20th-century American painters such as Thomas Moran, Winslow Homer, and William Merritt Chase, and writers such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, to members of various European avant-garde movements seeking respite from Nazism, and to all the subsequent creative types, socialites, and eccentrics drawn there by beauty, friendship, and accident. Jackson Pollock's own line of descent there began with British printmaker Stanley William Hayter, who, with his wife Helen Phillips, rented a shack and lent it to his assistant Reuben Kadish, who invited Pollock and Lee Krasner to share it. They, in turn, bought their own house. In the 1970s, the art critic Harold Rosenberg lamented that "a law in the development of all art hangouts is that the artists tend to get submerged by the people they attract." A fact of life, perhaps, but the creative life in the Hamptons today - despite the insurgency of the fashionistas and glitterati - remains what the authors call "a work in progress, now in its third century." -ARTnews Read more About the Author Helen A. Harrison is an art historian, art critic for the New York Times, and director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York. A resident of Sag Harbor, New York, she has lectured and published widely on 20th-century AmericConstance Ayers Denne a Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, is a leading authority on the work of James Fenimore Cooper. Her book reviews, lectures, books, articles, and other literary endeavors have earned acclaim in the United States and abroadEdward Albee , the renowned playwright and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, is a longtime resident of Montauk, New York. Read more
Reviews
Love this book that I bought it twice, because the first one was never returned. Great pictures and stories of the 50", 60's 70's art scene in the Hamptons, when the Hampton's were cool and interesting - and not so - Real Housewives of New York.