Dali House

Well north of Charleston, Gerald and Sara Murphy try a different dance on a Long Island beach, about 1915.

Though everything’s expensive in the Hamptons these days, it was (mostly) sand-cheap back when Max Ernst was banging together his iron turtle. Still, there seemed to be a high price to pay for living swell. The artists of the 1940s got away with enjoying some advance Heaven time at the leisurely seaside — they were all refugees of one sort or another, after all.

Not so Jackson Pollock, who we’ll be meeting in a bar in a Part 4. He went crazy on the beach. Gerald and Sara Murphy had craziness thrust upon them. But they only winced when they had to.

Sara fell the furthest and never complained.

The Beach Boys series: Part 1 with Max Ernst and the gang, Part 2 with other Long Island artists both older and younger.

Download my Murphys-Jackson Pollock Google Earth post.

In October 1975 about 50 people were at St Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton to say some prayers for a little old lady who’d lived in a modest house at 1113 Basil Road in McLean, Virginia, but grew up in the fanciest mansion on Long Island.

Sara Murphy had died from pneumonia the week before at the age of 91. The service at St Luke’s took place 11 years to the day of her husband Gerard’s send-off in the same church, and when it was over, Sara’s casket was interred next to his on her family’s estate, once glory-bedecked as The Dunes.

But for the boxes of keepsakes and jottings that the couple’s surviving child would have to sift through, astonishing memories were buried with them, of Hemingway and Cole Porter, Jean Cocteau, Picasso and Léger and John Dos Passos, and of course the bittersweet tang of F Scott Fitzgerald, their very good friend once, who had dedicated to them the novel that he considered his best.

“Tender Is the Night” was inspired by the Murphys, Fitzgerald said, though the caricatures he drew of them, as Dick and Nicole Diver, evolved in the course of the book into a tragically unmistakeable portrait of Scott and Zelda. Sara and Gerald didn’t grasp the psychological transference, though, and were put off. Hemingway missed it too, and bawled Scott out for screwing around with the truth. See the rest.

Another piece from the Sotheby’s auctions of Russian art on June 10 and 12: Alexander Evgenievich Yakovlev’s “In the Cafe de la Rotonde”, which was expected to bring between £40,000 and £60,000.

I think it’s a lovely, pensive painting by Yakovlev (also referred to as Iacovleff, 1887-1938), born and trained in St Petersburg, widely travelled, including to Mongolia, Japan and China. He taught architecture in his hometown, by then renamed Petrograd, and in Boston too, finally settling in Paris in 1920. See the rest.

Everyone enjoys a good punch-up now and again, as long as it’s somebody else who’s getting punched, and so it was in early-17th-century Belgium when Pieter Brueghel the Younger evidently sought to keep a family tradition alive by painting “The Peasants’ Brawl”. It was Pieter’s birthday on May 22 and we took him to the village fete for some fun.

Anthonis van Dyck’s portrait of the Younger Pieter

It’s believed the villagers got into a rumble over a card game during the local knees-up, perhaps a celebration of the kermesse of St George. The what? Not being a follower of the Brueghels, nor a European, nor a Christian liturgist, I had to look it up. Wikipedia asked whether I meant the bicycle race, the Canadian rock band, a cubist painting by Wyndham Lewis or the festival.

See the rest.

Dali House hasn’t had anyone running frantically around since Nicolas Poussin showed up toting “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake”. Now here’s another Frenchman, Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy (1757-1841), with another mysterious flight through the woods.

“A Neo-classical Landscape with a Young Woman Running on a Path” is the title that Sotheby’s Paris credits to this curious relic, which it’s trying to sell for, hmmm, who’ll bid 15,000 euros? It’s in the “Old Master Paintings and Drawings” auction on June 25.

A Paris Salon regular, Dunouy specialised in landscapes, often with historic or palatial buildings and once, memorably, with Vesuvius erupting, a commission from Louis XIII. He was “associated with the artists known as little masters”, as one online source puts it, meaning fans of classical, highly detailed scenes.

But I’ve found no explanation as to why the young woman in this piece is on the lam. And on closer examination, she appears to be a nun!

Maybe we should have a caption contest.

America’s first deservedly celebrated genre painter, Long Island native William Sidney Mount (1807-68), portrayed the good folks of Setauket, as seen here, and Stony Brook, and in the 1860s Fanny Palmer came out from Brooklyn to harvest vistas for Currier & Ives engravings, and Alonzo Chappel, who lived in Middle Island, depicted the Battle of Long Island, shown below.

In the following decade John Frederick Kensett and Frederick Church helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art so there would be proper place to view the scenes they captured on what Walt Whitman called “the Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine”.

Part 1 of the “Beach Boys” series is here.

Even Winslow Homer of Maine came up with “East Hampton Beach, Long Island”, seen here, and in 1877 he and J Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, William Merritt Chase and Thomas Moran formed the Tile Club to paint decorative tiles — they spent so much time chugging up and down the island on the new railroad and writing about it that a tourism boom was fomented.

Moran decided to move here, as did Chase, who in 1891 established the country’s first outdoor art school in Southampton’s Shinnecock Hills. George Bellows migrated out, then Frederick Childe Hassam, and then, soon after the 1913 New York Armory Show, modern art moved in, beginning with abstract painter Arthur Dove (seen here is his “Sun” from 1943) and his artist wife Helen Torr and, fleeing the rising Nazis, George Grosz, who lived in Huntington.

Fernand Léger stayed with his companion Lucia Christofanetti in a guest cottage on Frank Wiborg’s grand estate in East Hampton, The Dunes, where Sara and Gerald Murphy lived. Léger left, but Lucia stayed, and she coaxed Breton and Duchamp into sampling the island. (The Murphys, too, were magnets for Europe’s artistic elite, but we’ll visit with them in another post.)

“In the dark years of World War II,” Ariella Budick wrote in Newsday a few years back, “a group of surrealists found refuge on the east end of Long Island. Forced into immobility by blackouts and gas rationing, they played chess, bicycled the byways, shocked the locals with their bare feet and, stirred by their serene surroundings, created art.”

She cites Charles Riley, the co-curator of a late-’90s island retrospective called “Dreams on Canvas: Surrealism in Europe and America”: “The first bikini ever worn on Long Island was a surrealist prank executed by a very brave young woman named Catherine Yarrow … She hand-knit an extremely revealing bathing suit. It was part of a surrealist house party.” (Apologies to Paul Delvaux — that’s not really Catherine Yarrow in the picture.) See the rest.