Dali House

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.)

Also lured by Christofanetti was our Salvador, who joined the parties at celebrity photographer Horst P Horst’s place in Oyster Bay with Noël Coward, Greta Garbo and Coco Chanel. Dalí evidently advised Horst on what to plant in the garden of his home, which occupied a portion of the former Tiffany estate, and at other times he picked the brains of James Watson and his fellow scientists from the nearby Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, who were researching genetics, possibly giving Dalí ideas for painting the DNA helix.

Was it the seaside life that had Dalí and Horst up to their knees in seafood? When Dalí was putting together his “Dream of Venus” pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens (as seen in Dali Planet), Horst obliged with pictures of models who were nude apart from being encrusted with crustaceans — or a surrealist swimsuit painted on by Sal.

The list of artists who made Long Island their address, particularly since the 1940s, is startling: Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol, Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, Roberto Matta, Pavel Tchelitchew, Enrico Donati, Helen Phillips, Joseph Cornell, Jacques Lipchitz, Larry Rivers, Ibram Lassaw, James Brooks, John Ferren, Jane Freilicher, Robert Dash, continuing on to the younger crowd today.

This is not to mention the writers, from James Fennimore Cooper to Anaïs Nin, Truman Capote, Edward Albee, Wolfe, Plimpton, Doctorow and, briefly, Jack Kerouac in North Haven. John Steinbeck wrote “Travels with Charlie” in Sag Harbor. Yes, and Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller spent a summer on the island in the late 1950s. These days it sounds like you can’t walk down the street without bumping into the likes of Renée Zellweger, Jerry Seinfeld or Sir Paul McCartney.

Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, bought the 60-year-old fisherman’s homestead shown above in the Springs area of East Hampton in 1945 or ‘46. An old shed famously became the studio where he flung paint around, Krasner wisely staying in the house doing her own abstract studies. The place is now preserved for public perusal, and we’ll be spending some time there in Part 4 of the “Beach Boys” series.

Ernst was still around when de Kooning arrived in East Hampton in 1948 and carried on with his “Woman” series, his great departure from abstraction (here, “Woman”, 1944), before moving into “the Red House” in Bridgehampton in 1954 with his wife Elaine and Franz Kline. In the early ’60s he designed his own studio in Springs, where he died in 1997.

Also showing up in 1948 was the Sardinian sculptor Costantino Nivola. His place in Amagansett became a popular gathering point, Ernst mingling with Pollock, de Kooning and, possibly, Le Corbusier, who did a massive mural in the house and helped Nivola work out a technique for sand casting that made him wealthy.

Robert Motherwell came out to play chess with Ernst and returned after the war to build a house and studio in Amagansett.

And then there was Jimmy Ernst, Max’s son by art historian and journalist Louise Straus-Ernst. Although Jimmy was the first to escape Europe, migrating to the US in 1938, his father had already been to the island and moved on by the time Jimmy found it. Despite their lengthy estrangement, Max couldn’t help but loom large in his life, as told forthrightly in Jimmy’s 1984 memoir “A Not-So-Still Life”. He died that same year, and he’s buried at Green River Cemetery in Springs, as are Pollock and Krasner and Mrs de Kooning.

Having just viewed Picasso’s “Guernica” at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, Jimmy was anguished to see the Nazis mount an exhibition of “decadent” art that included his father’s work. He got to New York and saw Max’s paintings in the Museum of Modern Art.

When his father was granted asylum in the States in 1941, he was kept on Ellis Island for three days before being released into Jimmy’s custody. Jimmy became Peggy Guggenheim’s personal assistant and travelled with her and Max to California. Meanwhile his mother was taken to Auschwitz, never to leave.

It was Jimmy who added soufflage to the surrealist arsenal of techniques, a list that includes his father’s inventions, frottage and grattage. In soufflage the paint is blown aside to create or reveal an image. Whether Jimmy’s children, both carrying on the family tradition — Amy Ernst, born in 1953, and Eric, born in 1956 — come up with another methodology remains to be seen.

How about joining Duchamp for a game of chess? That’s one of the sets that Ernst built, after all, and this is a warrior’s pastime, so we can talk about the war years, when Europe came to New York, just as the Americans had flocked to Europe a lost generation earlier.

In the New York Times in 2005 Robert Hughes recalled “The Imagery of Chess”, an exhibition that Julien Levy hosted at his gallery at the end of 1944. He must have still been shaking sand out of his shoes as the art buyers gathered round to watch a game that Duchamp organised in which chess master George Koltanowski, playing blindfolded, took on six of the artists at the same time, as well as Museum of Modern Art founding director Alfred Barr Jr. (The wizard beat six of them and drew the seventh.)

Max Ernst’s “Roi, Reine et Fou”

With Ernst’s enormous anti-war frottage “Europe After the Rain” (detail above) watching from a wall, the artists showed off the chess sets they’d designed or paintings inspired by the game, the set-up being that there was a war going on, so they’d toss around strategies about the game of war. Gorky and Motherwell and John and Xenia Cage were there, and Isamu Noguchi displayed works he’d done after he got out of a wartime internment camp in Arizona.

André Breton and Nicolas Calas put together a set of glasses filled with red or white wine, to be emptied in turn upon capture. Yves Tanguy, another escapee from occupied France, had a pair of chess pieces made from sawn-off bits of a broom handle. Alexander Calder’s chess set didn’t appeal, according to Hughes, but he insisted “the most brilliant set was indubitably Max Ernst’s.

“The knight conceived as a curving scimitar-like form (no head, or all head, whichever you prefer). It looked predatory, as warriors should.”

Have you met Sara and Gerald Murphy? They’re waiting in Part 3.