Dali House

This, with admirers, is Louis Markoya, a member if the Collect Dali Yahoo Group who was Salvador Dali’s protege from 1971 to ‘75 and strives to keep his spirit alive with his expertise and his own art — and with brilliantly surreal moments like this one.

A huge crowd turned out in New York late last month for the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s new show “Dali and Film”, but I’m betting that Louis was the only person who showed up dressed as a Dali painting. He arrived from his home in Connecticut wearing a tuxedo that had leapt from the 1936 painting “The Anthropomorphic Cabinet”.

“A lot of people had no idea what to think,” Louis says of the reaction to his “formal drawerwear”.

“At least five times that night a person would get their nerve up and come to me to say, ‘That’s (fill in the adjective — great, wonderful, fantastic, etc),’ and follow up with, ‘Where did you get it?’ To which I calmly said, ‘I made it’, and the remakable and funny thing was that everyone had the same reaction: ‘YOU DID NOT!’”

The “Dali and Film” exhibition continues until September 15. MoMA has a pretty good overview online.

As if further proof were needed of his commitment to the cause, Louis sent me another photo from another occasion, “a surrealist ball that both HR Giger and Ernst Fuchs were supposed to attend (and did not)”. The exhibition was “Brave Destiny” in Brooklyn, around 2003, for which Louis created a piece called “Dali’s Anus” (a full post is coming up on that one).

“The show was supposed to feature several Dali originals,” Louis wrote at the Collect Dali site, and “was billed as the greatest modern surrealist show ever. Well, there were no Dalis, Giger and Fuchs did not appear, and the show was full of crappy unicorn and fantasy painters. But my costume was magnificent.” He “went over the top”, to use his his own words, and dressed as Dali’s painting “The Ship” from about 1943.

Much more about Louis in a moment but, coincidentally, a pair of the limited-edition bronzes that Dali had made in 1982 from “The Anthropomorphic Cabinet” were auctioned off recently by Sotheby’s. The one sold in Amsterdam brought 10,000 euros (I’m not sure of the price from the Paris sale), while a small bronze of his “Homage to Newton”, pictured further down in this post, drew 6,250 euros. See the rest.

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.

Never one to malinger creatively, Max Ernst built himself this Giant Tortoise while loafing through a few summers in Great River, on Long Island’s south shore. It was the last half of the 1940s.

His chief companion was fellow artist Dorothea Tanning but, then as now, there was a whole crowd of creative types kicking back among the dunes. New York City was just at the end of the island, a short train hop away, life here was cheap, and who doesn’t like being a kid again at the seaside?

Or was it Amagansett where Ernst lived? They’re certainly not the same place, quite a distance apart in fact. Yet among the many online accounts of Long Island’s bustling arts community, when it comes to Max Ernst they hop between little Great River and tiny Amagansett, a village whose name is Montaukett for “place of good water” — not the rivers or the sea but a fresh inland source.

Ernst had spent his first summer in America on Long Island, with the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim who’d bought so many of his paintings and helped him get clear of the Nazis and move to the States.

He married her, but by 1943 that was over, and in ‘46 he would make Tanning his fourth wife in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills. The Ernsts, pictured together here, settled for awhile in Sedona, Arizona, before returning east.

Ernst, who was 52 in 1943, turned the garage of their rented house in Great River or Amagansett into a workshop where he could transform all sorts of bits and pieces into sculptures. Among these were a few born of necessity: He’d sent a postcard to art dealer Julian Levy in New York complaining that he couldn’t find a chess set anywhere on the island.

So Levy came out for the summer and shacked up with him and Tanning. He didn’t bring a chess set, though — they made their own. See the rest.

Jim Stewart’s fermenting things are a source of fascination and amusement at his California-based website Zymoglyphic Museum. Death is given new life, as in the former whatever-it-was reborn as a “Leatherwing”, which Stewart defines as “a night-flying species related to the Zymoglyphic Mermaid and the Jenny Haniver”.

The former is another of his creations, while the latter has been around since the 16th century — a ray carcass pulled from the sea, twisted up and dried for fun and freak-outs. Wikipedia has Jenny here. Dali House pokes bravely at taxidermy here.

This fascinating amalgam entitled “Monument of St Redon” is one of dozens on view at Exhibits From The Imaginary Museum, where the copyright is assigned to Thomas Ligotti, but the creator seems to be also known as Aeron Alfrey. Aeron has a slew of websites, with his infernal creatures at Monster Brains also of special note.