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.) 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.

The photos in this post are by Teri Pengilley for the Independent

Dorothea Tanning, a member of the original surrealist tribe, long-time wife of Max Ernst, and turning 98 in August, gave an interesting interview to Salon.com in 2002 in which she lamented the art being produced today.

“Most of it comes straight out of dada, 1917,” she said. “I get the impression that the idea is to shock. So many people labouring to outdo Duchamp’s urinal. It isn’t even shocking anymore, just kind of sad.”

Tanning didn’t drop any names, or even nationalities, but I think Britain currently seems to be leading the world in inane, derivative pointlessness. I’ve given up trying to find hope in Damien Hirst, and now this …

Jake and Dinos Chapman — who once infamously added funny faces and clowns heads to Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings — bought a set of watercolours by Adolf Hitler for £115,000, added psychedelic rainbows and big wobbly hearts to 13 of them, and are now offering the batch for £685,000.

The point, you see, is that they’ve taken Hitler’s art away from him.

No, I don’t see it, either. See the rest.

Dali House has new linked acquaintances with a pair of art-minded websites. The proprietors of both recently checked in here for a look around, and their own premises are well worth a visit.

By far the newer of the two is a youthful website called the Pablo Picasso Club. Though it hasn’t been rolling for long, the club is getting up to 200 visitors a day, mostly Americans, and already has a lively interchange of ideas underway.

The forums are a little argumentative for my tastes, but there’s some decent commentary and quite valid questions being asked about the nature of art and what artists go through in the creative process. There are loads of images, not all of Picasso’s works, though also a dearth of titles. Most of the members seem attuned to admiring art, not analysing it.

Good fun for the old bull of the Spanish plains, where it gets very hot. Still, us foreigners can get a chuckle out of these undated newspaper photos. The double image comes from the archives of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group.

Meanwhile there’s a site with dada intentions but wide-ranging interests, Rosenbush Cafe, whose author, Henry Rosenbush of Alabama, bills himself as the Existential Nihilist and “a dadist since 1971″.

The cafe’s own roots run much deeper: Henry’s great-uncle Edwin opened the original Rosenbush Cafe in 1926, where Henry spent “every Sunday in the ’50s”.

He’s now keeping those memories alive and at the same time collecting dada and surreal items, especially movies, doing general video and film reviews and writing a surrealist novel called “The Cool Side of the Pillow”.

“Anti-art,” Henry laments. “How I wish I had lived in that era, but we do what we can in the modern era to keep it alive so it will never die!”

Wangechi Mutu’s “Untitled”, 2003

History’s parade finds its way to cut-up specialist Wangechi Mutu by way of dada, of course, with Hannah Höch pointing out the path ahead and warning that it’s not always downhill. The course is littered with exquisite corpses.

Collage has always struck me as the poor country cousin in the art tribe, still at school and with no hope of ever actually graduating and joining the family business. I think that’s why the dadaists embraced it: It was a geeky, clumsy sort of art, more Anyman artisanship in fact, so it suited their anti-art ambitions. Plus, it involved piecing together bits of newspapers, snapshots and mementoes — putting the mundane on a pedestal — and left room for subconscious selection. And it could be done fast.

Hannah Höch’s “Grotesque”

Everyone keeps scrapbooks at some time or another, and In Europe at the time, collage was something your mother might do with her favourite pictures from the weekend magazine. Like the surrealists’ rounds of exquisite corpse, collage was something to be “played” in the parlour after supper.

But I still love collage, the big lug, and both of these women are very interesting, especially side by side — a German who, like Picasso, borrowed African art’s backwardness to push Western art forward; and an African native who cadges urban Americana to leap oceans and kick down social borders.

Back in Nairobi where Mutu was born, and in the other big African centres, contemporary artists like Bill Bidjocka, Odhiambo Siangla and Lubaina Himid have found a measure of fame, but Westerners keep asking their agents if they can get some tribal antiquities instead. These new fellows, the buyers presume, are just copying Modigliani, aren’t they?

Below, “Complete Prolapsus of the Uterus” from 2004, chiding the typical gender bias of yesteryear’s medical diagrams.

No wonder Mutu shifted to the West ASAP, albeit to study anthropology along with art at Yale. It worked out fine: Now about 36, she’s great at bending minds with her collages of women made from Mylar, flourishes of deco paint and a lot of thoughtfully chosen magazine clippings (National Geographic being an obvious source). From a distance it looks like you’re in for some eye candy, but up close Mutu’s exotic beauties turn out to be gargoyles on a feminist mission, some armoured, some haemorrhaging body parts or dragging around prosthetics.

“Mask”, 2006, archaic sculpture and modern tease.

Goddesses and glamour models there are, but they’ve clearly just been released from hospital following a horrendous accident. Their skin is inhuman and they’re at least partially bionic, not in a good way.

They are very much science fiction, but as we always discover once we get there, the future isn’t clean and stable — it’s a junkyard of the past. Our robots aren’t going to be young, curvy, soft-skinned Japanese handmaidens; they’ll be brides of Frankenstein, with serious issues that, like the glitches in Windows software, refuse to be resolved. See the rest.