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.

Dalí’s collaborator Philippe Halsman took a series of photos of Sal’s divine whiskers for the 1954 book “Dalí Moustache”, including the Mona Lisa embellishment above (a real moustache, apparently), which I’ve lined up against Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated “LHOOQ” from 1919.

At least one commentator has chastised Dalí for being far too late with this gag, regardless of whether this was intended as a mere pun or as a renewed declaration of war on old-school painting. But maybe Dalí knew something about Duchamp that still isn’t widely known.

“Parody” is the word most often used in describing “LHOOQ”. Others are hot bum, hot ass, hot arse and hot pants. Commentators do the jitterbug when they “translate” the title. Pronounce the letters aloud in French slowly, quickly, in a slurred fashion, with gusto, and you ought to hear Elle a chaud au cul, common street lingo for “She has a hot arse” or “She is hot in the bum / ass” or “She’s got hot pants” or, Duchamp once dubiously offered, “There is fire down below”, by which someone else presumed “She’s horny”.

Maybe “LHOOQ” is supposed to be read in English as “look”, said another, which is a good title for an artwork, after all. I suggest that, read in English when very, very drunk, the letters suggest, “Shhhe’s sooooo cute.” Any takers?

The most interesting thing about the postcard view of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa that Duchamp randomly defiled in 1919 is that it’s apparently not a randomly defiled postcard of the Mona Lisa. See the rest.

“A Reunion of Friends” by Max Ernst.

I have no idea why it’s called a “reunion”. Tristan Tzara, Yves Tanguy and Man Ray are nowhere in sight (not to forget André Masson, Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud), Ernst (pictured here) had just arrived on the scene in Paris, and Dalí, to name another prominent member, wouldn’t be joining for another six years. But I’ve also seen the painting referred to as “At the Rendezvous of Friends”, which is a somewhat more meaningful place to drop anchor in surrealism’s tossing shoals.

“At that time we used to meet in the evenings like hunters, comparing what we’d bagged that day, the tally of beasts we’d invented, the fantastic plants, the images we’d shot down,” Louis Aragon wrote in his 1924 essay “A Wave of Dreams”, as translated by Susan de Muth.

“In the grip of a tremendous momentum, we spent more and more time on the practices which led us into our strange inner lands. We delighted in observing the curve of our own exhaustion, and the derangement which followed. For then the marvellous would appear. At first each one of us thought himself subject to some peculiar mental disorder and struggled against it. Then it revealed its true nature. It was as if the mind, having reached a turning point in the subconscious, lost all control over where it was drifting. Images which existed in the mind took physical forms, became tangible reality.

“Once we were in touch with them they expressed themselves in a perceptible form, taking on the characteristics of visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations. We experienced the full force of these images. We could no longer control them. We had become their domain, a setting for them. In bed, at the moment of falling asleep, in the street with eyes wide open, with the full apparatus of dread, we held out our hands to phantoms.

“Rest, abstention from surrealism made these phenomena disappear, gave us space to comprehend how close they were to the phenomena induced by chemical preparations, and at first we suspended our experiments through fear, but they gradually reclaimed their rights over our curiosity.”

The scene of hunters tallying their day’s kill is a curious assemblage even for surrealists, pictorially a counterpoint to Max Ernst’s glue-free collages that hung in Dali House the other day. He must have been anal-retentive because he was always amassing bits and bolts and marshalling them into assigned spaces.

So, who is reuniting/rendezvousing? According to the always informative Olga’s Gallery, Ernst is in the front row on the left, sitting on Dostoyevsky’s knee for purely aesthetic reasons. Then down the row to the right, making Masonic-Star Trek hand signals, are Theodor Fraenkel, Jean Paulhan and Benjamin Péret, followed by Johannes Th Baargeld and Robert Desnos.

In the back row, standing, you can see Philippe Soupault, Hans Arp, Max Morise, a shady character in the background who cannot be identified because he works for the CIA, and, looking a lot like Columbus, Raffaele Sanzio, known to posterity as Raphael, against whose prying eyes Morise is trying to hide his heart.

Raphael would have been the evening’s guest of honour because by then he’d been dead 400 years. Clearly there was some warmth in the surrealists’ hearts for the old boy. Certainly Dalí would much later find his way to God with Raffa’s help, leaning heavily on “The Transfiguration” and “La Fornarina”.

Next come Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, André Breton, the statuesque Giorgio de Chirico and finally Mrs Paul Éluard, Gala, who still hasn’t met and run off with Dalí. (The gossip on that is here.)

The surrealists seem to be holding their annual convention at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, if not on the moon. Refreshments are meagre: That looks like a cubist snack tray that Ernst is keeping Doestoyevsky away from. Bit of cheese and an apple. The knife could be trouble in this mob, though.

And what about the mystery figure on the left with his back turned, playing with a doll house? Arp is trying to get him to pay attention. Hmm — doll house … Dali House … it’s not …? No, it couldn’t be. And it’s not, it’s supposedly René Crevel. We’ll meet all these folks personally in a moment.

Soon after painting this police line-up Ernst got busy turning his twee collages into large-scale paintings like “The Teetering Woman”, aka “The Equivocal Woman”, seen here, dreamed up frottage and grattage and, in 1924, enjoyed a trip to the French colonies in Southeast Asia with the Éluards. It was a pleasant decade all round, but things do have a way of changing.

The surrealists all turned out to be communists, for starters, so in 1938 Ernst withdrew stealthily to the balmy south of France, where first the French authorities arrested him as a “hostile alien” and then the Gestapo came to see him and compare notes on communism.

Despite sharing a loathing for it, the Nazis threw him in prison, but he managed to escape with the help of Loplop (pictured) and good old Peggy Guggenheim got him on a boat to New York. The rest is modern American art history.

Louis Aragon’s take on Ernst in his essay “A Wave of Dreams”: “Earthquakes are where Max Ernst, painter of cataclysms as others of battles, feels most at ease and contented. He finds it strange that the earth isn’t constantly quaking. René Crevel has never noticed that this planet is solidly fixed with help from meridians and latitudes: he is more of a sleepwalker than anyone.”

Meanwhile, back at the reunion, dada was being called awful names and much fresh manifesto’ing was about to commence. Surrealism was a newborn babe, a snobs’ club of rebellious dandies seducing one another with every meaning-laden tick of the clock and every coincidental bark of an Andalusian dog, and then turning to the next person, launching intrigues against glimpsed realities.

Here are Max’s models … See the rest.

A photo of the Cafe Meliton on Cadaques’ El Passeig by Hamburg artist Art Collart from his website. Guests of the the cafe sit among mementoes of Marcel Duchamp, who took refuge in the scenic seaside town and sometimes dined there with Dali in the early days.

It was the bar’s owner, Meliton Casals, who took snapshots at Dali and Gala’s 1958 wedding. Duchamp is remembered playing chess almost every day there with the local fishermen and occasional special guests, among them John Cage.

“When Duchamp realised that he had scattered the ideas of his youth to the winds, until he himself was left with none,” Dali observed, “he most aristocratically declined to play the game, and prophetically announced that other young men were specialising in the chess match of contemporary art; and then he began to play chess.”