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.

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.

What happens when a painting’s title forgets its place and crawls all over the canvas? Too ambitious to loiter meekly in the little sign card next to the frame, the words decide they’re just as important as the picture, and the next thing you know you have anarchy, graffiti run amok, images and text forming a labour union and subverting the millennia-old conventions governing visual representation.

A detail of Georges Braque’s “Pedestal Table” from 1913.

Pop art made words in paintings commonplace, but its grandfather, cubism, was a sucker for shards of text blowing through the scenery, and its crazy old great-uncle, surrealism, kept scrapbooks of every flitting message scrap, quite sure they would one day all make sense.

Andre Derain’s “Portrait of a Man with a Newspaper” from about 1912.

Pictures and words are natural enough collaborators, of course, both being central to the fine arts, but traditionally they never appeared onstage together. I really don’t want to dig too deeply into this, because there are websites that are quite happy to take you on very long and not particularly interesting strolls along Semiotics Street, returning by way of Semantics Boulevard. In the case of Rene Magritte the University of Washington has an especially heavy-breathing thesis online, but do watch out for words like “intersubstitutability” — you could injure yourself.

Then there’s David Scott’s 2005 essay for Image & Narrative, “the Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative” about the words found in Paul Delvaux’s art, which I found a bit more intesting since Delvaux is a bit more interesting, not least because he was forever painting naked women sleepwalking around train stations. (He also painted a fine “Leda” in 1948, a subject I’ve lately been rattling on about.)

Dali House has also joined the wool-minders pondering the meaning of “Et in Arcadia ego” in Nicolas Poussin’s “The Shepherds of Arcadia”, but that was hardly on the same level as Magritte’s patient experimenting with what exactly it is that words and pictures do, how they do it and how you can pull the rug out from under them.

“This is Not a Pipe”, from 1929, and it’s still not a pipe today. Magritte did a string of variations on this picture over the decades in a bid to expose “the Treachery of Imagery”, ultimately putting the words on a bolted-down plaque so it looked as though the affirmation could never be removed. I think of the image every time I hear David Byrne sing, “This is not my beautiful wife!”

What was Magritte on about? Michel Foucault found a litany of layered possible interpretations in a 1973 book about the pipe picture, one cancelling out another. This picture of a pipe doesn’t make the pipe a pipe, of course, but there’s much more. This painting is not a pipe? Art is not a pipe? If you focus on the words and realise this sentence is not a pipe, suddenly a picture reclaims its dominance over the written word. See the rest.