Art's summer place. - Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach; Lee and Elaine - book review

Art in America, July, 2002 by Richard Kalina

Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach, by Helen A. Harrison and Constance Ayers Denne, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2002; 176 pages, $40.

Lee and Elaine, by Ann Rower, London, Serpent's Tail, 2002; 256 pages, $14.

It is comforting, in a way, to read in Helen A. Harrison and Constance Ayers Denne's Hamptons Bohemia that people have been successively lamenting the loss of the authentic Hamptons since the mid-19th century, when the Long Island Railroad came in and ruined everything. As a full-time summer and part-time winter resident of the Springs for 20-odd years, I can see the changes--more big flashy houses plopped down in potato fields, traffic jams in February, boutiques displacing shoe-repair shops. But still, compared to New York, some 100 miles and between two and six hours (depending on traffic) to the west, it is heaven. There's an unbroken line of some of the best ocean beaches on the East Coast on the south side, a complex landscape of bays to the north, woods and farmland in the middle, and, thanks to the surrounding water and the lack of air pollution, a soft, cool light that seems to gently sand away the sharp edges of things.

The area has attracted artists, especially New York-based artists, for well over a century. From Thomas Moran and William Merritt Chase to Eric Fischl and Ross Bleckner, they've come for much the same reasons--to take in the beauty of the place, to get a break from the city, and to congregate, in relatively unpressured surroundings, with their friends. Writers have been well represented, too. Harrison, an art historian and New York Times critic who directs the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, and Dennc, an English professor at Baruch College, CUNY, are nicely informative about the local doings of James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman in the 19th century, and of Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, and the circle of Gerald and Sara Murphy in the 1920s. They fill us in on the postwar years of John Steinbeck, Edward Albee (who provided a foreword for their book), George Plimpton and the Paris Review group, Jean Stafford, A.J. Liebling, Harold Rosenberg and the poet, curator and friend to the artists of the New York School, Frank O'Hara. Harrison and Denne are just as up on the later arrivals, authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, E.L. Doctorow and Truman Capote.

The Wooster Group writer Ann Rower, I assume, must have also spent a good deal of time on the East End. Her new novel, Lee and Elaine, is set, for the most part, in East Hampton. In it, a remarkably self-involved yet unnamed first-person narrator tries to come to terms with a growing awareness of her gay sexuality, the dissolution of a 20-year live-in relationship with a man and, to this reader most wrenching of all, the entirely preventable loss of her $700-a-month, rent-stabilized SoHo loft. The emotional center of this novel is Green River Cemetery in the Springs, just a short stroll from where I am sitting now. The narrator first visits it after reading the obituary of her friend, conceptual sculptor and performance artist Hannah Wilke, in the local newspaper. During her many visits to the cemetery, resting place for a surprising number (given its small size) of art and literary luminaries and semiluminaries, she becomes increasingly fixated on two of its better-known residents, Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning. Krasner and de Kooning, both vibrant women, were all too often eclipsed by their more famous husbands, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The narrator, upset by this, fantasizes freely and engages in some desultory research, with the hope of uniting the two late artists in friendship, solidarity and a nurturing lesbian relationship. While the likelihood of a love affair of that sort is only slightly more plausible than one between Mark Rothko and Dwight Eisenhower, it still gives the book--considering the success of the film Pollock--a certain hook. One reads on in much the same way as one finds oneself emptying a bag of Cheez Doodles--knowing that not only are the contents bad for you but, unlike potato chips, they don't even taste good.

The narrator's continuous dither and self-dramatization are certainly depressing (as is the constant awful weather), but the mix of real, obviously disguised and not-so-obviously disguised names, along with composite (I would suspect) and purely fictional characters, is particularly annoying--as is the looseness with facts, local or otherwise. Clement Greenberg, for example, did not coin the term "Action painting," and if it takes our tale-teller several visits to Green River Cemetery to find Lee Krasner's gravestone, then I wonder how she manages to locate the stove in her apartment.

The Harrison and Denne book is, of course, a much more straightforward affair. With lots of nice pictures and just enough heft, it makes not only a fine summer coffee-table book but one very much worth reading, especially about less-familiar topics. The Hamptons' early bohemian days are of real interest. Moran and his creative group of family and friends livened up East Hampton for years; Chase founded a summer school for art in Southampton that lasted for 12 seasons at the end of the 19th century; and Childe Hassam, one of the finest American Impressionists, spent much of his time in East Hampton.