Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach by Helen A. Harrison, Constance Ayers Denne

From the Publisher

For more than two centuries, the Hamptons have been home to a vibrant community of artists and writers, lured by the golden dunes, refreshing breezes, radiant landscapes, and frequent visits from the Muse. It was here that Winslow Homer painted bathers and strollers on the ocean beach and Lee Krasner created her Earth Series in a cramped studio shared with her husband, Jackson Pollock. From Herman Melville to F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck to George Plimpton, these are just a few of the gifted figures to draw inspiration from this famous and fashionable retreat. Richly illustrated with archival photos and reproductions of the artists' work, Hamptons Bohemia chronicles the evolution of a community and the colorful characters who have inhabited it.

New Yorker

Before the era of overpopulated time-shares, minivans, and Lizzie Grubman, Long Island's East End was famed as the "premier retreat for America's artistic and literary luminaries." So write Helen A. Harrison and Constance Ayers Denne in Hamptons Bohemia, a colorful ode to the Hamptons' often overlooked cultural legacy. Filled with photos of such residents and weekenders as Jackson Pollock, Kurt Vonnegut, and Truman Capote at work and at play, "Hamptons Bohemia" reveals a South Fork that first became a haven for artists in the nineteenth century, when James Fenimore Cooper and Winslow Homer were drawn to the remote beaches and austere potato fields. By the nineteen-forties, wide-eyed locals could be overheard asking, "Can you tell us where we'll find the Surrealists?"

As one East Ender, Edward Albee, points out, the Hamptons have since become "suburbs of New York City." Yet some evidence of artistic exile remains. In Studios by the Sea, the former Interview editor Bob Colacello and the photographer Jonathan Becker document the current crop of beachside artists, including Julian Schnabel, who has set up shop in an 1882 Stanford White mansion. Architects have also gravitated to the East End. Weekend Utopia, by the lifelong Hamptonian Alastair Gordon, explores the idea that the "beach house was the sonnet form of American architecture." It was in the Hamptons that White, Philip Johnson, and Robert Venturi worked out their ideas, and where now, as Gordon ruefully notes, ersatz manor houses twice the size of the White House gobble up the landscape. As Capote warned back in the seventies, "Some of the potato fields, so beautiful, flat and still, may not be here next year." (Mark Rozzo)

Publishers Weekly

Though the title may provoke a good-natured scoff in people familiar with Long Island's tony, increasingly suburban East End, this lovely coffee-table volume, which charts the area's history of "artistic and literary activity," shows how decades of luminaries found either solitude or community (or both) in this "place that engages one's capacity for wonder." Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, and Denne, a professor at Baruch College, begin with the earliest known inhabitants, the Algonquin Indians, and devote a chapter on the American Barbizon painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but the book's heart lies in its narrative of the writers and artists who descended on the South Fork in more recent years. From the 1940s and '50s Fernand L ger, Jackson Pollock, John Steinbeck and Jean Stafford to the 1960s and '70s Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Kurt Vonnegut and E.L. Doctorow the authors recount beach excursions, gallery openings, art happenings and writers vs. artists softball games in breezy prose interspersed with wonderful photographs: Joseph Heller on the beach, Robert Motherwell in his Quonset hut. There's also gossip and hearsay (Willem de Kooning's daily check to see that Pollock, his former rival, was still buried in Green River Cemetery), and poem excerpts (Patsy Southgate, writing an elegy for Frank O'Hara after his death in a beach accident, longs for "those arrogant days/ before your grave"). For anyone who's ever driven east on the Long Island Expressway in summer, or wondered what life was like in "America's premier art mecca," this volume is as simple and pleasurable as a stroll down a Bridgehampton lane. (June) Forecast: This should have good sales in the New York City area, boosted by a television special to air on ABC in early June. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A complement to this visual tome is the more narrative Hamptons Bohemia, which offers a successful account of the heritage of artistry in the area. Art historian Harrison and Denne (English, Baruch Coll.) offer an easy and enjoyable read, giving a historical slant on the writing, painting, sculpting, and various other creative activities that have emanated from the rotating "colony" of artists on eastern Long Island. The text, which covers two centuries of artists from Native Americans to Julian Schnabel is interspersed with poetry, pictures, and representations of artists' works, creating a catalog that fully documents this unique scene. As artists and residents of the East End, writer Colacello and playwright Edward Albee offer introductions to Studios by the Sea and Hamptons Beach, respectively, showing this rarified world from the inside. Both discuss the inspiration gained from living in a place once pure and rough but inundated over the last 20 years by city dwellers, who have changed not only the relaxed vibes of the country but the physical landscape as well. Both works offer insight into an ever-shifting art scene that somehow manages to retain its original ideals, living in beauty and creating it as well. Essential for strong art collections. Rachel Collins, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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