Artists in the Hamptons by Elizabeth Edwards
Emily Mann’s A Seagull in the Hamptons transports Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, a play about theater artists and writers on a Russian lakeside estate, to the modern American seaside. Mann herself notes the aptness of her selected setting: “I set it in the Hamptons because it’s where theater folk go, where intellectuals go, in our area, anyway. …. The Hamptons is a certain class of New York theater people and New York writers, and people with money and all of that, and I’ve gone there, so I know it.”
Indeed, this haven of beach and farmland has long attracted artists of all varieties, who come seeking a place of retreat from nearby New York City. As early as the nineteenth century, writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman have found inspiration in the picturesque locale, and their depictions of the place in their novels and poems have enticed other artists to the region in turn.
A cyclical pattern has since developed: a handful of artists find some corner of the Hamptons, fall in love with the area, and settle in. They form societies which draw fellow and aspiring artists to the area, who are soon followed by the admiring and the curious. Many who come for a brief visit end up deciding to stay, caught up in the famed Hamptons “landlust.” Then the next generation of artists arrives and are either unable to get along with the previous group of artists for aesthetic reasons, or unable to afford the ever-rising real estate prices. They find a new corner of the Hamptons in which to settle, and the cycle repeats itself once more.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the first major organized group of artists traveled to the Hamptons to explore the southern coast of Long Island. They called themselves the Tile Club (because of their tradition of painting ceramic tiles when they gathered together in one another’s studios), and in 1874 they rode the relatively new Long Island Rail Road from Babylon to Montauk, chronicling their trip in an article in Scribner’s Monthly. Their favorite village was East Hampton, which they identified as a place “marked with the artistic consciousness,” where inhabitants “set out their milk-pans to drain in beautiful compositions” and “are all the time posing for effect.”
This glowing description drew artists in droves, and by 1883 the easels and sunshades that dotted the nearby countryside had earned the village a reputation as “the American Barbizon” (a reference to the French hamlet forty miles southeast of Paris that was itself a well-known artists’ haven). Many of East Hampton’s artistic visitors formed informal societies to learn new techniques and critique one another’s work. Thomas Moran, famed painter known for his panoramas of Yellowstone and friend of several of the “Tilers,” erected his own studio/residence in East Hampton, which became a natural center of artistic gatherings whenever his many creatively talented relatives came to visit. His son and nephews would provide musical entertainment on guitar, mandolin and violin, and family and friends alike would pose in period costumes to present tableaux vivants, or “living pictures.”
Meanwhile, a Tile Club member named William Merritt Chase was establishing the Hamptons’ first formal school of outdoor painting, the Shinnecock Summer School of Art, over in Southampton. Students biked along country roads until they found a subject for painting that appealed to them, then returned to the school’s main building for personal critiques by Chase himself, which were conducted with such dramatic flair that they became a draw for local spectators.
Another wave of artists arrived in the 1920s, when five New York City writers—Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Irwin S. Cobb, Percy Hammond and John Wheeler—moved to East Hampton in search of clean air and a quiet country life. These five were good friends and their presence in the Hamptons brought numerous other New York journalists to the area for weekend visits.
The Great Depression placed a temporary damper on the artistic development of the Hamptons, but World War II had the opposite effect. As upheaval swept across Europe, many artists, writers and intellectuals traveled to America to flee Nazi persecution. These included poet André Breton, printmaker Stanley Williams and painter Max Ernst—members of the newly developing Surrealist movement. New York City, America’s acknowledged cultural capitol, was the most natural destination for these exiles, and the Hamptons provided the perfect retreat for Europeans accustomed to migrating from city to countryside in the summer months.
With more abstract emphases than their artistic predecessors, these experimental artists did not require the coastal scenery and charming villages of the Hamptons’ traditional resort sections (which, in any event, were by now generally prohibitively expensive) to inspire them. Instead, they settled in smaller hamlets further inland—like Springs, where Stanley William Hayter, head of the experimental Parisian printmaking studio Atelier 17, rented a primitive shack. In the summer of 1945, Hayter’s assistant invited his friends Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner to the shack for the month of August, and they, too, fell under the sway of Hamptons landlust. Within months, they had purchased a residence of their own and moved in, becoming the center of a new influx of artists from the school of Abstract Expressionism, including Conrad Marca-Relli, William de Kooning and Alfonso Ossorio.
By this point an infrastructure of galleries, critics and collectors had been solidly established in the Hamptons, making the area a natural destination for members of subsequent visual arts movements—particularly those eager to test the boundaries of artistic experimentation outside the high-pressure scrutiny of the urban art world. These included Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as a number of unclassifiable sculptors, photographers and artisans like William King and Dan Flavin, all of whom found freedom and acceptance as visitors or residents of the Hamptons during the 1960s.
In addition to visual artists of all varieties, a number of influential writers also congregated in the Hamptons in the mid-twentieth century. John Steinbeck rented a house in Sag Harbor in 1953 to work on his novel Sweet Thursday. By 1975, Hamptons residents included such well-known authors as Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Matthiessen, P. G. Wodehouse, Joseph Heller and Truman Capote. The Bridgehampton saloon Bobby Van’s served as a watering hole for these and many other literary giants of the era.
Theater artists, too, have long been drawn to the Hamptons. In 1962, playwright Edward Albee drove to Montauk to visit actress Uta Hagen, and felt compelled to purchase his own parcel of land there. In 1967 he also purchased a former stable in the area, which he turned into a seasonal retreat for artists and writers that is still in operation today. During the late 1960s, actress and Off-Off-Broadway producer Gaby Rodgers staged a series of theatrical events in the backyards of some of her friends in East Hampton. Painters, writers and other artists would be drafted to participate in these free-ranging displays of performance art. In the early 1990s, fabric designer Jack Lenor Larsen built the LongHouse Reserve—landscaped gardens designed to host performances of music, dance and theater. And in the hamlet of Water Mill, avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson has built a laboratory specially designed for experimental theater and design projects.
Expansion and rising prices in the Hamptons have in recent years diminished both the natural views that have long drawn artists to the East End, and the capacity for up-and-coming writers, painters, poets and theater-makers to join the ranks of Hamptons residents. Many former artists’ studios have been destroyed or converted to private homes. A select few, however, such as the former home of Jackson Pollock and the Moran studio, still remain as memorials, and many artists who currently own homes of historic interest in the area are making arrangements to preserve their property for posterity. A final testament to the artistic history of the Hamptons is Green River Cemetery, the resting place of choice for East End artists including Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Jimmy Ernst, A. J. Liebling and Frank O’Hara. The cemetery has become so popular that the management has had to purchase additional land, and many visitors make their way to the cemetery each year to pay their respects to some of the trailblazers who have kept the artistic spirit of the Hamptons alive over the past hundred years.