Long Island, especially the East End, has been home to many artists and artist couples who were both stimulated and soothed by proximity to the water, clear views of the sky, and, most of all, by the light that permeates the verdant, flat landscape. Though now a bustling upscale haven, in the 1940s and 1950s it served also as a refuge for artists who wanted to be close enough to New York City to be able to sell and show their work there, but who needed cheaper studio and living space closer to nature, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner among them. Others followed in their wake, and a vibrant artistic community developed.
Five very different homes and gardens, all open to the public, offer an intimate look into the inspirations behind these storied talents.
Dove/Torr Cottage, Centerport
After a decade living on their yawl in Huntington Harbor and a stint upstate after his mother died, artists Arthur Dove and Helen Torr were able to purchase an old post-office building perched alongside Titus Mill Pond in 1938. The pair remained there, devoted to their coastal surroundings, to their art, and to each other, until his death in 1946 and hers in 1967.
The water was both their inspiration and their salvation. Dove, who had already established a career with his lush oil paintings, there found a new, more abstract way of working on paper when he became an invalid. These smaller works were still anchored by the innovative forms that had made his reputation, while dreamy seascapes and shorescapes featured abstracted boats, birds, and skies in haunting watercolors.
Reds—Torr’s nickname—largely gave up her own work to assist and care for Dove. She even asked her sister, Mary, to destroy it all after her death. Fortunately, her sister did not. Unsurprisingly, however, her oeuvre was neglected until an exhibition at the Heckscher Museum—the steward of the Dove/Torr Cottage and archive—opened in 1972.
The tiny, ramshackle 19th-century clapboard house is light-years away from the nearby Vanderbilt Mansion, also open to the public. Its water-facing windows offer a glimpse of the rocks, trees, and pond that often found their way into its owners’ work.
Currently undergoing a long-term restoration, the house is open today, July 27, for one day only. However, a grounds sound walk narrated from the surroundings and the artists’ letters in part by local schoolchildren on the Bloomberg Connects app is available year-round, while Torr’s diary—faithfully kept—is available online at the Archives of American Art and gives added depth to the lives of this modernist couple.
Longhouse Reserve, East Hampton
LongHouse Reserve was created by the passions of Jack Lenor Larsen, a textile impresario, curator, and collector. Their more permanent form exists in 16 acres of footpaths and cultivated and wild gardens, more than 60 sculptures by artists such as Isamu Noguchi, Dale Chihuly, and Buckminster Fuller, and an eccentric modernist house with roots in a Japanese Shinto shrine. The Reserve is also home to a series of community programs on Long Island Modernism.
A native of Seattle, Larsen originally drew from the Indigenous and Nordic influences that surrounded him. Though he attended architecture school, he was unusually drawn to the warp and weft of the loom. A stay in Los Angeles, where he worked as a movie extra in Westerns, cemented a love for textiles that he grew into an eponymous multi-national firm in 1952, known also for collaborations with notable artists and architects.
He was never too sated to travel far afield to learn one more dyeing or printing technique. Larsen created designs for Lever House, Pan Am, and Dansk, among others, always featuring this encyclopedic textile expertise. Many bespoke examples are currently stored in the house, which Reserve director Carrie Barratt hopes to one day open to the public.
Larsen was unapologetic about having abandoned the perhaps more celebrated profession of architecture. In an interview, he once said, “Why do it on a loom? Think of basketry and fish traps, interlaced houses, and freedom. Think of cocoons and hornets’ nests.... Think of yourself as a spider!”
The Leiber Collection, East Hampton
I once took Italian-cooking lessons, and the handbag designer Judith Leiber was in my class. Her Hungarian accent and advanced age seemed no impediment to her learning curve—she was in there rolling pasta sheets with the rest of us. But in her career, Leiber was reportedly not as malleable, famously winning out in a standoff with Saks Fifth Avenue after they rescinded the return policy at her boutique.
There were good reasons for Leiber’s toughness. Born in Budapest in 1921, originally destined to be a chemist in the cosmetics trade, she was instead apprenticed to the Hungarian Handbag Guild. She learned the intricate handmade-production process and rose within the profession. But once war broke out, the family—under last-minute Swiss protection through a friend—moved to a small apartment. All work for Jews stopped and they barely survived. She was finally able to emigrate to the U.S. with her new American husband, Gerson Leiber, who had been stationed in Budapest after the war. With his encouragement, she opened her eponymous company in 1963; it’s still a coveted brand, now largely owned by Dee Ocleppo Hilfiger under a corporate umbrella.
Her purses are known for their impeccable craftsmanship and detail as well as for their historic and whimsical design. Jewel-encrusted, ebony, and Lucite, they were made to be clasped by manicured fingers, slung over couture-adorned shoulders, or left conspicuously as placeholders on gala tables. Her clients included movie and opera stars, First Ladies, and, occasionally, ordinary women who had saved up.
Inspired by artists such as Mondrian, Sonia Delaunay, Braque, and Faith Ringgold, as well as animals and vegetables, Leiber once referred to her handbags as her children. But lined up in the vitrines in the Leiber Collection, they present instead like a rear guard of elite soldiers, ready to defend the right to be cosseted and oh so stylish. A sculpture garden designed by Gerson is an added enticement.
The Pollock-Krasner House, Springs
The high-drama marriage of artists Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock is the stuff of legend. Krasner, a go-your-own-way young talent who nevertheless embraced playing Mrs.; Pollock, a rule-breaking painter whose outsize persona and work once dominated the art world. Traces of their complex relationship remain in the home they shared on Long Island.
Krasner and Pollock met in 1936 at a loft party in downtown Manhattan. Though he was drunk, she was instantly smitten. Deeply constrained by his turbulent alcoholism, they escaped the “wear and tear” of New York City to this 1879 farmhouse. Bought with the help of Peggy Guggenheim in 1945 in exchange for a chunk of Pollock’s output, it was to be the birthplace of unprecedented breakthroughs for both artists.
They had no heat or electricity, but they had one bike to share. Gradually they transformed the house, adding antiques and moving the barn so the view of Accabonac Creek was unobstructed. Newly sober, Pollock mowed the lawn, baked apple pie, and made spaghetti sauce while Krasner became his unofficial agent and protector.
Once the barn was cleaned out, he could lay his canvas directly on the floor and pour and fling enamel house paints with impunity. For two years, it was home to Pollock’s greatest Abstract Expressionist production.
In the end, however, all the domesticity in the world could not save Pollock from himself. He fell off the wagon during Thanksgiving 1955, and a horrific car crash just months later ended his life and that of an acquaintance and gravely injured his lover, Ruth Kligman, who had temporarily moved into the home when Krasner fled the fraying marriage to France. Devastated, Krasner returned to the house and gradually reconfigured it, eventually moving into the barn studio, which also became home to her greatest paintings. She spent her life at the house until her death, in 1984, on the eve of her first major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
At the house, now under the auspices of the State University of New York at Stonybrook, where the couple’s archive is also maintained, you can still see their phonograph and record collection and their shared library, though only one painting and a few prints are on display. Exhibits about them and their circle rotate with contemporary works.
But it’s in the barn studio where the paint marks on the floor (his) and on the wall (hers) are pentimenti of their contributions to art made new.
The D’Amico Studio and Archive, Amagansett
The abandoned construction site on Amagansett’s Lazy Point peninsula was a far aesthetic cry from the Museum of Modern Art, where Victor D’Amico, founding director of the museum’s Education Department in the 1930s, and Mabel Birckhead, a high-school art teacher, envisioned their new home. (The two married in 1945.) But the remote setting in the natural world was precisely what stimulated them.
Recycling building parts for the first edition of their house, in 1940, and its expansion, in 1953—including a glass-walled living area and a second-story art studio—allowed them to put into practice the many modernist principles to which they so ardently adhered. Board president Christopher Kohan likened the final product affectionately to “Philip Johnson’s Glass House without the budget.”
The interior is, however, anything but spare. Suffused with light, it’s filled to the brim with Mabel’s assemblages of glass and driftwood, jewelry, and paintings, as well as Victor’s extensive archive. There is ingeniousness and delight everywhere you look. Victor was also able to acquire MoMA castoffs, including chairs by Alvar Aalto and Charles Eames, during periodic de-accessioning, underscoring his reverence for these design pioneers.
Victor and Mabel’s belief in a progressive lifestyle grew in parallel with their belief in the power of art education. Victor always felt that people were capable of artistic expression regardless of inborn talent, and he set up classes, exhibitions, an art carnival, and TV programs while at MoMA, all designed to encourage personal interpretation of the world at hand. Mabel’s artistic credo was “You can make things happen or you can let things happen.” Like the Eameses, the couple believed toys and play stimulated creativity.
In 1960, Victor had a decommissioned navy barge towed from New York City to nearby Napeague Harbor, where Mabel’s family—early vacationers in the area—had purchased land. Now a historic landmark along with the house, the Art Barge offers an impressive suite of summer studio-art classes for adults and children, carrying on the couple’s belief in experiential learning.
Patricia Zohn has contributed to numerous publications, including Wallpaper, Artnet, the Huffington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times
