The Summer Place

There is something about success in art that leads artists to appreciate the kind of surroundings that success on Wall Street leads stockbrokers to appreciate. If in midsummer 1964 it became necessary to page 150 ranking painters and sculptors, the place to go would be the Hamptons on the eastern end of Long Island, an area best known as a golfing, sailing, tennis-playing, tanning and drinking preserve for the rich. A 40-mile stretch of sea, sand and shore towns, the Hamptons have attracted artists ever since the 1870s, when Winslow Homer went there to paint impressionistic oils of ladies dipping their toes in the surf. Last week the art colony was at its midseason busiest. The oldest colonial, visionary Architect Frederick Kiesler, 67, was at work on a 46-ft. sculpture despite a recent heart attack. Sculptor Costantino Nivola, 53, a swarthy Sardinian who likes to cast concrete abstracts in a huge sand pit on his 40-acre property, was busy making a small sculpture of Kiesler.

An Abundance of Axes. Pop Artist Jim Dine has just bought a house in the area and says he likes the Hamptons for a special reason: the marine and farmers' hardware in local stores. "I've bought more than 20 axes to put in my new assemblages," he reported. "If I'd bought them in Manhattan, the store clerks would have turned me in as an ax murderer."

The artists of the Hamptons form anything but a school. Alexander Brook still paints tender nudes from life, works in a former stable in the old whaling town of Sag Harbor, and putts around in his Model T and 1935 Rolls-Royce. Realists such as Fairfield Porter, Paul Georges and Moses Soyer live within a short drive of Abstractionists Ludwig Sander, Corrado Marca-Relli and James Brooks. Even New Yorker Cartoonists Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg find the region warmly inclusive.

A De Kooning House. Architect Gordon Bunshaft, chief designer and partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has built a small concrete and marble pavilion overlooking an inshore bay, and Edward Durell Stone remodeled a 21-room, grey-shingled elephant on a dune where Jacqueline Kennedy used to play when she was a subdeb Bouvier. The Hamptons' most illustrious and most retiring painter, Willem de Kooning, turned architect and built his own house--over and over again. A huge, $150,000-plus modern mansion with all the daring angularity of De Kooning's art, it has a 30-ft.-high studio and a sauna in the basement, but it is still unfinished after four years of continuous construction, destruction and rebuilding.

Sculptor Ibram Lassaw believes that the merit of the Hamptons for artists is just that they can find a studio here." Painter Lucia Wilcox, who used to turn fish thrown away by local fishermen into bouillabaisse for Max Ernst, Jean Helion and Fernand Leger when they were war refugees in the Hamptons, says, "I am crazy about the sky. It's like Paris." City Landscapist Jane Wilson likes the change. Moreover, Art lives comfortably with Wealth. Adolph Gottlieb is a neighbor to one of the U.S.'s richest in-surancemen. He reports that "if you say to a cocktail party of brokers out here, 'I'm a painter,' they understand. They are interested in art."

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