Drawn to the Island

I n the 18th Century, before the nation was born, painters didn't come to Long Island; they left it. Robert Feke had to leave Oyster Bay, where he was born in 1705, and travel to Boston and Newport to acquire the polish necessary to sell his portraits. But by the 19th Century, circumstances had changed. New York City was more cosmopolitan, a magnet for both artists and patrons -- a place to find training and sales. And there was the new railroad to carry established artists east, out of the fumes and smells of thronging New York City and onto Long Island, just as trains dispersed Impressionist painters throughout the French countryside.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the artists rode the rails in search of nature and of light. But in America the nature they found was often untrammeled and wild and intimated the presence of God in every secret waterfall and lonely plain. This was what the art historian Robert Rosenblum once dubbed ``The Natural Paradise.'' Some artists sought that paradise in the majestic vistas of the West, but on Walt Whitman's ``Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine'' the hand of God showed itself in more subtle ways. The sky was a big ever-changing light show, and horizons were wide enough to suggest the curvature of the Earth or the mystery of time as it rolled with the waves. In winter the sun glinted low off the water, or mists obliterated detail and animated fantasy. Farmland was rich, and richly framed in pines and marshy grasses.

In the years since, it has not only been the scenery that drew so many artists to Bellport, Huntington and East Hampton. They came for the calm, to get away from liquor and the hurly-burly, from too much fame or too little notice. They came because other artists were there, friends or like-minded contemporaries. They came to tread where other artists have trod, worked, raised families, grown old and been buried. They have been too varied to constitute a Long Island School of Art, and too numerous to list here. But together they have made Long Island among the most viable and fecund art-making neighborhoods in the nation.

The story of art on Long Island really begins with William Sidney Mount, who learned sign painting from his brother Henry and portrait painting from the artist Henry Inman in New York City, but returned east to paint the farmers and farmland around Setauket, where he was born in 1807, and Stony Brook, where he lived most of his life. ``Paint nature,'' he kept reminding himself in his notes.

But what he painted most was the way people lived in their natural surroundings -- farmworkers resting from their labors under a tree (``Farmers Nooning,'' 1836); a family churning cider under the blue Long Island sky in ``Cider Making,'' 1841; a black woman and a young white boy with dog, just off shore (``Eel Spearing at Setauket,'' 1845). In the process Mount became the first great American genre painter, the painter as observer of the homely business of life.

By the time Mount died in 1868, the economy was booming in the wake of the Civil War. People had money and leisure to buy prints and paintings with which to decorate their homes. The firm of Currier & Ives found a boom market for the cheap, hand-colored engravings between 1834 and 1907, and one of its most prolific artists was Fanny Palmer, who traveled from her Brooklyn home to Long Island to record her scenes of rustic play. The illustrator and engraver Alonzo Chappel made huge historic set-pieces, paintings and prints of George Washington's inauguration and the Battle of Long Island from the home in Middle Island where he settled in 1869.

There were so many people with money to spend that artists such as John Frederick Kensett and Frederick Church not only could make a living, but had time for such other enjoyable pursuits as helping found the Metropolitan Museum of Art (in 1870) or riding the Long Island Rail Road in search of subjects to paint.

For Kensett, translucent light and restrained balance best expressed the vision of nature's harmony, and he recorded the poetry of calm and flatness in his ``Eatons Neck, Long Island,'' 1872. Charles Henry Miller celebrated the Long Island farmland in ``Washing Sheep on Long Island,'' 1874. In the end, Winslow Homer would prefer to settle on the more dramatic coast of Maine but he traveled onto Long Island to record the hard sun picking out bright colors on the beach, in ``East Hampton Beach, Long Island,'' 1874, or how the light bleached a tent set out on East End marshland in ``The Tent,'' 1874.

The British-born artist Edward Moran silhouetted fishermen against the sun rising behind Orient Lighthouse in ``Fish Pond, Orient Bay, Long Island,'' 1876. The year after that, Winslow Homer and his friends decided to indulge that favorite of artistic pastimes -- talking about art -- by forming a club whose ostensible purpose was to paint decorative tiles but which quickly became an excuse for companionable travel. In its five years of existence, The Tile Club would include such artists as J. Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, William Merritt Chase and Edward Moran's younger and much more famous brother Thomas. Their travels were duly published in magazines, complete with artist sketches. And a great many of those expeditions consisted of train trips to Long Island, despite original objections by group members that, ``There's nothing there'' and ``Nobody goes there.''

Nevertheless, in June of 1878 they set out in the rain to sketch scenes from Babylon, Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Montauk and Shelter Island. It was later much remarked upon in the press, as the art historian and curator Ronald Pisano notes in his thorough and engaging book, ``Long Island Landscape Painting, 1820-1920,'' that member William Laffan, who was both a writer for the New York Sun and a passenger agent for the Long Island Rail Road, arranged free transportation on the line that needed the publicity these artistic sketching jaunts generated. It would take tourists to support the new lines the Long Island Rail Road was planning to reach as far as Montauk.

So well did the plan succeed that not only the wealthy and the adventurous made Long Island a summer playground, but artists themselves began to settle there, beginning with Thomas Moran, who opened a studio in East Hampton in 1879 and returned each summer until his death 47 years later.

It was Tile Club member William Merritt Chase who established the East End as an art community. In 1891 he opened the nation's first outdoor art school, in the Shinnecock Hills of Southampton, and set out to paint his surroundings. With the flat tones of Dutch landscape painting and the elan and loose brushwork of the French impressionists, he recorded women in white dresses and red bonnets on sage tufts of grass above the ocean (``Idle Hours,'' 1894) or umbrellas at the beach in ``At the Seaside,'' 1892.

George Bellows made the still arduous trip to Montauk with his bride in 1910 and commemorated what they had seen with the muscular painting ``Shore House'' (1911), in which the house on the cliff, a telephone pole thrusting high beside it, faces the vast, light-spilled sea.

By then Louis Comfort Tiffany's Corona glassworks had shipped so many glass windows and lamps to so many European and American mansions that Tiffany could build himself a great $2-million pile in Oyster Bay. But he, and a great many artists like him, were soon to be rendered old-fashioned, at least for a time, by a new taste for European modernism which swept the American art world just as World War I was about to begin.

The New York Armory Show in 1913 introduced Picasso, Duchamp and European modernism to America and forever changed the ways in which American artists would regard the art of painting. World War I began the following year, and when it ended in 1918, the age of the automobile had arrived. Roads began to thread the Island and threaten the antique charms of its neighborhoods.

The artist Frederick Childe Hassam had such nostalgia for tradition that he ignored new art currents in favor of a sunny all-American version of 19th-Century impressionism; he wanted so desperately to honor the already changing landscape that he set about systematically recording the old houses of the still-bucolic East End, beginning in 1920 with such paintings as ``Amagansett, Long Island, New York.''

Arthur Dove, on the other hand, was one of the first painters in Europe or America to explore the possibilities of abstraction in the teens of the century. He spent most of the 1920s living with his wife, the painter Helen Torr, on the 42-foot yawl Mona, anchored off Huntington, where he painted ``Scenery,'' a sail and sun on water in the simplified, soaked, painterly vocabulary of modernism in 1932. And Torr that year reduced ducks and white birches to cut-out shapes in her ``Heckscher Park.'' By 1938, Dove and Torr had moved to Centerport, where Dove's paintings took on an edgy contrariness that prefigured abstract expressionism, and where he died in 1946, she in 1967.

Huntington had held charms for artists as early as 1905, when the photographer Eduard Steichen visited his patrons Mr. and Mrs. Roland Conklin there and photographed the foggy shapes of trees in ``Across the Salt Marshes, Huntington.'' George Grosz, who in 1933 became one of the first artists swept to American shores by Hitler's repressions, moved to Huntington in 1947. By then he had long ago replaced the sardonic irony about the military-industrial collusions of German society with angst-ridden visions of the Holocaust and war as hell, and softened efforts at social commentary, which won him hardly any acclaim. But he was glad he had not returned to Germany, he said: ``If I had listened to certain letters of 1934, when everyone was enthusiastically for Hitler, then I would be a different failure today -- a German failure, not an American one.''

By the 1930s, the prevailing art movement in Europe was Surrealism, and an emergency rescue committee saw to it that many of its leading practitioners found their way to New York after the Nazi invasion of France. The Surrealist artist Max Ernst summered briefly in 1941 in East Hampton with his wife, the art patron Peggy Guggenheim, shortly after his escape from Europe. However, he quickly left for Sedona, Ariz., with his lover, the painter Dorothea Tanning, returning to the Island's Great River in 1944 to make a series of bronze sculptures of animals and fantastic creatures whose look of threat and anxiety seemed to reflect his uncertain condition.

The Surrealists, with their entourage of dealers and curators, were an example of seriousness and success to a group of young American painters intent on investigating the unconscious and the implications of European modernism.