Local Legends

Four artists who made significant contributuions to the art world while on Long Island

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An Offbeat Life, A Mysterious Death

On Jan. 13, 1995, Ray Johnson jumped off the bridge at Sag Harbor, and began backstroking his way toward Sag Harbor Cove. That was the last time he was seen alive, and although, at 67, he was given to driving himself relentlessly in the name of health, his friends believe that this was the artist's final performance, the "greatest work" he had been talking about. His was, after all, an art of performance, and it spanned oceans.

For three decades -- many of those spent in Locust Valley -- he dispatched cartoony letters, collages and Xeroxes to correspondents around the world as the instigator of a form of participatory art that the Whitney Museum in its 1970 exhibition dubbed the "New York Correspondance School of Art." Since then there have been nearly 200 comparable exhibitions in Germany, Poland, Brazil, Italy, England, Belgium, Argentina, Switzerland, Hungary, Australia and Russia.

But it was for the collages he began making in the 1950s and for his outrageous performances of the 1960s that the art world remembers him best. The collages were paper and cardboard and dense with mosaics of shapes he called "modicos," that might describe an image or a color or a word or a text. They encapsulated a moment that was a prologue to pop art, and they were as beautiful as they were complex and witty.

From Yellowstone's Mists To Hamptons Clouds

So closely was Thomas Moran (1837-1926) identified with East Hampton that his archives reside in the East Hampton library, where a great deal of the research for the recent "Thomas Moran" exhibition at the National Gallery of Art took place. He made his impact on the national character with such paintings as the 1872 "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone," which at 144 feet long, is so grand, mystical and mythical that it came to stand for the American landscape in the mind of the American public -- and of Congress, which that year passed the legislation to create Yellowstone as the nation's first national park.

But in the Hamptons, where he lived on and off for decades, he could also make drama of a cloud-strewn sky and watery banks.

Blending East and West

Most hyphenated Americans emphasize the American part, but for a great part of his life, sculptor Isamu Noguchi went back and forth between the Japan of his father, a much-praised poet in his own country, and the America of his mother, who was a writer and teacher. He spent most of his boyhood in Japan until his early teens, then was sent to America alone in 1918 for his schooling. He entered the field of sculpture in the most American of ways -- as an assistant to Gutzon Borglum, creator of the presidential faces on Mount Rushmore.

But his mature work was a synthesis of can-do American modernism and contemplative Japanese tradition. He kept a studio in Japan and one in Long Island City, where he created gardens, sets for the choreographers Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, furniture and paper lamps. But it is the potent presence of his sculptures, whether stalwart, abstract stone or expressive bronze head, which are the reasons to visit the Isamu Noguchi Museum and Sculpture Garden, across the street from the studio where he worked until his death in 1988.

The Man Who Made Boxes

Joseph Cornell, a self-taught artist whose magical vision was at once sophisticated and prophetic, lived in the most mundane of circumstances: From 1929, the year he turned 26, until his death in 1972, Cornell lived on Utopia Parkway in Flushing. An excruciatingly shy man who is said never to have had a lover, he lived there with his overbearing mother and his disabled brother.

But his work so eloquently spoke for him that other artists learned from and befriended him. In 1931, a great many years before many other American artists had noticed the surrealist painters of France, Cornell took a hint from Max Ernst and constructed a series of collages with engravings from old books. These quickly developed into boxes enclosing three-dimensional, miniature stage sets on which Cornell could play out complex fantasies that had the universe as their subject, the world of dreams as their visual equivalent and ephemeral objects as their medium.

His passion was the dance. The choreographer George Balanchine and ballerina Tamara Toumanova appreciated him for his sensibilities, and he returned the favor with boxes that characterized them and their world. In the 1946 box "A Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova (Homage to the Romantic Ballet)," a picture of a swan behind blue glass floats in velvet, rhinestones and white feathers from the ballerina's "Swan Lake" headpiece. The 1965 box "Pascal's Triangle" is far less fey, far more concerned with abstraction, mathematics and the presence of birds.

Despite his self-imposed isolation, Cornell was far from a naive provincial. He had studied French literature at the highly prestigious Massachusetts prep school the Phillips Academy. When it came time to earn a living, he sold textile samples, and comforted himself haunting thriftshops for old maps, photographs, stuffed birds, clay pipes and, of course, feathers, then returned home to make his boxes in the Utopia Parkway kitchen. So idiosyncratic was his vision, and so personally charged, that he has become the emblem of a certain kind of self-effacing, dream-ridden art and life in America.

-- Amei Wallach