An Esteban Vicente show at the Parrish

For four decades, Esteban Vicente was a beloved figure not only among his circle of fellow artists but among his Bridgehampton neighbors as well.

"He had a morning ritual everybody in town was familiar with," says Alicia Longwell, curator of "Esteban Vicente: Portrait of an Artist" at the Parrish Art Museum. "He'd come to the Candy Kitchen for breakfast, then pick up the morning paper and go to the post office to get his mail."

So it's fitting that the exhibit includes photographs of Vicente, who died at 97 in 2001, in his barn studio behind his home on Montauk Highway and in his meticulously tended "wildflower" garden with his wife, Harriet. The color photos, by Laurie Lambrecht, bridge the painterly sections of the three-part portrait of a Long-Island-by-way-of-Madrid artist's life.

FRIENDS AND FELLOW PAINTERS Vicente, a sculptor by training, moved to New York in the 1930s and supported himself teaching Spanish. But he soon became part of the downtown New York School of painters, some of whom became leading figures in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Among his friends were Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and Willem and Elaine de Kooning. (Willem was Vicente's roommate for a time on 10th Street, when they were both members of the Eighth Street Club of downtown artists.) The Pollocks, the de Koonings and the Vicentes all moved, at least for summers, to the Hamptons in the '50s and early '60s. All are included in the first gallery of the Parrish show, along with Vicente's art students. He was a visiting professor at New York University and Yale. Chief among his Yale students was Chuck Close, the hyper-realist who also moved to the Hamptons. Close, whose style was completely counter to abstract expressionism, said Vicente encouraged him to be himself.

THE MASTER'S ART The largest gallery is devoted to Vicente's postwar career spanning 50 years. "He never reinvented himself," curator Longwell says. "There's a continuity," she says, from his earlier abstracts in charcoal and thick brush strokes to later paintings that have a more "free-floating feel," with diffuse brush strokes and collages of paper cutouts and paint that evoke a child's imagination. (Think Matisse, only more abstract and primitive.)

"It's like art before a child is told how to make it," Longwell says.

WHAT "Esteban Vicente: Portrait of an Artist," exhibition of art from the Parrish, New York University's Grey Art Gallery and private collections

WHEN | WHERE 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Monday and Thursday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday, through April 10, at the Parrish Art Museum, 25 Job's Lane, Southampton

INFO $5, $3 students and seniors, under 18 free; parrishart.org, 631-283-2118

More art

WHAT Donald Baechler, who fuses traditional Americana with pop culture imagery, exhibits a large-scale installation accompanied by a handful of his collage paintings in the Contemporary Gallery upstairs at the Nassau County Museum of Art. Of Baechler's work, Art in America wrote that his depictions of everyday objects and simple figures "tap into our nostalgia for childhood." His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, as well as museums in Amsterdam and Paris.

WHEN | WHERE 11 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, through May 8, at the Nassau Museum of Art, 1 Museum Dr., Roslyn Harbor

INFO $10, $8 seniors, $4 students and children 4-12, $2 parking on weekends; nassaumuseum.com, 516-484-9338