Dan's Papers - June 15, 2007

In the very near future, a built-to-specification section in the Library at Stony Brook Southampton college will be filled to the brim with the more then 2,000 items that currently comprise the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center research and art reference library in East Hampton. These documentary archives, photographic and oral history collections will be available to the campus community and the general public and to a wide range of researchers -- high school students, doctoral candidates, fiction writers, journalists, historians and creative writers. The documentary materials include the complete Pollock Krasner papers on microfilm, the catalogue raisonne for both artists and the research papers from Jeffrey Potter and B.H.Friedman, two of Pollock's biographers, as well as vertical files of clippings and exhibition brochures of 20th Century American artists and hundreds of hours of video and audio taped interviews. The core of the art reference library was created through donations from the estates of Elaine de Kooning; Arnold Hoffman, jr.; Hans Kline; and Alfonso Ossorio. Since its early creation, the collection has also grown through gifts and purchases. Once the move is completed and the material is housed in its new home on the Stony Brook Southampton Campus, it will be far more accessible to a greater number of visitors and students then at any previous time. With a larger facility, more parking spaces for visitors and greater exposure to the academic and publishing world, the collections should generate much more interest and use.

Stony Brook Southampton will also be the site of the summer lecture series for the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. The summer lecture will be held in the refurbished, 135-seat Duke Lecture Hall in Chancellors Hall on July 22 in conjunction with the Southampton Writers conference. The speaker will be Meryle Secrest, a distinguished biographer (Frank Lloyd Wright, Bernard Berenson, Salvador Dalii, and Stephen Sondheim) will also hold a workshop at the conference. The fall film series will also move to the Stony Brook Southampton Campus. The films and lecture series will still be listed on the web site at www.pkhouse.org.

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is regarded as the undisputed leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement. By definition, "Abstract expressionism is a post-WWII movement in painting characterized by emphasis on the artist's spontaneous and self-expressive application of paint in creating a nonrepresentational composition," according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1945, Pollock married the painter Lee Krasner and moved from New York City to Long Island's East End. With the help of a loan from New York art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, they purchased a small home and some land in the Springs near East Hampton. In the then very quiet East End community of farmers and baymen, Pollock created his masterpieces. These works were so innovative in style and technique that they stunned the art world and continue to inspire artists and viewers to this day. Jackson Pollock died in an automobile crash in the Springs in 1956, but his wife continued painting and became a prominent artist in her own right. The couple's move from Manhattan to the Springs inspired other artists, such as Willem De Kooning, to leave Manhattan and join them, creating a flourishing artists' colony on the East End. Indeed, the artists colony came to include such famed painters as Ilya Bolowtoski, Larry Rivers and Athos Zacharias (De Kooning's protege and Lee Krasner's last assistant) and many others too numerous to mention. That artists' community still flourishes today. One of the ironies of this story is that many of the above mentioned artists taught at what is now called "Stony Brook Southampton" for a time.

Lee Krasner continued to live in the house after Pollack's death and upon her death left the house and grounds as a memorial to both their lives. When she died in 1984, she was in the midst of a retrospective of her work. Visitors are welcome to tour the house and grounds of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, as well to don protective foot covering and carefully walk across Jackson Pollock's studio floor, which has the shadows of many of his most famous works still stuck to the floor.

The transfer of the art reference library and other related materials to Stony Brook's Southampton Campus will create a greater interest in visiting the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, with it's new exposure to hundred's, if not thousands, of excited art lovers and students. The preservation and development of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center has been undertaken by the Stony Brook Foundation Inc, a non-profit affiliate of Stony Brook University.

For more information about tours of the house, contact: Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, 830 Fireplace Road, East Hampton. Visit www.pkhouse.org, 631-324-4929, fax 631-324-8768.