Dans Hamptons

The only two times that I’ve been in an art gallery when the authorities have come in to raid the place and shut down the show, it’s been in the Tower Gallery in Southampton. The first time was thirty years ago, when everyone was forced to leave and the artist showing her work burst into tears. This second time, which was at a showing of 87 of my drawings, took place this past March 19. Three hundred people were on hand, enjoying wine and cheese. It was raided. But just with a sign out front. Pretty pathetic, if you ask me, particularly when you compare it to the drama of the earlier raid.

Since these are perhaps the only two such raids in the history of art galleries in the Hamptons ever, I suppose I ought to describe them.

The first raid involved canvases painted by Edith Irving, a Swiss citizen, who was living in East Hampton that year. The name may sound familiar to you. It involved a pretty sensational situation. And she went to jail for a time.

Edith Irving was married to Clifford Irving, a novelist who had, two years earlier, sold a book to McGraw Hill for $300,000 that purported to be a first hand biography of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Two thirds of the money had changed hands. And then it turned out that this perfectly good manuscript was a hoax. Clifford, with Edith helping him with the research, wrote the entire biography from information he found in libraries, from letters he was able to obtain, from other books and from the manuscript of a play written by one of Hughes’ closest advisors that never got sold, but which had been kicking around in the office of Irving’s literary agent.

The book was declared a fraud by Howard Hughes himself, the richest man in the world at that time, who, in addition to being the richest man, was the only rich man ever to have lived in the penthouse of a hotel for more than ten years, never seeing anybody but armed guards, and issuing orders only through intermediaries. He held a press conference from inside his penthouse, denounced the book, said he had never met Clifford or Edith Irving, and that they, the Irvings, had simply used Hughes’ name to steal some poor publisher’s money.

In the end, both Clifford and Edith Irving went to jail for a year, but during the court fight, Edith arranged to have a showing of her paintings at the Tower Gallery in Southampton to raise money to pay her legal bills. The event had started at 5 p.m. on a summer’s evening, with more than a hundred people in attendance, and the wine and cheese were out, and people had been marveling at all of Edith’s art for about thirty minutes, when four uniformed agents of the Internal Revenue Service charged up the stairs to the gallery space and over a bullhorn, announced that all the paintings were, at that moment, being seized by the IRS in lieu of back taxes and everybody better leave.

People filed out into the street, talking animatedly about this remarkable turn of events, leaving Edith weeping upstairs with her friends (and, notably, with the agents and her paintings). It was perhaps the most sensational thing to happen that summer in the Hamptons.

As it happened, I briefly thought of this event thirty years ago this past December, when out of the blue, Yolanda Merchant, who runs what is now called the Ferregut Tower Gallery, called me up to say she’d seen the lacy drawings that I have produced on occasion for publication in my paper — she was not referring to the great art that Mickey Paraskevas has in the paper almost every week — and she said she’d like to give me a one man show at her gallery for a month. I told her that nobody had ever asked to have a show of my art before, and I was thrilled at the idea. We decided it would take place, with an opening on President’s Day Weekend, which falls on February 16-19, and we got to work putting the artwork together.

The Tower Gallery has a great history in the Hamptons. Andy Warhol had a show there. So did Larry Rivers. Various owners of the gallery, from time to time, have also shown the works of Fairfield Porter, Roy Lichtenstein and many others. At three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, two hours before the scheduled opening, which would be from five to seven that day, I arrived at the gallery at the corner of Jobs Lane and Main Street, bringing one final drawing that I had just done the day before and which I had just had framed that same day. I also came with some postcard invitations that I hoped to put in some store windows nearby. The town was pretty busy at that hour. The Hamptons was packed for the weekend, and we had decided that 5-7 Sunday afternoon would be a perfect time, considering Monday would be a holiday, too.

Yolanda took me up past all the waiters and assistants buzzing around to the third and top floor of the building — it is at that height just a single room in the shape of a turret — and we looked at the 87 cartoons, all framed and placed on the walls, with the buffet table and the wine and glasses all ready to go. There is only one flight of stairs that leads up to this room. But once in the room, there is a door that opens directly onto a flat roof deck. I had recalled that at that fateful gallery show of Edith Irving’s, people had spilled out onto that deck. I thought I remembered a railing out there. Now there was no railing. I told Yolanda about the raid then, for the first time.

“Well we might get raided again,” Yolanda told me. What a surprise that was. I had no idea what she was talking about.

We returned to the second floor, where Yolanda has an apartment, and she showed me a yellow cardboard sign that she said she had found tacked to the front door of the gallery on the ground floor. She had it on the counter in her kitchen. This is what it read, in big black block letters.

This structure is unsafe and its occupancy has been prohibited by the code enforcement official.

It shall be unlawful for any person to enter such structure except for the purpose of securing the structure, making the required repairs, removing the hazardous conditions or of demolishing the same.

By order of the Building and Zoning Department Of the Village of Southampton

Underneath there was more, this time written by somebody in ballpoint pen.

2nd Floor is habitable for residential use only and no commercial gallery is permitted. Christopher Talbot 2/16/07.

“What is this all about?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. Do you think it’s a hoax? Is there somebody who doesn’t like you?”

I found it hard to imagine that anybody would go to such lengths to ruin an art show. My art show. And on a Sunday? Five hours before the opening?

“The building inspector had been by,” Yolanda said. “There’s something that has to be straightened out about the zoning. But I was expecting them to send me a letter.”

I was going to go out for a while to return at about four thirty.

I was imagining a hundred people or more holding glasses of wine, eating cheese and crackers and talking wittily and the whole place shut down and all my drawings seized by the police department and brought to the impound area. Or maybe hung on the walls in Village Hall.

“Well, I’ll post this down by the door. People can decide what they want to do after reading it.”

“It contradicts itself. It says the building is unstable,” I said. “Then it says you have permission to have your apartment on the second floor. This makes no sense.”

“Maybe they just have this one sort of poster printed up, for condemned buildings. So that’s what they used.”

When I returned at 4:30, Yolanda told me she had called the Senior Building Inspector, Jon Foster, who she knows, to ask him about it. She called him at home.

“He said it was the weekend and he wasn’t working. We should call him back on Monday.”

And so we went on with the show. According to what the Village authorities have been telling the media about my art show, more than 300 people showed up to look at the cartoons, have something to drink and eat and look at the work. We sold four of them at the opening, one to a judge in the court system in Riverhead. One of the best commercial artists in the city, Walter Bernard, was there. Mickey Paraskevas was there. Cover artist Cuca Romley was there. East Hampton gallery owner Vered was there, checking out the competition. We even had a man show up, Herb Levine, who is a guitar player. He asked if he could play classical music for the crowd. We said sure. And he did.

I spent most of the time on the third floor where almost all the cartoons were — about twenty were on the stairway going up — and I occasionally checked to see if the floor was swaying with all these people walking around on it, in preparation for falling down, but I have to say, the place is solid as a rock. I was also expecting, at any moment, for some announcement to come over a police bullhorn, perhaps from police out front on the sidewalk with their patrol cars with the flashing lights and everything.

It’s been my experience over the years that every once in a while a developer who wants to take down a beautiful old structure says it has “water damage” and it is “beyond repair” and the town sends somebody, and they agree with him, and so they let him tear the place down. Several times I’ve gone over to these structures. That they are falling apart is a load of crap. Maybe not all of them, but some of them. The ones I refer to have been solid as, well, the Tower Gallery. And then they get taken down. Go figure.

Well, no police ever came. And no zoning officer ever came. People drank and ate and if you want to see a short video, about two minutes, of this event, you can go to DansHamptons.com, and look at the video my son David put up on Dan’s Blog.

David is editing that website for the paper. He’s got lots of videos on our website. Don’t like me and my cartoons? Watch the attempted rescue of the dolphins in the Northwest. There’s lots to do and see on this website. Buy a big mansion on this website.

Anyway, at 7, people began wandering out into the cold, some of them bearing drawings, some of them not, and myself and twelve other people went up to the Publick House in Bowden Square for a fine dinner to celebrate the event. And we didn’t get raided or arrested there, either.

At the present time, the Village is claiming that Yolanda has no permit to run an art gallery in the Tower Gallery, and it is only for residential use. Turns out that they can put this sign up saying it is uninhabitable, but they can’t go in and evict anybody who is occupying the premises. They can only give them summonses to answer in court, which is where Yolanda says she wants this to be. Once a gallery, always a gallery, is what I thought. Isn’t that what ‘Grandfathered In’ is supposed to mean?

Well, if there needs to be proper exits, or the stairway is not wide enough, or whatever else is the problem, it is going to get straightened out.

And you can continue to see these drawings, drawn in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and even this century, some of them published in the paper and some not, and all beautifully framed, either at what is called the Ferregut Tower Art Gallery, if the place is zoned commercial, or simply Yolanda Merchant’s Apartment, if it remains residential, until March 20.

Maybe. She’s there weekends, and the, um, living room on the third floor is open from 1-6 p.m.

Unless the whole building falls down.

By the way, in East Hampton on Buckskill Road, have you gone ice skating at that great rink that’s been set up on some tennis courts, at what is in the summertime, the Buckskill Tennis Club? The owners got permission from the Town to flood the court, but it’s been such a hit with hundreds of people going skating there every day — paying $10 or $15 to ice skate or $5 to rent some skates — that the Town says they had no permission to have it get bigger and so they demanded it shut down. And they shut it down. And then a week later it got to a judge in Riverhead, who said they had to reopen it until the matter is settled sometime in the spring.

Gallery Raided

Southampton Tower Gallery, Home of Rivers and Warhol, is Raided