Hampton Style - August 29, 2008 - The Surrealist Coterie of the Hamptons

At the onset of World War II, Europe's avant-garde was forced into exile-a mass exodus later described by Art News as "the most significant artistic migration since the fall of Constantinople." Among these transplants was the Surrealist contingent, including Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, André Breton and Max Ernst, who had, with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, escaped Hitler's campaign to rid the world of "degenerate artists." New York City quickly became the new international headquarters for the arts and this particular group of orphaned artists spent their summers in the Hamptons. After fleeing the atrocities of war-torn Europe, the "Masters of the Absurd" found plenty of jarring juxtapositions on our shores to fuel their surrealist theme. From dodging bullets and bombs, they suddenly found themselves bicycling verdant byways, day drinking and walking barefoot along the beach. Duchamp spent long afternoons playing chess with Robert Motherwell, while André Breton scribbled prose from his cottage in Hampton Bays. From the confines of their makeshift studios there were debauched parties, passionate affairs and major works of art created in between. Maya Deren shot her experimental films in Amagansett, and Ernst, using what he could find in his garage, cobbled together "The King Playing With his Queen." It was a virile and creative collaboration and the magnetic force at the center was Peggy Guggenheim-muse, lover, friend, mother, benefactor, bully and protector of this rare breed of artists.

Peggy inherited a substantial sum of money early in life after her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, went down with the Titanic while vacationing with his mistress. (It is said he changed into his tuxedo just before the ship sank.) Peggy, who said she never truly recovered from the event and described her childhood as "protracted agony," left America in the early 1920s to join the bohemian circles of Europe.

"The day Hitler walked into Norway," Guggenheim famously recounts, "I walked into Fernand Leger's studio and bought a wonderful 1919 painting for $1000. My motto was 'buy one piece of artwork a day.'" It was 1940 and artists, poised in anticipation for German attack, were eagerly trying to pawn off work before fleeing the city. As Europe stood on the brink of World War II, Guggenheim was amassing what would become one of the world's most comprehensive collections of Modern art for pennies on the dollar. Resolute to become the next great collector, she traveled from studio to studio across Europe, clutching a list compiled by her friend Marcel Duchamp of those he considered to be master artists. The day after her visit to Leger's studio, she bought an apartment on the Place Vendome and began hanging paintings-a bold move for a single women at the core of such a subversive crowd, especially in the midst of massive Jewish persecution. But the husky-voiced heiress with the "eggplant nose" was fearless. When the Louvre refused to house her collection, deeming it not worth saving, she hid the massive trove in a hay barn in the Vichy countryside. After Hitler's invasion, as bombing reached the factories on the outer boulevards, Peggy was still sipping wine in cafes. Her final escape via Lisbon included stops to entertain lovers on the way. In July of 1941, after living 20 years as an expat, the gallerist caught a Pan-Am Clipper back to New York. Her prolific collection followed.

An expatriate bent on modernizing the stodginess she found upon returning home, Peggy was willful and perverse enough to qualify as a Surrealist herself, but she settled for the role of muse. The only thing the Bohemian impresario was more passionate about than art was sex. She traveled and spent money with the independence and bravado of a man, and she bedded her conquests with the same gusto. Among her "Don Giovanni-sized list of men" were young Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy and the abusive King of Bohemia Laurence Vail, whom she "guilelessly pushed all the way to the alter." During their marriage, he pushed her down on the street and even rubbed jam in her hair during quarrels-reminding the already insecure Peggy that she possessed neither beauty nor talent. "All I had to offer was my money," she recounted, "upon which he graciously consented to live."

Her next conquest was Max Ernst, the doleful "high priest" of Surrealism, whom she met while living in France and brought to New York upon Hitler's invasion. At the time he was imprisoned at Drancy concentration camp near Paris. The smitten heiress got him forged documents, planned his escape and paid off the appropriate officers. Ultimately, Ernst would also play a role in his own survival, and appropriately, his art was at the center of it. He was making his way through Nazi-occupied France when an officer demanded to see his artwork, which was rolled up in canvas under his arm. "So took place the exhibition of his life," wrote Dorothea Tanning, "with the unrolling of those wild and sumptuous canvases that in minutes were tacked to the walls of that dreary little station." The inspector's words were as follows: "Monsieur, I adore talent. You have great talent. But I must send you back to France. There is the train to France. Here on the left is a train to Spain. Don't take the wrong one." (He took the wrong one and relocated to New York.)

Just months after his arrival, Max married Peggy Guggenheim-many say out of a loveless sense of obligation-and they promptly moved to East Hampton to join the growing group of eccentrics. It was a rowdy bunch who always made time for erotic theatrics and faux bacchanals. They drank at Elm Street tavern, gossiped on Coast Guard Beach in East Hampton and bathed naked in the ocean; dinners were improvised using wild flowers and junk fish; cerebral parlor games and Surrealist banter filled their nights.

The group was known for eccentric garb-donning lobster hats and cellophane dresses, waxed moustaches and paper costumes. Duchamp even strolled around in drag and Dali in his famous old-world suits. In fact, the first bikini ever worn in Long Island came from a Surrealist prank when fellow artist Catherine Yarrow took scissors to her swim costume; soon enough the artsy femmes of their crew were all donning hand-knit "Continental-style" suits. Locals ogled at the audacious exhibitionists.

There was a real sensationalistic aspect to the refugees' reception. Their escape from Nazis made them heroes to some while staunch conservatives deemed them heretics. The famous group photo in Peggy's apartment held the attention of mainstream media more than any works on the wall, as did the escapades of artists like Ernst, who left Leonora Carrington for Guggenheim, and then moved on to Dorothea Tanning.

It was a time when someone might arrive at a party with one lover and leave with someone else's, and this often happened as the memoirs and writings recorded. André Breton wrote "Les Etats Genereux" at his rented cottage in Hampton Bays, a home he begrudgingly shared with his wife Jacqueline Lamba and her new lover, emerging sculptor David Hare. Puzzling over the war on distant shores, the founding poet of the movement and cuckolded husband composed the melancholy lines: "There will always be a wind borne shovel in the sand of dreams."

Although promiscuous, Guggenheim had a complicated sense of her own sexuality. Jimmy Ernst-the son of Max's second wife-wrote this impression in his memoir: "Her face expressed something I imagined the ugly duckling must have felt the first time it looked in the water." But Peggy had an irreverent independence uncommon for the time. As she told an interviewer in 1976, "I was totally free financially, emotionally, intellectually, sexually." This often put off her partners, who, for all their Surrealist sexual politics, were used to being on top. Despite her efforts, by the end of Peggy's marriage with Max, he still referred to her using the formal "vous." She too was having an affair by the time he left her.

Still, the blow Guggenheim felt was severe when Ernst abandoned for Tanning, and a concurrent argument she had with Breton was said to play a part in the waning popularity of the Surrealist school-first with Guggenheim and then with the public. Guggenheim had already moved on to her next project: Abstract Expressionism-and she had her eye on a particular artist.

When the famous "Art of this Century" show opened in 1943, she displayed the Surrealists alongside budding talents. The set featured wonderful nonsense of turquoise floors and sloping walls cantilevered on sawed off baseball bats. Cubists paintings hung on strings and the humanoids and ominous dreamscapes of the Surrealist set on arms extended from the wall. She wore one earring by Calder that night and the other by Yves Tanguy-to prove her impartiality between Surrealism and Abstraction. But she was leaning towards the new guard, among them Jackson Pollock, who was making his debut that night. He had been working as a carpenter before Guggenheim found him, offering him a mere $150 a month and collecting more of his paintings than she could even store. She believed him to be the greatest painter since Picasso, and the public seemed to agree in time.

After Pollock's first show, he became the focal point of Guggenheim's gallery. No longer under Peggy's auspices, Ernst returned to the East End despite the split. He and Tanning rented a house with art dealer Julien Levy and Ernst turned his garage into a studio, producing plaster manquettes for bronze works and sculptures from objects and trash. The next year, Ernst and Tanning rented a house in Amagansett with Lucia Wilcox. As remembered by Jimmy Ernst, the couple was present for Lucia's Syrian cuisine potlucks and played erotic theatrical games on the beach, much to the distaste of Bonackers, who considered them 'sissies' and 'drifts,' and the Maidstone crowd, who hoped "those flakes would just go back to Europe already." One stuffy East Hampton resident, upon seeing the 1949 Guild Hall exhibition, deemed them" a snob's club of rebellious dandies." The following summer the couple was married in a double ceremony with fellow surrealist Man Ray. For Ernst's birthday, Maria Motherwell and Dorothea Tanning dressed as satyrs and nymphs and frolicked in the woods.

Among the next generation of artists migrating to the East End around that time were Robert Motherwell and Contstantino Nivola. In 1945, Motherwell built a Modernist Quonset hut in Georgica with architect Pierre Chareau. The eccentric structure, partially inspired by the work of his friend sculptor Alexander Calder, was frequented by both generations of artists but once again, the conservative old guard of East Hampton did not approve, cursing those "crazy artists once and for all" and claiming East Hampton "had gone to the dogs!" The bohemian set was also wary of Motherwell, calling him too cerebral and class-conscious to make authentic art. He drove a classic MG convertible, after all, and he joined Maidstone. His boarding-school French and high-stock breeding, however, made him an important liaison between the European transplants and younger artists; his home became a sort of meeting place. One summer, he drove to Mexico with Roberto Matta, who introduced him to Surrealism, where he met his wife to be, a stunning Mexican actress named Maria Ferrera.

Nivola, also an exiled European, soon followed Motherwell and built his infamous house in The Springs with sand sculpture walls. The Pollocks lived down the road and he hosted weekly garden parties for luminaries like Mark Rothko and Franz Kline. Le Corbusier proved to be his most influential visitor when, feeling inspired by the structure, he agreed to create bas-relief-style murals around the house.

In New York, the Surrealists were famously aloof from the emerging American artists, but out here they began to let their guard down. This period marked the beginning of the cross fertilization between the refugee European artists and wide-eyed local vanguardsmen. They began to exchange ideas and this sort of interchange hadn't occurred since Americans went to Paris in the 1920s. At the Guild Hall show of 1949, while both schools were represented, it was Pollock who stirred the crowd when a fist fight broke out over one of his mammoth paintings.

The Surrealist party, it is said, had a solemn ending. Artist-rebels tend to do best in their youth, and the period of exile only saddled the movement with the sag of middle-age. Its creative energies eventually dwindled, and the group activities of Paris could not be sustained when so detached from the War. By the time they returned to Europe, the only radical break they attempted was from their wives. (Before heading home, most of them changed partners.) But the bravado and bold iconoclasm they brought with them infused the next generation here in America, a group which would later become the vociferous Abstract Expressionists.

Peggy has been called a great influence on that movement as well, cradling those artists as she had her zany Surrealists. While later years show her disillusioned, her bravura never mellowed with age: "I do not like art today. I think it has gone to hell," she wrote before she died. "People blame me for what is painted today because I encouraged the new movement to be born. But in the 1940s, there was a pure and pioneering spirit in America. A new art had to be born-Abstract Expressionism. I fostered it. I do not regret it."

Peggy, like her Surrealist friends, returned to Europe and spent the last years of her life in Venice, where she maintained the Guggenheim Museum and the last privately owned gondola in Venice. She was at peace in that floating gondola - the nicest thing she'd known since she gave up sex, or so she loved to say.