Descripción

Einband bzw. Umschlag leicht berieben. - The Island's natural beauty and the serene, pastoral life of its inhabitants attracted artists of the day, and painters such as William Merritt Chase and William Sidney Mount, inspired by the broad vistas and ever-changing skies of the area, painted simpler scenes than did their Hudson River counterparts. Soon Thomas Moran and Childe Hassam established summer residences on eastern Long Island. Irving Wiles was the focal member of an artists' colony on the Island's North Fork, just across Peconic Bay. William Glackens and others found inspiration farther west, around Bellport. Among those who made isolated visits to the Island were John Frederick Kensett, normally associated with the Hudson River School, but whose painting Eaton's Neck portrays a picturesque point on the Island's North Shore; Winslow Homer, who visited East Hampton in 1874; and George Bellows, who painted Montauk while on his honeymoon. With changes in the landscape came changes in the styles that artists used to depict it. At the beginning of the twentieth century, such artists as Childe Hassam and William Lathrop continued to paint in the representational manner later referred to as American Impressionism. This school was challenged, however, by the abstract painters associated with the avant-garde photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, among them John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and Helen Torr. In the 1950s and '60s, the abstract and representational styles met head-on on Long Island's South Fork. Fairfield Porter established a studio in Southampton in 1949, and shortly thereafter the great abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning settled nearby, in East Hampton. The resulting diversification and exchange of styles drew many other artists to the area and revived the South Fork's reputation as an artists' colony. Today the South Fork continues to thrive as an art center, and indeed Long Island as a whole seems destined to attract talent.