FIRSTCLASS
A World of Art
ARTS
Long Island’s East End is home to sun, surf, sand—
and now, world-class art
AN ARTISTIC
TRADITION
In the late 1940s,
painters Willem and
Elaine de Kooning
and Jackson Pollock played softball
with their friends on
Long Island’s East
End. In 1968, the annual game became
a charity event, and
in the ensuing years
the teams have
grown to include
actors, athletes and
even politicians (see:
Clinton, Bill). This
year marks the 65th
annual Artists & Writers Celebrity Softball
Game. Check it out
Aug. 17 at Herrick
Park in East Hampton. artistswriters
game.org
Actor and
Amagansett
resident Alec
Baldwin takes
the plate.
If you can get past the celebrity glitz and polo field glamour of the Hamptons, you probably imagine stunning white
beaches, wetlands swaying
with auburn reeds, and pastel-pink light reflecting o; a periwinkle blue ocean.
But a world-class art
museum? Probably not.
You should rethink that.
At the Parrish Art Museum
in Water Mill, N. Y., the current
exhibition, “Angels, Demons
and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio,
Dubu;et,” is a collection of
some 50 works from 1948 to
1952 that looks at the similari-ties among American painter
Jackson Pollock; Filipino-American artist and patron
Alfonso Ossorio; and French
painter Jean Dubu;et.
The show has traveled
directly from The Phillips
Collection in Washington,
D.C., and was curated by the
director of its Center for the
Study of Modern Art. At Par-
rish, “Angels, Demons and
Savages” is presented “so that
viewers can readily experience
and understand how [the art-
ists] converged in one of the
most fertile creative times in
American art history,” Parrish
director Terrie Sultan says.
The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N. Y.
the East End for generations.
The reception area features
furniture constructed from
100-year-old heart pine, and
gives way to a wide lobby with
windows facing both north
and south. The gallery wing,
with more than 12,000 square
feet of exhibition space, has 11
galleries installed with world-class works. A covered outdoor terrace presents views
onto a vineyard to the west
and a grand meadow to the
south, o;ering a quiet respite.
Of course, the art collection is impressive: It encom-passes some 2,600 works,
including 19th-century landscape paintings, American
impressionism, and modern
and contemporary art.
Many of the works are by
artists who called these East
End beaches home, and after
seeing them, you won’t forget
that a world-class art museum
does, too. parrishart.org
