Hampton’s August thoughts

It is over 50 years since Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner moved from Greenwich Village out to Springs. David Salle spends full-time now with a new house built at Sagonapack and Julian Schnabel in 1982 had restored his house at Montauk. Chuck Close and Sandro Chia also are there. Willem de Kooning’s daughter Lisa de Kooning, up in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods, has now turned her father’s great modern studio off Springs Fireplace Road into a foundation which will be accessible to researchers and on a limited basis to the interested public. There, movingly, de Kooning’s last painting made before he gave in to the final stages of Alzheimer’s stands unfinished on the easel. Robert Dash, a landscape painter who moved to abstraction later in life, thinks ‘we have more painters in this area than all Italy had in the quattrocento’. This might just be an underestimate.