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Title details for De Kooning's Bicycle by Robert Long - Available

De Kooning's Bicycle

Artists and Writers in the Hamptons

by Robert Long
Grover Gardner
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

Some of the twentieth century's most important artists and writers — from Jackson Pollock to Saul Steinberg, Fairfield Porter to Jean Stafford — lived and worked on the East End of Long Island. The home they made there would affect their creative work for years to come. Pollock found there a connection to nature that inspired some of the most significant painting of our time. James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara found companionship and raw material for their poems on South Main Street and the city train. Willem de Kooning rode his bike every day to Gardiner's Bay, where the light informed every brushstroke he put to canvas from the early 1960s on. Through searching, lyrical vignettes, critic and poet Robert Long mixes storytelling with history to recreate these lives and events that shaped American art and literature.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 1, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781481550109
      • File size: 157063 KB
      • Duration: 05:27:12

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Follow Grover Gardner to the Hamptons of the 1960s, where you'll find American abstract expressionists--De Kooning, Pollock, and others--struggling with their art and their addictions in a famed artist's colony. Gardner, as usual, delivers the prose with depth and alacrity, painting rich word pictures and anecdotes of daily life and the artistic chaos that led to later--often posthumous--fame. With his narrative skills, Gardner takes what could be a mildly informative account and delivers a cinematic audio treatment of these debauched characters, guiding us on a tour of their creative minds through the lens of their daily lives at this time and place. D.J.B. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      Starred review from October 1, 2006
      This account of writers and artists living in the Hamptons, primarily from the end of World War II until the mid-1980s, begins as a conventional narrative, with a brief history of Long Island, before shifting into something much less conventional. Long offers sketches of his characters, complete with imagined dialog and interior thoughts, because he is less concerned with the facts than with illustrating how these figures' lives and work are interwoven. Art critic for the "East Hampton Star" as well as a poet, Long also shows the influence of locale. Looking out a train window, Frank O'Hara sees not Long Island but Fairfield Porter's impressions of the landscape. The much honored Grover Gardner makes Long's portraits of Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and Saul Steinberg come alive. Standouts include a sad look at Jean Stafford in decline and a vivid insight into O'Hara, who seems the most open to the varied experiences offered by the Hamptons. Highly recommended for all collections."Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr."

      Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 1, 2005
      In a series of vividly told vignettes, critic and poet Long (Blue
      ) illustrates how the East End of Long Island indelibly etched a mark on the style and work processes of the abstract impressionists and their artistically minded friends. For artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and their respective wives, Lee Krasner and Elaine, the Hamptons were a creative playground in the 1950s. Long reimagines their lives there in stories told from the artists' points of view. Pollock, aka Jack the Dripper, and Krasner moved to the East End in 1945 in an attempt to curb the infamous inebriate's drinking and stimulate his talent, and Long cleverly narrates Pollock's artistic methods. When the artist "unleashed screaming ribbons of cadmium yellow, it was like a hot trumpet solo," Long writes, likening his painting process to jazz improvisations. Former MoMA curator Frank O'Hara, Fairfield Porter, Jean Stafford and New Yorker
      cartoonist Saul Steinberg receive similarly poetic treatment, but it's with titans like Pollock and de Kooning that Long best captures the spirit of modernism as filtered through New York's rural past. Agent, Patricia Van der Leun.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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