Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #700104 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-16
• Released on: 2005-11-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
New York City's influence on American art and literature is a given. Less well known is the effect of bucolic Long Island. Long, the art critic for the East Hampton Star, offers a vivid history of the Hamptons as a sea-caressed mecca for Manhattan-based painters and writers, a bohemian group who flocked to the shore each summer, beginning in the Gilded Age with William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam. But Long soon wearies of factual reporting and chooses to slip into imaginary inner monologues instead, writing in the voices of Long Island's most notorious artist outlaw, Jackson Pollock; one of the island's most enduring denizens, Willem de Kooning; Fairfield Porter, who lived there with his wife and his lover, James Schuyler; as well as Frank O'Hara, Jean Stafford, and Saul Steinberg. Long's empathic projections are certainly mesmerizing and moving, as long as the reader is well versed in each artist's and writer's life and work, but there is an element of trespass here as Long covertly mixes fiction with art history. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"You must read these beautifully written and sensitive portraits of several of the major figures in the arts who inhabited the east end of Long Island during its great creative period--De Kooning, Pollock, Krasner, Jean Stafford, Saul Steinberg, and others. Those of us who knew these extraordinary people are grateful to have our memories sharpened; those who are meeting them for the first time here have the thrill of discovery ahead of them. This is an invaluable book."--Edward Albee

"Before Hollywood invaded the Hamptons and McMansions replaced potato fields, the region played a vital role in the history of mid-twentieth-century American art. Poet and Hamptons native Robert Long tells this engrossing story with a novelist’s flair." --John Ashbery

"If, as De Kooning said, art is a big soup, Robert Long has given us the goggles to plumb for the most delectable bits. Long's memoir ranks with the cultural criticism of Shattuck's Banquet Years: his eye for beauty, masterful style, and historical sense make this a shining gift to the world." --Mary Karr, author of Cherry
"De Kooning's Bicycle is a beautiful, heartbreaking book and an astonishing act of clairvoyance. Robert Long enters the minds of the brilliant dead--Pollock, De Kooning, O'Hara--and looks through their eyes, infused with the sweetness and melancholy of the East End landscape and its marine light. The book's poetry and emotional precision ensure that it will be not just read but reread." --Luc Sante, author of Low Life

Customer Reviews

Not worth it
I got this book because the title was intriguing. I would have been happy with good personal anecdotes, art history, art criticism or just some good writing, but none of the above was to be found. I'm a Willem de Kooning fan and have read a bit about him and Jackson Pollack too. This book starts off with boring historical stuff about Long Island which I skimmed and then the parts about de Kooning and Pollack are rehashes about well known topics. The writing isn't very interesting and there isn't much about the artwork. The third person writing format is awkward too; lots of "he's" where it's hard to tell who "he" is. I'd say anyone who's interested in de Kooning should get "de Kooning : An American Master" by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, which is an excellent book.