Young in the Hamptons

About the Book

Photographer/writer John Jonas Gruen and his wife, the painter Jane Wilson, occupied a unique place in the Hamptons of the late 1950s and l960s. They became the nucleus of a brilliantly gifted group of painters, writers, poets and musicians, who would gather in the Gruen home in Water Mill during a period when all the arts were in ferment and when being a part of the Hamptons' creative milieu meant witnessing the rise of many vibrant and astonishing new American art forms.

Thanks to the physical beauty and miraculous light of the east end of Long Island, artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Grace Hartigan, Saul Steinberg and Jane Wilson, among so many others, forged art works of extraordinary originality and vision; poets such as Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest came to the region to commune with sea, earth and sky and create poems that celebrated individuality of soul and spirit. And musicians such as Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss and Leonard Bernstein all found the compelling aura of the Hamptons both inspiring and nourishing.

In this album of photographic memories, John Jonas Gruen captures some of this heady aura as he photographs his many friends and party guests singly and in groups on his Water Mill patio, in his house, on the beach and elsewhere, offering a glimpse of what it was like back then . . . when everyone was young and beautiful and possessed of that special sense of well-being that allowed for at least the "look" of a charmed Hampton life.

As Gruen puts it in his introduction to "Young in the Hamptons," "These pictures certainly don't speak of artistic struggle nor of poverty nor of personal upheaval, although all of us did struggle and most of us were poor and quite a few of us experienced personal upheaval. But it is the miracle of the camera that it can record a reality subject to many interpretations. Basically, my camera has recorded people at their happiest and most positive."

"Young in the Hamptons" heralds a certain historic resonance, for it was a time when artists shared a togetherness and moments of conviviality that in these electronic, computerized times may be close to vanishing. It was a time when artists genuinely loved being together and when "drinks at the Gruens" meant that the click of a camera would invariably record this beguiling togetherness for posterity.

About the Author

Sam Swasey was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1987. He later moved to Burlington, Vermont where he received a degree in English and Studio Art from the University of Vermont. Soon after his graduation he moved to Berlin, Germany where he worked in the Arts and spent many months travelling throughout Europe. Swasey and his wife, Karolina, now live together in New York where he is completing a Masters Degree in Writing and Art Criticism at the School of Visual Arts. Gruen’s career as playwright began in the late 1950s. In the subsequent years, Gruen applied for and was admitted into the Playwrights Unit of the Actors Studio. As a journalist, John Gruen became a music and art critic for the New York Herald Tribune, for which he worked from 1960 to 1967. He also became a noted cultural writer for the New York Times, Vogue Magazine, New York Magazine, Architectural Digest and Dance Magazine. Under the name John Jonas Gruen, he began his career as photographer. Specializing in black and white portraiture, he has been widely exhibited, and, in 2010, received a one-man exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. John Gruen is married to the painter, Jane Wilson. Their daughter, Julia Gruen, is the Executive Director of the Keith Haring Foundation.