A Place in the Sun

More than a century ago a handful of romantic painters from Manhattan discovered the good life on summer outings to the leafy glades of the Catskills (and incidentally founded the first self-conscious U.S. regional group, the Hudson River School). Ever since, artists have made it a habit to pack up canvas and paints, take off for a working summer vacation. In the current paint-for-paint's-sake decade, artists continue to take the bus, borrow a car or hitchhike to the summer Bohemias, where they crowd the bars and grow summer beards.

Last week in many rural outposts their presence made news:

P: Southampton, Long Island's still plush jackets-for-dinner resort, cast a glance back to an earlier generation of summering painters by staging a retrospective of more than 100 turn-of-the-century paintings by the late William Merritt Chase. A friend of Whistler and a dandy in the grand style, Chase inspired his students with his enthusiasms for Velasquez, Frans Hals, Chardin and Japanese printmakers, awed his contemporaries with his exotic, cluttered studios, fez-topped black servants, white wolfhounds and mighty oaths ("My God! I'd rather go to Europe than to Heaven!"). His styles became as varied as his enthusiasms, but in his summer house in Southampton he allowed himself to relax, painted the windswept Shinnecock Hills, and the shore dotted with parasoled ladies, in glowing, impressionist colors as pure as the salt air and clean as fresh linen.

P: Gloucester, Mass, threw the beard, beret and bikini set of latter-day painters into a foot-stamping tizzy with a decision that no nudes will be shown in this week's Sixth Annual Arts Festival. Artists answered the challenge with a threat to stage an all-nude show at nearby Rock-port's Bearskin Neck, began peppering the local newspaper with impassioned protests ("As an artist I love what God created, and I never want to see pants on plants"). At week's end hard-pressed Festival Chairman Ken Gore announced that the ban was only against "questionable nudes," and none of that category had shown up.

P: Provincetown, Mass., which thought it had seen its great days when Eugene O'Neill's players held forth at the Provincetown Playhouse and the Beachcombers' Club was packed with hairy-chested writers, has staged a postwar cultural comeback, is now an oasis of abstract painters, most of them clustered around Manhattan Mentor Hans Hofmann, 75, whose summer class this year numbers loo-odd. Talk of the town: a lighthearted deviation from orthodoxy by one of the founders of abstract expressionism, Robert Motherwell, who is showing 32 line drawings of a nude model. P: East Hampton, Long Island's hard-driving avant-garde rival to Provincetown ever since the late Jackson Pollock moved there ten years ago, last week made a bid for more recognition with the opening of the artist-organized Signa Gallery, hurriedly converted from the former Maidstone Market on Main Street in time to catch the summer rush. With a six-artist show that included half a dozen space-whirling abstractions by Chicago Second Prizewinner James Brooks (TIME, Jan. 21), opening night drew a crowd of more than 600. Says Artist Alfonso Ossorio, whose 8-ft.-by-r.2-ft. abstraction, Advent, dominates the show: "Our idea is to show that the era of discovery and evolution is not over." Judged by one standard, the artists seemed to be making their point: sales for the first week totaled $2,850.

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