Francesco Bologna, a noted artist and longtime East Hampton resident, died on Tuesday at the Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Southampton. He was 89. A full obituary will appear in a future issue.
No funeral services will be held, according to his wishes. The family plans a celebration of his life at a date to be announced.
A graveside service for Joseph H. Mintzer, a longtime resident of East Hampton, will be held on Thursday at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in East Hampton. Mr. Mintzer, who was 93, died in his sleep on Friday. A full obituary will appear in a future issue of The Star.
Stewart Pearce, who had a 40-year career with the Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center, died at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan on July 17 with his husband, Kevin Kellogg, at his side. He was 65, and was diagnosed with lymphoma not long ago.
Mr. Pearce first came to East Hampton in 1998, and he and Mr. Kellogg bought a house in Springs on Isle of Wight Road. They cherished the time they had together here, Mr. Kellogg said. Mr. Pearce, who loved to cook and walk the beaches, often said the Springs house was his respite from the stress of the opera world and that every weekend spent here was a vacation.
From 2006 to 2014, he was the assistant general manager at the Met, having begun his career as an intern in 1976. He also served as the managing director of the Opera Guild from 2010 until his retirement in 2015. Peter Gelb, the Met’s managing director, in announcing his death to the members of the opera company, said that Mr. Pearce’s “knowledge of the Met and how it worked was second to none.”
Mr. Pearce was born in Brooklyn on June 1, 1951, to Daniel Pearce and the former Dorothy Linn, and grew up in Fair Lawn, N.J. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University, he later earned a master’s degree in arts administration from New York University.
Mr. Pearce and Mr. Kellogg were married on June 6, 2009, in Lenox, Mass. The couple had been together 18 years and had known each other even longer. They first met as members of a Met Opera audience in 1984, Mr. Kellogg recalled.
Family members said Mr. Pearce was widely read, a world traveler, and a devotee of theater and film. He spent a lot of time at the East Hampton Library, stopped by BookHampton, and attended productions at Guild Hall in East Hampton and Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, as well as Broadway shows.
Devoted to the many pets he and his husband shared over the years, he was often seen in East Hampton walking one of their dogs. They often went to Paris and other European cities, taking in opera productions as they traveled.
“Mr. Pearce will be remembered for his wit and wry sense of humor, his consummate knowledge and love of opera, his gentleness, warmth, humility, optimism, and grace. He was a true gentleman,” his family said.
Mr. Pearce was cremated, and his ashes were buried on Monday at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Rabbi Robyn Tesarsky officiating. A memorial service will be announced in the fall.
Memorial contributions have been suggested to Doctors Without Borders USA, P.O. Box 5030, Hagerstown, Md. 21741-5030.
Robert Barron, a drummer who in the 1940s toured with big bands and played with the likes of Teddy Wilson, Leslie Gart, and Lani McIntyre, died on July 12 at home in Amagansett. He was 95 and had been in hospice care.
Mr. Barron was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 24, 1921, and grew up there, marrying his high school sweetheart, Sylvia Katz, on July 13, 1941. They settled in Manhattan.
When not touring, Mr. Barron worked in jazz clubs on 52nd Street and major New York City hotels including the Waldorf-Astoria.
Drawn to acting in his 30s, he earned scholarships to study with William Hickey, Stella Adler, and Herbert Berghof. That led to appearances in many Off Broadway plays and a short-lived Broadway production, “Mystic Connecticut” with Samuel Levine. While continuing to support himself as a musician, he also acted in regional theaters such as the Charles Playhouse in Boston, where he played Berringer in “Rhinocerous.” It was his proudest role, his daughter said. Boston critics lauded his performance as the finest they had ever seen, he told her, and compared him to Charlie Chaplin.
He worked with Mike Nichols in Philadelphia and in East Hampton appeared at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater with the Phoenix Players. Among his roles there was the lead in Arnold Weinstein’s “The Party.”
Mr. Barron and his wife, Sylvia, an artist, began summering in Amagansett in the mid-1960s with their daughter, Shawn. They eventually built a house with a view of the ocean on Bluff Road and moved there full time about 15 years ago. He enjoyed playing tennis at the courts on nearby Atlantic Avenue, but “found the most enjoyment looking at the ocean from his deck,” his daughter wrote. He would drive to Atlantic Avenue Beach to read The New York Times. In later years he took an active and knowledgeable part in the Amagansett Library’s biweekly Shakespeare discussion group.
He wrote his own obituary, and in it said that he would like people to remember that “he had a good time.”
Mr. Barron is survived by his daughter, Shawn Herlihy of Amagansett, and a grandson. His wife died in October.
A service was held on July 15 at Green River Cemetery in Springs, where he was buried.
Barbara Goldsmith, a prolific writer whose books included the 1980 bestseller “Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last” and who was a founding editor of New York magazine, died on June 26 at her New York City home. She was 85 years old and had congestive heart failure.
In her writing and research, Ms. Goldsmith, who had a house on Georgica Road in East Hampton for many years, had a particular interest in women of note. In addition to her acclaimed account of the 1934 Gloria Vanderbilt custody battle, she wrote “Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull,” which was published in 1998, and “Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie,” in 2005.
According to one of her sons, John Goldsmith of Santa Monica, Calif., she worked with Dr. Mathilde Krim, the founder of the AIDS Medical Foundation, during the mid to late-1980s to secure funding for research during a time when little was understood about the illness.
Mr. Goldsmith said his mother worked with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to get its dyslexia program off the ground, a cause close to her heart because two of her children were dyslexic. She was also supportive of libraries, including the East Hampton Library, where she was an honorary founding chair of and participant in the annual Authors Night fund-raiser, a frequent speaker, and key donor for the new children’s wing
Ms. Goldsmith also fought for book publishers to use acid-free paper after she noticed the historical documents she studied remained intact while newer texts would come apart easily. She also underwrote the PEN Freedom to Write Award, given to writers facing political persecution, between 1987 and 2015.
Despite all these accomplishments, she would have probably thought her crowning achievement was her children and grandchildren, her son said. “I remember her as very loving, very kind to us, always attentive, and smart as hell.”
Ms. Goldsmith was born Barbara Joan Lubin in New York City on May 18, 1931, to Joseph Lubin and the former Evelyn Cronson. She was raised in New Rochelle, N.Y., and graduated from high school there. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1953 with a degree in English and art history.
She and C. Gerald Goldsmith, an investment banker, who eventually divorced, were married in 1954. Her later marriage to the filmmaker Frank Perry, with whom she spent time in East Hampton as well as New York City, also ended in divorce.
Attracted to East Hampton’s then tightly knit creative community, Ms. Goldsmith began spending a lot of time here in the 1960s. “She felt very at home in this community. There was no pretense there. She didn’t feel the staid feeling she would find closer to the city. And then there were the obvious things. It’s beautiful out there,” her son said. He also said she was “the worst shortstop you’ve ever seen,” noting that she had played for the writers at the annual Artists and Writers Softball Game.
Mr. Goldsmith called his mother “a chronicler of a generation.” She wrote for publications including Art News, Woman’s Home Companion, Town and Country, and The New York Herald Tribune. It was in 1966 that Ms. Goldsmith lent Clay Felker, a former editor of the Tribune, enough money to acquire the name of that paper’s Sunday supplement, New York. It became New York magazine, and Ms. Goldsmith was named a founding editor.
“Boy, she could write, that’s for sure, and she was meticulous in her research,” he said. “She was always fascinated by the corrosive influence of money. It seems to run through her work as a theme, that and obviously strong females. Women set apart from their time. She probably identified with those people.” Ms. Goldsmith’s 1987 book “Johnson V. Johnson,” delved into a legal battle among the heirs of the Johnson pharmaceutical fortune. Her only work of fiction, “Straw Man,” was about wrong-doing in the art world.
In addition to her son John, Ms. Goldsmith is survived by another son, Andrew Goldsmith of Beverly Hills, Calif., a daughter, Alice Elgart of New York City, and six grandchildren.
A graveside service for Ms. Goldsmith was held on June 29 at Green River Cemetery in Springs, with Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, of which she was a member, officiating.
Priscilla Bowden Potter, whose paintings captured the beauty and light of the East End, died in New York City after a brief illness on July 19. She was 76.
According to Arlene Bujese, a curator and art dealer who exhibited Ms. Potter’s work, “Her paintings, primarily of the Long Island landscape, evoke a sensitive awareness of the variety of expression to be found in nature. With a relatively light touch, she explored the essence of surrounding spaces particular to the East End, often touching on a particular place: a pond, trees, houses, which were integrated into the painting as though they, too, grew out of the soil. . . .”
While Ms. Potter exhibited her work throughout the United States and in London during a more than four-decade career, she was a fixture in East End galleries, among them Elaine Benson, Lizan-Tops, Vered, and Ms. Bujese’s Newtown Lane venue.
As an integral part of the artistic community here, she donated many works to Southampton Hospital, painted plates for the Retreat’s Artists Against Abuse auctions, and also was a volunteer driver for Meals on Wheels. A music lover who played the flute, she drew the signature William Morris-style artwork used on programs over the years by the Choral Society of the Hamptons.
Helen Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, said, “In addition to being a friend and a generous donor to the Pollock-Krasner House collection, to which she gave works by Alfonso Ossorio, Costantino Nivola, Stanley William Hayter, and Reuben Kadish, she was a gifted painter whose landscapes captured the essences of the places she loved.”
She was among LTV’s first production class in 1986, when public access television was in its infancy. With Genie Henderson, she launched a series called “Meet Your Neighbor, Neighbor,” which was hosted by Jeffrey Potter, the writer who was her husband from 1981 until his death in 2012. She directed programs, served on the LTV board, edited its newsletter, and created dozens of shows for cultural groups. “She brought so much originality to LTV, lifting the often amateur efforts of the rest of us into a new video art form,” Ms. Henderson, LTV’s archivist, said.
She was born in Glen Cove on Feb. 6, 1940, to Clifford M. Bowden and the former Isabel Hamilton. She attended Radcliffe College and studied at the Art Students League in Manhattan. She maintained an apartment in New York City for many years, “particularly for opera and other cultural things,” according to her stepdaughter Manon (Madeleine) Potter. East Hampton was her home from the early 1970s until 2014, when she returned to the city. She and her husband lived in a small house on Sag Harbor Road in East Hampton, where she had a separate studio and he wrote in an outbuilding. They also spent 15 summers in Nova Scotia.
Isabel Carmichael, a longtime friend, said that as a very young person she was struck by Ms. Potter’s beauty, elegance, charm, and wit. She said Ms. Potter was one of the first people diagnosed here with Lyme disease and that she had remained stoical about the effects of treatment.
Ms. Potter is survived by two sisters, Linda Laux of Washington, D.C., and Marybeth Bowden of New York City, and four adult stepchildren. In addition to Manon Potter of East Hampton, they are Job Potter of East Hampton, Gayle Potter Basso of Heber, Ariz., and Horatio Potter of Wilsall, Mont., and New York City.
Arrangements for a memorial service will be announced at a later date.
Mark S. Handler, a former president and chief operating officer of Macy’s who was instrumental in its transformation from a bargain-hunter’s destination to a fashion emporium, died at his East Hampton house on July 16.
Mr. Handler, 83, who also had homes in Manhattan and Wellington, Fla., was found floating in his pool and was taken to Southampton Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, apparently of drowning. Apart from mild arthritis, he had not been ill, said his wife of 56 years, the former Barbara Justin. Police do not consider the death suspicious.
Born in Chicago on March 11, 1933, to parents of modest means, Barney Handler and the former Jule Peterson, Mr. Handler grew up to become a master merchandiser who was among the most admired retailing executives of the 1970s and ’80s. He was instrumental in the introduction of private brands, designer boutiques, the annual Macy’s flower show, black-tie in-store events in support of charities, and more.
His was “a great rags-to-riches story,” said his daughter, Jody Cooper. He was attending the University of Illinois on a basketball scholarship when his older brother was killed in an auto accident, leaving him his parents’ only child. He returned home to be with them, transferring to a community college in Chicago, Roosevelt University, which now counts him among its most distinguished alumni.
He moved to New York in 1958 after being accepted into Macy’s executive training program, and managed to accumulate enough credits for a master’s degree at New York University while working. He sent money home to his parents each week, his daughter said, and after a number of years brought them to New York to live.
His rise through the Macy’s ranks was speedy: junior assistant buyer, buyer, misses’ sportswear buyer, merchandise administrator, vice president, senior vice president, and, in less than 20 years, president and chief operating officer of Macy’s Corporation.
“Mark was one of the nicest, most gentlemanly men I’ve ever met. I was lucky enough to work for him and to be his friend,” said Ellin Saltzman, who first met Mr. Handler at the East Hampton Tennis Club, where he was a founding member, in the late ’60s. She was corporate fashion director at Macy’s when he was its president.
“He was humble and never boastful,” his daughter said. “He helped so many of my friends launch their careers at Macy’s. Many of them now own companies of their own.”
His friends Aaron and Judy Daniels of Bridgehampton and New York called Mr. Handler “a man of style and substance; a raconteur and humorist whose kindness and generosity was unsurpassed.”
With a few other “Macy’s guys,” Mr. Handler rented a summer house on the South Fork after his first year in the city. “I was renting one with some girls,” his wife said. “One of the girls knew one of the guys, and they all came over.” The Handlers were married in 1960.
“We stayed at Mrs. Jones’s Rooming House on the Montauk Highway for $20 a night,” she recalled. “For $2.50 more, you could get a kitchenette, so we got another couple and we split the $2.50.” In 1971, they bought a sprawling “white elephant” on Ocean Avenue in East Hampton, and never regretted it. “Mark adored it out here. He loved to walk to Main Beach, and to Georgica with the kids.”
Mr. Handler took up golf when the Atlantic Golf Club opened in Bridgehampton in 1992, and loved it — he is said to have been “an avid but adequate golfer” — but his real passion, apart from his family, may have been cooking. By all accounts, he was a great cook. “Our house was open house,” his wife said. “Every Fourth of July we had a party, every Labor Day we had a pasta party. We had a lot of dinner parties — he made the most delicious duck.”
“Most people call their mothers for recipe advice, I called my father,” Ms. Cooper said. “He would walk me step by step through recipes on the phone. He cooked pasta sauce all day for the Labor Day party.”
“He was my confidant, my sounding board, my best, best audience,” she added. “We talked almost every day.”
In addition to his wife and daughter, who lives in Chicago, Mr. Handler leaves a son, Jon Handler of Half Moon Bay, Calif., and four grandchildren. More than 150 mourners attended funeral services on July 20 at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton. Burial followed at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in East Hampton.
Memorial donations have been suggested to the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society, 95 Main Street, East Hampton 11937.
Lois Marie Loewen, a member of East Hampton’s Round Swamp Lester family, died at her Newville, Pa., home on July 23 with her husband of 69 years, the Rev. John C. Loewen, at her side. She was 88, just a month shy of her 89th birthday. Though she had Parkinson’s disease, she led a full and happy life, her family said.
She served with her husband in Pennsylvania Methodist churches throughout Cumberland, York, and Adams Counties for 30 years. She bore the duties of a minister’s wife with skill and grace, and greatly enjoyed both her church family and her own, relatives said.
Mrs. Loewen was born on the family homestead in East Hampton on Aug. 19, 1927, the second child of Randolph and Ruth King Lester. She is the last of that family to survive, her brother Randolph having been killed in Europe during World War II and her brothers David and Thomas, and sister, Dorothy, all gone before her. She attended East Hampton High School.
She met her future husband, John Loewen of Mount Joy, Pa., while he was serving in the Navy in 1942. They were married on Dec. 15, 1946, in East Hampton, where they lived and worked until 1962, when they moved their family to Gardners, Pa., to pursue Mr. Loewen’s successful career in the ministry of the Methodist Church.
Mrs. Loewen especially loved camping, outdoor gatherings, and most any group get-together. Knitting was a longtime hobby that she tried to teach her daughters-in-law, Cyndi Loewen, Cherie Loewen, and Rhonda Loewen — with little success, they said, but much fun and laughter.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her sons Bradley Loewen of East Hampton, the Rev. Craig Loewen of Gettysburg, Pa., and Mark Loewen of Woolrich, Pa., and by seven grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews.
Burial was at Fort Indiantown Gap National Cemetery in Annville, Pa., with her son Craig officiating. There was a private family gathering on Friday, followed by a memorial service on Saturday.
The family has suggested memorial contributions to any church or place of worship of the donor’s choosing.
--
Correction: The original online and print version of this obituary gave an incorrect birth date and age for Lois Marie Loewen. She was born on Aug. 19, 1927, and would have been 89, not 90, this year. She and her husband moved to Gardners, Pa., in 1962.
John Jonas Gruen, a writer, critic of several arts, composer, and photographer who for more than five decades chronicled this country’s loftiest cultural circles, died on July 19 in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He was 89 and had been ill for five weeks.
Mr. Gruen and his wife, the painter Jane Wilson, came to the East End in 1957 and bought a carriage house in Water Mill three years later. They became an integral part of the cultural life on the East End as well as in New York City.
Mr. Gruen’s photographs documented the lives of artists and poets at leisure here, both separately and in groups, among them Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Jane Freilicher. Many of his photographs were published in his books “Facing the Artist” and “The Sixties: Young in the Hamptons.”
In addition to his books of photographs, he wrote “The New Bohemia” (1967), “The Private World of Leonard Bernstein” (1968), “The Party’s Over Now” (1972), “Gian Carlo Menotti: A Biography” (1981), and an autobiography, “Callas Kissed Me . . . Lenny Too!” (2008), which dealt openly, and humorously, with his personal as well as professional lives. He also wrote authorized biographies of the Danish ballet star Eric Bruhn and the artist Keith Haring.
When he was first in New York, Mr. Gruen did graduate work at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts and worked as a book buyer for Brentano’s, publicity director at Grove Press, and a photographers’ agent.
As a critic, he started out in the early 1960s writing about music and art for The New York Herald Tribune. A devotee of dance, he wrote some 200 articles for Dance magazine from 1975 to 1997. He also was a critic of the visual arts for New York magazine and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, ARTNews, and other periodicals.
It is difficult to believe Mr. Gruen had any leisure time, for in addition to his criticism and 15 books, his commitment to photography spanned 40 years and led to numerous exhibitions, culminating in “Facing the Artist: Portraits by John Jonas Gruen,” an exhibition of 60 photographs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2010.
Reviewing that show for The Financial Times, Ariella Budick cited Mr. Gruen’s “compulsion to get inside his subjects’ skin and to see the world through their more eminent eyes. The show doesn’t just document several generations of creative types; it records the photographer’s lascivious attraction to their auras.”
Mr. Gruen undoubtedly agreed. His gift for perceptive characterization, in words as well as photographs, was evident in his autobiography, in which he called himself “handmaiden to the stars, reveler in reflected glory, and needy intimate of the super famous.”
According to a 2005 profile in The Star by Robert Long, “Mr. Gruen’s first love was music, and he wanted to make a name for himself as a composer — not of string quartets or symphonies but of classical art songs, a genre that still captivates him.” While that was not to be, an album, “New Songs by John Gruen,” was the first to be released by Elektra Records.
Jonas Grunberg was born on Sept. 12, 1926, in Enghien-les-Bains, a suburb of Paris, to Abraham Grunberg and the former Aranka Dodeles. After four years in Paris and Berlin, the family, who were Jewish, moved to Milan, from which they fled to New York City in 1939. Once in this country, Mr. Gruen Americanized his first and last names. Decades later, when he set aside composing and journalism for photography, he added Jonas as a middle name.
He attended the University of Iowa, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history and, perhaps even more important, met Ms. Wilson, who was also a student there. “It was love at first sight,” he said in his autobiography.
In a review of that book in The Star, Jennifer Landes wrote, “It is clear in all of his descriptions of his family that he adored his wife and daughter (and dogs) and placed them very high on their pedestals.”
They were married on March 29, 1948, and remained together until her death in January 2015. Their daughter, Julia Gruen of New York City, the executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, survives.
Describing himself with acuity in Time Out magazine in 2008, Mr. Gruen said, “One of the big problems is that I never really settled on one thing. I kept them all going, like a juggler, but none of them really took hold in a way that would catapult me as this one creature.”
Leslie M. Walker, a horticulturist who lived in Springs for 35 years, died of an undetermined cause on July 26 in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 67.
“She was a loving and dedicated mother, sister, wife, aunt, and grandmother,” said her husband, Dennis Walker of East Hampton. “Leslie will always be remembered for her kindness, enormous heart, and even warmer soul.”
She was born on Sept. 3, 1948, in Norwalk, Conn., to Edward Clarke and the former Margaret Mathews. Her father, who lives in upstate New York, survives.
Ms. Walker grew up in Summit, N.Y., attended Roy C. Ketcham High School in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., and earned a degree in horticulture and floriculture at the State College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill. Later, she worked at Buckley’s Flower Shop in East Hampton, and tended to many private estates on the South Fork, her husband said. “Her knowledge of plants led her to create lavish gardens through the years that showcased her artistic vision,” he said. “She was fondly nicknamed the Plant Lady by friends due to her love and knowledge of different flora, and her gardens in her yard are envied by all her neighbors.”
Mr. and Ms. Walker were married in Southampton on Oct. 3, 1970. The couple lived on Front Street, where Ms. Walker assumed many roles over the years including den mother to Cub Scouts, Brownie leader, and equestrian mom. “Through these roles, she met and loved many of the children in the community,” her husband said, “often providing rides to and from games and practices.” She loved horses, he said.
A member of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church for many years, she served as a deacon and head of Christian education. She was also a member of the handbell choir and minister search committee. After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, she volunteered for a mission to help those affected. “For all her time volunteering and teaching, she never wanted accolades or attention,” Mr. Walker said. “She exemplified true humility and humanity.”
In addition to her husband and father, Ms. Walker’s three children survive her. They are Dennis Walker Jr. of East Hampton, Jennifer Walker of Flanders, and Morgan Walker of Winston-Salem. Six siblings also survive: Lawrence Clarke of Charlottesville, N.C., David Clarke of Summit, Michael Clarke of Kernersville, N.C., Bonnie Walker of Culver City, Calif., Daisi Johnson of Colorado, and Christopher Clarke of Summit. Four grandchildren, a great-grandchild, and many nieces and nephews also survive.
Visiting hours are today from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton. A funeral will be held tomorrow at 11 a.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, with the Rev. Nancy Howarth officiating. Burial will follow at the Wainscott Cemetery.
Ms. Walker’s family has suggested memorial contributions to the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, 120 Main Street, East Hampton 11937.