Lou Spitalnick of Montauk is a master of platinum printing, one of only 500 or so photographers in the world who use it exclusively. The arduous process heightens the Old World painterliness and intensifies the details in the still lifes that are his obsession.

An art history scholar and a former newspaper art critic, Mr. Spitalnick lives on the bluffs overlooking the ocean with two massive dogs, a Great Pyrenees named Tiberius and a briard named Imogen.

He tore down an old shack there 28 years ago and built a house that plays on a visitor's senses like a contrapuntal melody. It has the stained-glass and lofty-ceilinged grandeur of a fine old church, but its cluttered corners and country furnishings make it the coziest of beach cottages. The dual effect is not unlike that of his photographs.

Medieval Image

In his studio, he had arranged against a plain brown cloth some pink and white lilies, the flowers no larger than a child's palm, in a narrow, chipped glass vase. A pair of old crosses on chains, one wooden and one of tarnished silver, lay nearby.

With sunlight hung across it, the image was medieval Italian or Spanish, yet almost Japanese in its restraint - and about to be tossed in the trash. The flowers, which appeared perfectly fresh and lovely, were an hour too long out of the Red Horse Market, said the photographer.

"I like to have an almost botanical style, showing flowers at their most beautiful and ideal," he explained. "My pictures aren't iconographic. There's no program, no dead flowers."

He had been at work that day on the last print he needed for a show at the Pace Collection in Manhattan, which runs through April 21. The image was baroque - quinces, a flute, sheet music, and old books, all scattered across an antique cloth of silk damask, frayed around the edges.

Mr. Spitalnick's art history studies have left him with a deeply classical sensitivity, although, he stressed, "I don't want pastiche. I don't want my photographs to look like copies of paintings."

The platinum printing process makes that impossible. According to John Stevenson, owner of the Platinum Galleries in Chelsea and Santa Fe, it results in "the most expanded tonal scale of anything in the world. It leads to extremely beautiful highlights that are octaves above what silver processing can do."

"Platinum photographs have a distinctly holographic quality," said Mr. Stevenson.

Dealer's Theory

The dealer, whose galleries may be the only ones in the world devoted exclusively to platinum, has a theory as to why: "We are being confronted with so much more visual data, more details, than anything we've ever seen graphically before, that our brains are compelled to turn that into a three-dimensional experience."

The difference between platinum plate and ordinary methods is that platinum produces an archival image to last for "a galactic generation," said Mr. Stevenson.

Mr. Spitalnick said it sometimes seems that making one perfect print takes that long.

"It's maddening. It'll print differently in summer than in winter. If it's a damp summer, I'm in real trouble."

Painstaking Work

He finds profound joy in having mastered a most difficult medium, but said the work is enormously straining. Mr. Spitalnick uses a view-camera, so he sees all his images upside down, takes dozens and dozens of shots to find one that pleases him, and then develops all his prints by hand, as the medium requires.

It involves a decision of near spiritual dimensions to choose from among 30 types of nonabsorbent paper. The photographer must make copious notes on correct exposure time and measure and mix some valuable and potentially dangerous chemicals.

Trying over and over for a perfect print of an image of calla lilies, to be used in a Manhattan show, Mr. Spitalnick mixed some drops of platinum, for high contrast, with some palladium, for warmth - an alchemist working with materials even more valuable than gold.

Photogravure

"Every picture is hand-coated," he said. "It's tiring. Maybe I make a lot of trouble for myself. I have my own peculiar rituals. Not everybody goes through the same tsoris."

Occasionally, he steps away from still lifes to photograph the bridges around Manhattan, depicting them as still lifes to photograph the bridges around Manhattan, depicting them as suggestive images that are always emerging from or slipping into fog.

He is making a collection of miniature portraits, too, of friends and acquaintances - Arkady Lvov, also a platinum photographer, posed with White Russian intensity, in a massive fur coat - and is experimenting with photogravure, a process that results in more grainy and impressionistic pictures, and that is itself experiencing a comeback.

"It's like taking a break. So much easier, far less expensive, and a million times less time-consuming than platinum," he said.

Georgia Peaches

It took Mr. Spitalnick several hours to make one print of what has become his trademark platinum image - Georgia peaches in an abused-looking pewter bowl. (Mr. Stevenson said a certain well-heeled collector of 15th, 16th, and 17th-century Flemish oils had bought one to hang among his paintings "because it fit there so well.")

Platinum-plate printing, the first method ever invented for developing photographs, fell out of use during World War I, when the price of platinum skyrocketed and the required paper was unavailable.

Still among the most expensive images on paper, platinum prints are now reserved for museums and connoisseurs - the Queen of England is a collector - and the medium, as costly as it is time-consuming, is only for the most devoted and meticulous of photographers.

Art Posters

Each mistake or substandard print represents 100 wasted dollars, and Mr. Spitalnick's editions are of just 25 prints. That has been limiting, as it is for all platinum-plate photographers.

Recently, he agreed to have some of his photographs reproduced as art posters. Even as the first ones are being distributed around the world, the photographer continues to debate with himself over the merits and dangers of moving outside the rarefied strata of platinum photographers and collectors.

"I don't like to call myself an artist," he said. "Everybody wants to be an artist. I'd rather not be in that crowded category. But I am very serious about this work. I'm excited about what I do, and I'm beset by doubts about whether it's any good, special, and distinct."

A show of 17th and 18th-century Italian paintings at the Academy of Design about 15 years ago "got me fixated on still lifes," he said. "I was fascinated. I wanted to do work like that."

"I tried to paint as a kid, but I got waylaid and didn't pursue it. So in some ways, I'm picking up where I left off, being true to my childhood. I just found a photographic medium through which I could produce the effects of the still life."

Mr. Spitalnick was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, then a working-class, mostly Jewish neighborhood with, he said, more than the average number of writers, artists, and musicians. It was there, said the photographer, that he developed his love of the finer arts.

Newspaper Critic

He shared with an older cousin, who became an architect, an interest in classical and Renaissance painting. His father played the violin, imparting an appreciation for opera and ballet, and his mother introduced him to other forms of classical music.

Even before studying comparative literature in graduate school, he learned to read French, Italian, and German. His literary tastes were "conservative," he said, leaning toward Shakespeare and Proust.

It was not until after graduate school that he became preoccupied with traditional still life. As the New York and East Coast art critic for The New Haven Register, though, he had little time for anything but writing. For more than 10 years, he was immersed in the art world as its correspondent.

"I wrote about El Greco, 19th-century French artists, anything. And I'd go wherever I could."

Although he has been handling a camera for 35 years, he began to work seriously in the medium about 15 years ago.

Pioneering Mentor

"I'm privileged to have the time to make a lot of blunders, and the means to pursue certain things until I see they are leading me down blind alleys," Mr. Spitalnick said.

He learned the platinum process from Lois Conner, a modern pioneer of the medium. She taught him the necessity of finding a format.

Hers - panoramic shots of far-flung landscapes resembling Oriental scroll paintings - was dictated by the old "banquet" camera she uses. He went in the opposite direction, looking for new images by getting as close as possible to "very small, very special things."

He shoots for the process, allowing it to dictate his choice of fruit, flowers, bowls and other subjects. The medium becomes the message.

But, said Mr. Spitalnick, Ms. Conner also taught him to allow the form to set him free.

"Think of a sonnet, something formal. And then, getting close, that shifts your attention to things you've never noticed before. The tiny details. And then you want to explore more and more of those new images."

Fond Memories

Springs

April 7, 1997

Dear Helen,

I would like to convey my heartfelt gratitude to the many local people who have over the years expressed their fond memories and appreciation of my father.

He so loved the sense of community he felt in Springs, from biking to Louse Point, where he was deeply impressed by the solitude and hard work of the baymen, to stopping at the Barnes Store, where he would order a "nice cuppa coffee." When he returned to the studio, he would use in his paintings what he had just seen and heard.

Over the years many people worked on the studio - plumbers, carpenters, house painters. He admired their craft to such an extent that when distinguished visitors arrived to view paintings, my father would ask, "Howdja like to see the boiler room?" Or he might point out the huge stainless steel kitchen sink which he had designed himself, overlooking the fact that he had actually designed the entire studio inside and out.

He was proud to be an honorary member of the Springs Fire Department. "I get to pick out the fires," he said.

To honor my father's deep love of Springs, it is my family's hope to place one of his sculptures by the water, where he often was found "getting ideas" or "having a nice little talk with that fellow down there."

Thank you all for making my father feel such a part of this town.

Sincerely yours,

LISA de KOONING

'Leak Of The Week'

Manorville

April 7, 1997

Dear Editor:

Welcome to Brookhaven National Laboratory's continuing course on radioactivity titled: "The Leak of the Week." The first lesson was on tritium, followed by cobalt, strontium, and cesium. More recently, they've covered radium and americium.

At first I thought the lab's radioactive leaks were due to negligence and incompetence, which amount to criminal behavior. But now I see that Brookhaven Lab officials are merely teaching us how radioactivity affects the earth, air, and our drinking water.

Which radionuclides are created in the lab's nuclear reactors and how do they affect the environment? See? You don't know. Not to worry, however. The lab's next lesson is scheduled for next week.

Sincerely,

PETE MANISCALCO

Please address correspondence to [email protected]

Please include your full name, address and telephone number for purposes of verification.

The Hamptons International Film Festival has expanded its board of directors and begun a new fund-raising pitch.

Tinka Topping, one of the founders of the festival and its secretary until last month, has resigned from the board of directors. Taking her place as secretary is Bruce Feinberg. Karen Fifer Ferry, the former treasurer of the board, has become one of four vice chairs, as has Pat Swinney Kaufman. Robert Wiesenthal took over Ms. Fifer Ferry's position.

In addition, two new faces, Rodney Miller and Patricia Weeks, have joined the board of directors.

Sapphire Anniversary

The fifth annual Film Festival will come to town in October and to make the sapphire anniversary all the more sparkling, the board is soliciting platinum, gold, and silver patrons. Those who give $5,000 to the festival become platinum patrons and gain unlimited access to all festival events. A $2,500 donation turns a donor into a gold patron and contributors of $1,000 earn the title of silver patron.

Of these, only the platinum patrons will receive tickets to the festival with their donation. The names of all patrons will be listed in the 1997 festival program book. For those who wish to see the films, the Film Festival will also continue to offer founders passes for $1,000 donations, and film buff passes for a minimum donation that has not yet been determined.

Adolescent trauma - being sentenced to one year in a Florida high school - seared into me a resolve never to set foot on that dangling appendage to the United States ever again.

Decades passed, and trips were taken to islands all over the Caribbean before that resolve weakened enough to take my child on a school holiday to Siesta Key on the Gulf Coast, where I had friends, to soften the pain of facing Florida again.

A dull time was had by all the adults, but at least there was Barnum & Bailey's winter circus and other attractions to amuse a child and the area was cheap and restful. Parents just have to offer up these excursions - like logging hours at the playground watching kids try to damage each other with coveted toys.

Then, eureka! They all grew up and my husband and I were invited to Key West for a look-see. The fact that this Southernmost City (as it bills itself) is barely in the Sunshine State and is only 90 miles from Cuba, thus dependably warm and horticulturally exotic, enhanced its appeal.

That was seven years ago and now we approach each January with wild anticipation of returning. Key West is truly not Florida! It's the Conch Republic, which, something like Peconic County, keeps trying to secede from the rest of the state, with which it has little patience.

Key West never did recognize Prohibition; its oldest families are descended from wreck-salvagers who emigrated from the Bahamas when too few ships ran aground and pickings got lean around about the 18th century. These British colonists and the numerous Cubans who migrated to Key West after their revolution in 1869 form the native "conch" population.

Conch Cooking

Key West cookery is a lot more "conch" and Southern than is Miami Beach "South Florida" cuisine, which I have actually seen referred to as "Floribbean." Cooking by Key Westers, old and new, is closer akin to the food in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's "Cross Creek Cookery" and the verities of Spanish-Cuban traditional cuisine.

Whole roast pigs are still turned on spits in large barbecue pits for Nochebuena (Christmas Eve) and there are places that will do the job for you - takeout whole roast suckling pig (lechon asado).

Black beans and yellow rice are commonplace in restaurants that are not Cuban. But you won't see a lot of sliced pineapple, coconut-wrapped shrimp, and other fruit with fish frou-frou in any but the most expensive, touristy restaurants in Key West - these often run by Marriott or some other hotel chain.

Though a few of the chefs try to ape the South Beach "new South Florida cuisine," their eateries have a way of going out of business alarmingly often.

Balance

One of those chefs, Norman Van Aken, has a new joint in South Beach, glowingly described in Sunday's New York Times Travel Section. He used to cook at the Cafe Marquesa here in Key West.

He is indeed a gifted cook, though his fantasies have a little more spin on them than I personally like, and he keeps everything in fairly reasonable "balance" (the new buzzword in foodese, if you haven't already noticed).

Other, less adroit practitioners, would be better advised to let well enough alone. South Florida has a fabulous supply of fruits, vegetables, and seafood and quite adequate supplies of pigs, chickens (too many roosters, in fact), and steers, much of it from within the state.

Timeless Mojo Sauce

"The Taste of Key West" was a recent fund-raiser sponsored by a group of restaurants: I couldn't go but I'm sure that the offerings included the "best" conch fritters, fried dolphin, key lime pie, and conch chowder.

I'm fond of other Cuban conch specialities with a dignified staying power such as mojo, a timeless sauce for just about everything, made from the sour oranges that still grow on trees all over town, tons of garlic, cilantro, and olive oil.

Also bollos, a black-eyed pea fritter, and our household's new favorite, calabaza soup, which I embellish with nontraditional chive-flecked sour cream.

All the ingredients can be found in Northern ethnic markets and on the East End it is not unlikely that you'll find them in the King Kullen, which has a lot of Hispanic foodstuffs and produce. (I will have to admit though, that the fruits never taste as good as they do on their native ground.)

Calabaza Soup

Calabaza is a type of pumpkin that appears in West Indian and South Florida markets and in the ethnic foods sections of many national supermarket chains. Hubbard or butternut or acorn squashes make good substitutes for it, though I think the bright orange calabaza produces a creamier-textured soup (or pureed vegetable).

Our winters in Key West have led me to investigate the possibilities of its many tropical fruits and vegetables. Most of them are bursting with health-giving qualities that the trendy will soon embrace.

Makes about two quarts.

2 lb. piece of calabaza or other hard, orange-fleshed squash

2 Tbsp. peanut or canola oil

1 medium onion, sliced

1 or 2 carrots, peeled and sliced

2 ribs celery, peeled and sliced

3 or 4 cloves fresh garlic, sliced

1 tsp. Ras Al Hanout or 1 tsp. ground cumin plus 1/8 tsp. cayenne, pinch of ground clove, cinnamon, and cardamom. (Ras Al Hanout is a scintillating spice mixture often used in couscous and other North African dishes, especially Moroccan ones. It can be found in some food specialty shops, or by mail from Kalustyan Orient Export Trading Corp., 123 Lexington Avenue, New York 10016. Though it is racily hot, a tiny bit of it does great things for all sorts of dishes, Moroccan or not.)

4 cups degreased chicken bouillon

1 medium bay leaf

4 sprigs fresh thyme

Salt and freshly milled black pepper to taste

Garnish:

1 Tbsp. light sour cream, room temperature, and a sprinkling of fresh-snipped chives for each serving (important, do not omit)

Preparation

Cut the calabaza into manageable pieces and whittle off the rind with a good sharp vegetable peeler. Scrape out any seeds or pith and cut the squash into one-inch chunks. Heat the oil to very hot in a deep soup pot or pressure cooker and saute the onion, carrot, celery, and garlic until limp.

Add the Ras Al Hanout or other spices and cook briefly, stirring. Add the calabaza, chicken stock, bay leaf, and thyme sprigs tied together with string (for easy removal). Simmer, covered, for about 35 minutes, when the vegetables should be very soft. If you have a pressure cooker, the time can be shortened to 12 minutes at full pressure and immediate pressure reduction (this method retains the most nutrients).

Remove the herbs, then puree the soup in blender or processor. Fill a big, deep, soup bowl and top the serving with lightly beaten sour cream floated on top and a sprinkling of chopped chives.

This soup is also delicious served chilled.

Bollos

These are a delicious idea for summer cocktail snacks. They are street food, like falafel, and utterly irresistible.

The batter can be made up in advance and deep-fried or even shallow-fried in an electric skillet heated to 350 F. Bollos should be served hot, hot, hot and well drained, with some kind of hot sauce (like the mojo that follows).

Thanks go to Steven Raichlen, a Miami food writer, for this terrific recipe.

Makes about 40.

1 cup dried black-eyed peas

10 cloves fresh garlic

1/2 medium onion, peeled and cut coarsely

1 Scotch Bonnet (hellfire) chili or a slightly less hot Habanero, seeds removed (handle with gloves)

3 Tbsp. fresh cilantro or Italian parsley, minced

2 eggs

1 egg-white, whipped

2 tsp. kosher salt

1 tsp. freshly milled black pepper

1 tsp. baking powder

About 2 cups vegetable oil for frying

Soak the peas overnight in cold water and drain. Remove any damaged ones. Put them along with the garlic, onion, and chili into a food processor and pulse away until you have a fairly smooth mixture. Add the cilantro and two eggs, the salt, pepper, and baking powder. Scrape into a bowl and fold in the beaten eggwhite. Drop by soupspoonsful into the hot oil and turn after one minute with a wire skimmer (or whatever you have). Don't crowd the oil.

I find a wok useful for this type of frying, as it produces the largest frying surface with the least depth of oil. An electric fryer is, of course, the most reliable and easiest of all. Most small crockpots do an excellent job of deep frying, too.

Drain the fritters well and serve on a bed of crushed napkins in a basket, along with some kind of dipping sauce. The sauce is not traditional, but a good one would be light mayonnaise thinned with lime juice and some kind of hot sauce, if you like spicy things.

Cubans don't really go in for a lot of heat, but "conchs" do and the gourmet market here stocks a zillion of them. Matouk's (if you can find it) makes one of the best.

Mojo

This acidic sauce (pronounced mo-ho) is omnipresent on Cuban tables and can be approximated using regular limes for the sour oranges (naranja agria) you can't buy anywhere that I know of. Splash it on fritters, seafood, roast pork, use it as a marinade, dab a bit behind your ears . . . you'll love it.

Makes one pint.

15 cloves fresh garlic

1 tsp. ground cumin

2 tsp. kosher salt

2 tsp. fresh black pepper, coarsely milled

1 Scotch Bonnet or habanero chili, seeded (optional)

1 cup good olive oil

1 cup fresh lime juice plus 2 Tbsp. orange juice

Put the ingredients into a food processor in the order given and pulse until thoroughly amalgamated. To use immediately, you might add some fresh cilantro, chopped in some of the sauce, but it turns an unattractive green if it sits around too long.

Mojo is pretty indestructible kept in the fridge.

In a centennial tribute to two master lyricists, Ira Gershwin and E.Y. (Yip) Harburg, the Bay Street Theatre will welcome back Phillip Officer on Saturday in "Yip and Gersh."

Mr. Officer, who was last seen at Bay Street two years ago, has been described as "arguably the most talented male cabaret singer to emerge in the past five years" by The New York Times. He has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Algonquin Hotel, the Russian Tea Room, and Rainbow and Stars in Manhattan.

Acting To Music

He began his career as an actor, performing in regional productions of "Hamlet" and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" as well as "Cabaret," "Annie," "Pippin," and "Hayfever." But it was his appearances in "The Sweetest Sounds: The Music of Richard Rodgers," "If This Isn't Love: The Music of Burton Lane," and "Hit the Road to Dreamland: Songs of the '40s" that have established his name as a singer.

His debut recording, "Fancy Meeting You: The Lyrics of E.Y. (Yip) Harburg," received a 1994 Backstage Bistro Award. His most recently released album is "Many a New Day: The Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein."

His performance will start at 7 p.m. at the Sag Harbor theater.

Coming up on April 19, Susannah McCorkle, a jazz and pop singer, will appear at Bay Street.

Death gave the final edge to the shape of Willem de Kooning's life, a wonderful life of struggle and fulfillment.

Obituaries, memoirs, reports of every detail of the dignified funeral and elegant reception at the vast, spectacular Springs studio where he worked for more than 30 years appeared by the score as hungry writers and photographers feasted on the rich remains and friends elbowed to gain recognition for their places in the great man's life.

The thinking about de Kooning and his meaning both as an artist and as our zeitgeist - the spirit of the time - has only just begun.

Cultural Stardom

Perhaps it can only begin and begin again, just as he would do in his painting. There is no ending. It is a self-perpetuating subject, much larger than the self-serving anecdotes that mark too many of the recollections avalanching the media since his passing on March 19.

For an intensely private and personal abstract artist, an enigma understood by few, he has, amazingly, become a popular hero. Along with Jackson Pollock, he has attained indestructible cultural stardom in the American art constellation, comparable to that of the legendary Babe Ruth in baseball.

And as if that weren't enough, he is a rags-to-riches role model, America's favorite kind of American star.

Last February, an exhibit of work from the last decade of de Kooning's life opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the final stop, through April 29, in a year-and-a-half tour of the United States and abroad.

Change In Style

It covers the period during which his painting style underwent a startling change, from intense, feverish, lavishly layered and multidirectioned strokes in colors of his own invention, to beautiful, doodle-like, floating, swerving, long, unbroken, circling outlines of primary color - red, yellow, blue - like an ice-skater's arabesques, thinned-out and transparent ribbons of paint on a white ground.

From the short scrub, the lurch, the stumble, the slide, the hook, the slash of the '60s and '70s, he went to the long, dangerous, sustained flight. From the fling-and-sting attack, he came to this, almost as a caress - and, as always, both slow and fast at the same time.

Critical Breach

As controversial as the brilliant Abstract Expressionist work had been, the abrupt change in style has equally provoked arguments, scrutiny, and questions, of a different nature perhaps, yet consistent in pitch, passion, and polarities with all the art world reaction to de Kooning's work at each period of change.

The excellent essay by Robert Storr of MoMA for the current show's catalogue practically equates the late paintings with de Kooning's final arrival at his Holy Grail. The critic Hilton Kramer, whose vehement attack in The New York Observer appeared on the day the artist died, brands them as junk.

The breach is no less among artists, from Chuck Close, who believes in the resolution de Kooning found in his new period, to Susan Rothenberg, who discounts the paintings as vacuous.

Questions

The questions continue:

Is the change due to the Alz heimer's disease that was claiming the mind of the aging artist?

Is there a missing link? Is there no link at all?

Do the late works, as Mr. Kramer accuses, belong less to the history of the artist than to the history of the art market?

Should these paintings be treated as a separate issue or as an outgrowth of the previous work? Or both?

Would we care as much about them if they had not been made by Willem de Kooning?

If we could choose a painting from the de Kooning oeuvre, from which period would it be?

Artist In His Art

This critic, although fiercely devoted to the artist and his art, finds herself still on the fence with the last works. Bill de Kooning would like that. He liked to keep things open, everything a possibility. He liked changes of mind and contradictions and paradox.

All the same, de Kooning's place as an intensely autobiographical painter in the fragmentation and ironies of a besieged present is no less ingrained in the late paintings than in all his work.

The paintings are compelling because he was compelling - brilliant and dumb at the same time, rendering the self in all its knowing and not knowing, its contradictions, insights and lost-ness, as his subject.

And always the relish of the pigment and the brush, and everything he could make it do. His sheer skill and craftsmanship - love for his materials and tools - was as much the subject as what he was thinking about or not thinking at the moment of his act of art.

Never has the self been marked out more directly and more densely. The crux of his greatness for me is in the way he brought up his image from the blind inside and bound it, however raw and ferocious, into equilibrium with the paint.

He Did What He Could

Considering the current Whitney Biennial (which, ironically, had its press preview on the day de Kooning died), with its forecast of the brand-new bubble-gum aesthetic, Willem de Kooning - the quintessential expression of Western painting - may well have taken it with him.

In the last works, he did what he could do, just as he always did. As he felt his mind slip, he allowed the sheer pleasure and the necessary habit of painting to take over.

He had passed the crisis of self. The self could no longer be an issue, so, being the practical and pragmatic Dutchman that he was, he settled for doing what he could - stop the torture and, for as long as he could, render the joy.

Conversation In 1984

"Just because you're getting older doesn't mean you're doing it better," de Kooning told me in 1984. "But you can't stop. You just can't stop yourself to find out, or you might stop, period."

"And the hardest thing is to begin again after you stop. As long as it goes, you go with it, even though you don't know where you're going, because you never know. You never did know. You just keep leaving from where you've been, and you go with it and you keep on going. Just like you always did."

We were sitting in the Adirondack rocking chairs, our eyes on the large canvas he was working on, with its swooping, swirling lines, at the other end of the studio.

Transitions

He wasn't referring in particular to the new series, but rather answering my questions about his transitions from figuration to abstraction, from landscape to the movement of water and the sea, and the mixture of abstraction with imagery, characteristic of his entire oeuvre.

Prime germinal figure of Abstract Expressionism (along with Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko), his shift to what has been referred to as his "old-age" style was certainly in evidence, not only in the painting on the easel but in the many stacked up against columns and bins all over the palatial place.

While his answer certainly applied to the new work, it essentialized the momentum and attitudes of his entire life. Above all, it expressed the ultimately practical, pragmatic temperament of the tough and tenacious Willem de Kooning, whose spirit infuses the very same studio on Woodbine Drive in Springs where we sat and talked on that indelible day.

At the time, he was just 80. He would paint for another six years before he "drifted away from his brushes and pigment," as Mr. Storr puts it.

Prolific Decade

With his style having become more relaxed and glib, the last decade of his painting life was the most prolific of de Kooning's entire career.

The tension and angst so central to his work was gone from the new series. They were easier to do, faster for the "slipping glimpser," as he called himself, to slip out of. It was what he could do at the time, and so that is what he did.

As entrapped in meaning as the pre-'80s works are, so liberated from the burden of meanings are those of the '80s. Having plumbed the depths and the meaning of flesh - its movement, spirit, and chaos - de Kooning now painted the movements of air, of flight, of song.

The late paintings also appear to trace the structure and trajectory of the early ones, as if now, in studying de Kooning with some distance, he wants to analyze what he did 40 years before.

The tension and angst so central to his work was gone from the new series. As entrapped in meaning as the pre-'80s works are, so liberated from the burden of meanings are those of the '80s.

I compared a 1988 painting at MoMA to "Asheville" of 1948. In its very contradiction of forms and surface there is a relationship, natural to de Kooning as a conclusive demonstration of madness and method, a final revelation of his love for polarity, for opposites, for the hot, quivering little "yes" behind the cold, firm, big "no."

I would like to see these paintings placed close to the beginnings to see how the wheel came round, how it shakes down after the struggle is over.

Powerful Brushstrokes

It was de Kooning's habit to bicycle from his studio down to Louse Point and watch the sky, the quiet horizon, the setting sun, the flight track of the gulls in space. In the end, it would be his metaphor. Everything he painted was rooted in the flesh of the real world. And he turned everything into paint, just as a writer turns everything into words.

His brushstrokes were the secret of his art. Previously, each and every one could be more than a whole painting. Each beautiful brushstroke was like a soliloquy as it snapped back into itself, as it drew itself into full power, like an ocean wave as it weaves back and forth before it heaves down.

Improvisation and spontaneity were the tools of his intuition. In his very inability to resolve the conflict, he shows the authenticity of his art, a war of the selves - his lyric nature and the adventurous, passionate, restless prober.

Craftsmanship

He was uncommonly skilled, highly trained as a craftsman and housepainter and deeply educated as a fine-art painter, with enormous control over his tools and materials. He even knew how to paint faux effects - wood and marble, in particular.

There was nothing he could not do with the brush and the paint. He understood the action of paint on the surface and how to lay it on in all those different ways - thickness, brushwork, scraping the paint down to the plaster and beginning again.

With his great admiration for all craftsmanship, he once employed a carpenter who loved making little wooden compartments with collar studs. De Kooning did not wear collar studs and never did.

Why these drawers, and all the collar studs? I asked. "Look how beautiful they're made," he said. "That's what he's good at."

Long Journeys

He never used acrylics. Even oils dried too fast for him to keep working the transformations and destructions and changes which were so much a part of his approach - the scraping, the laying-on, the building-up, the tearing-down.

Acrylics don't offer the drag, the resistance he needed in the slag of the oil.

De Kooning did not like shortcuts. He insisted on taking the long way around. His epic-making "Woman," the first major painting of the Woman series of 1950, took two years to paint.

Not that he was slow. As a matter of fact, he worked rapidly and obsessively. But each painting was a long journey, made up of stops and starts, turnings-around and going back to beginnings.

The paintings give a feeling of images lost, lurking ghosts of the one that remains in the canvas.

No Pretense

De Kooning's basic attitude was that of a workingman doing the physical job with all the skill at his command, no pretense, trying to do it better than he knew how.

His manner was somewhere between blue-collar tough and country boy, reinforced by his straight-from-the-shoulder talk and heart-of-the-matter wit.

He wore housepainter's white overalls. The land he bought to build his studio on was in a working-class neighborhood, although by the time he bought it in the '60s, he could have afforded the other side of the tracks.

The environment of high art and avant-gardism is one Jackson Pollock avoided and Willem de Kooning escaped.

How Many Ways?

I asked him on the occasion of my 1984 visit, "How does it feel to be rich and famous?" His paintings were selling at auction for millions.

He said, "Vell, it's nice to know I can make a living."

I said, "What about being famous? How does it feel to be so famous?"

He said, "Vell, you know, it doesn't come into my head."

The painting, as fresh daily impulse, as an exercise of the mind and spirit, as an invocation to God, if you will, was what it was about. Starting a fresh canvas meant reopening, reinvoking the problem - impossible to solve, possible only to begin.

How many ways to begin, how many ways to keep going? This is what obsessed de Kooning. Fame was as far from his comprehension of reality as the Man in the Moon.

At Wolfie's

The East End artists, particularly the young ones who live and work around Springs, whose hero he is, could be found on the day of the funeral not at the big studio reception - since they did not really know him personally and were too shy to crash, as too many others did - but at Wolfie's bar on Fort Pond Boulevard.

They were drinking to him there in celebration of his life and in the ambition to keep alive the tradition of Western painting as experienced through and by de Kooning, the very quintessence of that history.

That little group of young painters, some of whom deliberately live in the area made sacred by Pollock and de Kooning, knows it is a threatened species. Some even work as house painters, prompted by de Kooning's example. And that's how it is.

What Of The Studio?

What are the plans for the de Kooning studio, surely a monument to the artist, with its brushes, pigments, and books still neatly laid out, as it was his habit to do in preparation for the next day?

(He was, in my observation, one of the neatest and most orderly of all artists in his working habits, just as a good workingman should be, giving full respect to his tools and materials.)

There is talk of making the studio an East Hampton landmark, similar to the Krasner-Pollock House and Studio. There is also talk of an artists' residence program with fellowships for young artists to live and work there free from worldly intrusions, similar to programs like Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and, closer to home, the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk.

I will continue to think about Bill de Kooning. Thinking about him and his work always brings freshness to the mind. Here on the East End we were so lucky to have him in our midst, and now to know that his ashes are in the wind.

The actor and social activist Danny Glover made room in his busy Hollywood schedule recently to spend a few days in Bridgehampton at the behest of his longtime friend Kathy Engel, who has a child attending the new Hayground School there.

With Belvie Rooks of San Francisco, an award-winning writer whom Ms. Engel also knows from activist circles, and the actor Roy Scheider, another Hayground parent, the group created an original production, featuring the two Hollywood stars, that they hope will not only raise money for the school but spread its message to a wider public.

Called "Who's Gonna Be There?," the production is scheduled for presentation as a benefit for the school at the Bay Street Theatre on May 10.

Diversity

"There's something extraordinary happening" at Hayground, Mr. Glover told The Star. The actor said he saw the school, which prides itself on its diverse student body, as "a model we can take somewhere else - to educate all our children."

Roughly a third of Hayground's students are Native American, Latino, or black, according to Ms. Engel. Two-thirds of the school is on full or partial scholarship, she said, a total of about $200,000 a year that must be raised for tuition.

Another $500,000 a year for the next five years is needed to pay for the complex of buildings and playing fields now under construction at the school's new Butter Lane site. Classes at the 12.8-acre facility are expected to begin in September; the school has been housed meanwhile in the Bridgehampton Methodist Church.

Mentoring

Although the writer and the actors declined to reveal much about "Who's Gonna Be There?," its backbone will be a give-and-take between Mr. Glover and Mr. Scheider on the subject of mentoring.

Ms. Rooks and the two actors said they had "investigated" their lives to determine who along the way had increased their "sense of self," a goal that is central to Hayground's purpose.

"We found our paths were similar," Mr. Glover said, after a rehearsal session one day at Bay Street.

Mr. Scheider, a star of stage, film, and television whose 7-year-old son, Christian, attends Hayground, recall ed a junior high school teacher who was "boring until he read poetry," from which the actor learned that "the right words spoken at the right time can move mountains."

A Wider Aspect

"We have narrow, socially prescribed definitions of who we are and who we can be," said Ms. Rooks. "I am fundamentally a black woman - that is how people respond to me - but I also know that that is only an aspect of the whole."

"The magic," she added, "is how the whole expresses itself through differences."

She recalled the father of a friend whose house she loved to visit as a young girl, "because he used to ask me what I thought about the world."

"Quemoy and Matsu," recalled the writer, laughing. "He kept asking me what I thought about those places." Her friend's father was a mentor of a different sort: "kind and welcoming, [who] taught me something about family."

The theatrical collaboration, which will include music and audience participation, will be performed again the day after the benefit at the Old Whaler's Church in Sag Harbor.

The hope is that it will go on to become a model "to the larger community," as Mr. Glover put it, both dramatically and educationally.

In recent days, a group of 7 to 13-year-olds at Hayground completed the study of two cultures, Hopi Indian and Muslim. One young girl, a Hopi, pointed out inaccuracies in the literature about her culture.

Students and their teacher agreed that indigenous "storytellers" may have a better grasp of the truth of a culture than anthropologists, who, it was noted, frequently are white.

Starting Small

Teachers, advisers, parents, and supporters hammered out some of the precepts of the Hayground philosophy during a series of meetings before the school opened its temporary doors in September.

Viewing their tenets as works-in-progress, they are still at it.

"We focus consciously on diversity every day," said Sara Ford, an educational adviser at the school. "You can't legislate a shift in heart" on race, gender, and religion. "You have to start small."

Once again there's theatrical life at Amagansett's Stephen Talkhouse. Since Glyde Hart's Dark Horse Productions moved to Guild Hall, and Ms. Hart herself departed for the Midwest, the little nightclub has been strictly for music.

Last weekend, however, the New York-based Silk Road Theatre Company opened its first local production on the Talkhouse's tiny stage. Felicitously, they chose a claustrophobic two-character play requiring a set no larger than a park bench: Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story."

The playwright's first dramatic work, produced in 1958 in Germany before making its Manhattan debut on a double bill with Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," it is a theatrical tour de force.

Beat Generation Stunner

One of the Beat Generation-style shockers designed, in part, to offend the middle class (‚pater la bourgeoisie, as Baudelaire might have put it). It did just that.

Albee's 1958 shocker, de signed to offend the middle class.

Actually, Baudelaire is mentioned in the play as a heroic iconoclast on the order of the late Allen Ginsberg, pitted against the conservative J.P. Marquand, novelist of the Old Guard.

Peter (Doug Mancheski) has gotten to the bench first, and thinks of it as his bench. A textbook publisher, he comes every Sunday to this remote part of Central Park to read and get away from the demands of his family: a wife, two little girls, two cats, and two parakeets.

Confrontation

He's a sitting duck for Jerry (Michael T. Ringer), a hot-dog-munching, disaffected youth with no regard for Peter's turf. Before he knows it, Jerry's moving in on his bench and telling him far more than is truly palatable about his deeply skewed life.

While Peter conducts a typical upper-middle-class existence on the Upper East Side, Jerry occupies a "laughably small room" in a West Side rooming house he shares with a "colored queen," a Puerto Rican family, a weeping old woman, and his nasty landlady and her snarling black dog with the bloodshot eyes.

Like a panhandler who plucks your sleeve and shouts obscenities as you flee down the subway stairs, Jerry won't leave Peter alone until he has engaged him in the kind of violent confrontation that allows him to feel like a member of the human race.

Comic Improbability

"Sometimes you have to go a long distance out of your way in order to come back correctly," he says, but his detour is so extreme it can only end in catastrophe.

"The Zoo Story" is very funny. The two men and the bench: it's a setup full of tension and comic improbability that builds to its climax as though a berserk mouse were toying with a stodgy, middle-aged cat.

Produced and directed by Laura Pierce, a founding member of City Theatre Festival, where she served in many capacities, the play, unfortunately, did not quite work on Saturday, opening night.

Though enlivened by many good comic bits and by Mr. Ringer's generally fine performance as Jerry, the production lacked the sense of deepening menace needed to draw us into the characters' fatally conflicting agendas.

As played by Mr. Mancheski in a flickering performance that went in and out of focus, Peter did not feel real enough for us to understand, or care about, his fight for the bench.

Amusing and appealing during his lighter moments, he seemed checked-out when it came to a confrontation. In the battle of the dharma bum versus the businessman, his businessman didn't land many punches.

Comedy? Not

Mr. Ringer's more flamboyant Jerry was more interesting. It's much the livelier role, but he, too, failed to inject a note of menace early enough in the evening to create the necessary tension between the two.

Perhaps Ms. Pierce's direction could have been tougher. This is a funny play, but a drawing-room comedy it's not.

At any rate, it's good to have theater back at the Talkhouse. Welcome, Silk Road Theatre Company, and please come again.

Brookhaven National Laboratory did not have much of a 50th anniversary last year, beleaguered as it was by critics who said it had polluted the Peconic Bays and spurred the spread of brown tide, which almost destroyed the bay scallop on the East End, and who also blamed it for the high incidence of certain cancers on Long Island.

Nineteen ninety-seven is looking even worse, following the revelation that radioactive tritium from one of its nuclear-research reactors has been seeping into and contaminating the groundwater for years.

The Federal Department of Energy, which runs the laboratory, seems at wits' end over how to stop the seepage. It is concentrating instead on figuring out how to rid the aquifer of the contamination, meanwhile insisting that the leaking pool that holds the lab's spent fuel poses no danger to the lab's employees or neighboring homeowners.

Some critics expect that in the cleanup process the Government will be forced to admit that the goings-on at the lab - the years of fixation on scientific breakthroughs at the expense of the environment - were unconscionable.

What is certain is that Brookhaven is finally paying the piper for too many decades of self-righteousness and too little self-policing. From within their 5,000-acre fiefdom, administrators for years put safety low on the priority list. A steel liner was recommended for the fuel-storage pool. None was built, nor did the pool have a leak-detection system. Monitoring wells were put in late in the game; eventually, the radioactivity in the groundwater was detected.

With Federal, state, and county investigators working in concert now at Brookhaven, perhaps the many questions that remain will find answers. In the meantime, the underground plume of tritium is spreading at about 10 feet a day, and the lab's neighbors are wondering whether they face a health risk.

Brookhaven's supporters should stop telling them, as they have been doing, that the amount of tritium leaked "is the same as that emitted by your television or cellular phone," or that a health risk "is extremely unlikely." Such responses echo and compound the errors of the past and certainly do not engender confidence for the future.

That that future seems less and less likely to include the kind of nuclear research the lab boasts of and more and more bleak for its 3,200 employees is the logical consequence of so many years of wanton disregard for the public safety.

Criticism of the public schools in East Hampton Town seems to be gaining vigor, and there's no question that private schools in the area are not only thriving but multiplying.

The Ross School in East Hampton drew a remarkable 150 people to an open house in January, plans to start its own high school this fall, and already has attracted several former faculty members from East Hampton High School.

When the Hayground School opened last September in Bridgehampton, it received twice as many applications as expected, even though it was in temporary headquarters. It now boasts 60 students from 3 to 13 years old and is readying an innovative building. The well-established school from which Hayground split, the Hampton Day School in Bridgehampton, has retained about 160 of its own students. And there is talk of a new Montessori school.

Neal Gabler, a co-chair of the committee searching for a new principal for East Hampton High School, last week registered a complaint that has been heard before, including on The Star's letters pages, about the local public schools: that they do not sufficiently challenge all their students; that programs for the academically gifted too often give way to those for students with other needs or interests.

But that is an issue inherent to any school committed to educating every child, including those whose first language is not English, those who have developmental problems, or those who for other reasons require a leg up. It is an issue private schools do not necessarily share.

Not to let the public schools off the hook. School districts like those on the South Fork that enjoy the distinct advantage of having second-home owners who pay taxes but do not send children to the public schools have no excuse for less than challenging programs for the gifted. In fact, it seems reasonable to expect the districts here to shine academically, given the solid tax base which supports them.

The proliferation of private schools on the South Fork probably has more to do with changing demographics than with educational quality, or the lack of it, in the public schools. More and more families today have articulate ideas about the sort of educations they want for their children - alternative, multicultural, international.

Families who seek to join the year-round community could do worse, however, than to start by enrolling their children in its schools. Several letter-writers from the East Hampton schools insist on today's letters pages that this district does in fact produce a first-rate education.

The point is, it can't afford not to.

To lose too many children to private education would be to repeat a pattern of polarization all too familiar to those who live about 100 miles west of here. We are in this together, after all.