John Jonas Gruen
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.”