Mary Heilmann: At Home With the Big Boys
For the past decade, it’s seemed that Mary Heilmann was bent on world domination. A career survey show that started in her native California in 2007 and made stops in Houston and Columbus, Ohio, before concluding at Manhattan’s New Museum in 2009, ignited a critical and popular response that led to several solo shows in New York, Holland, and all over Germany, and a regular presence at the most respected international art fairs.
When the new Whitney Museum of American Art opened in the Meatpacking District in 2015, her installation “Sunset‚“ which took over a rooftop terrace, delighted visitors with its signature colorful chairs, a video she’d made of the neighborhood in 1982, and blown-up photographic images of her joyful pink paintings. In March, Guild Hall honored her with a lifetime achievement award. Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney, was the presenter.
This summer, a mini-retrospective is on view in London at the Whitechapel Gallery; it too is attracting a great deal of attention.
Ms. Heilmann, who could go anywhere or do anything, wants to live and work in New York, but especially at her house and studio in Bridgehampton, where she looks out onto two acres of farmland that inspires and drives her creatively.
“Art is about thinking, looking, and meditating about the work,” she said in her studio this spring. “Looking out the window to see the farm and field is a major part of my work. It’s part of the process.”
“It was when Lisa Phillips and some people from the New Museum visited me here that they thought of the [New Museum] survey,” she said. Given the span of the show and its key stops in the United States, its inception in Bridgehampton “made it kind of personal and huge.”
From the earliest months of her relocation from California to New York in the late 1960s, she began visiting the East End. First, she came to see Bruce Nauman, a classmate and kindred spirit from the University of California, Davis, who was working for the summer in Southampton at the invitation of Roy Lichtenstein. More short visits were followed by a series of rentals, in Springs and at the Cozy Cabins in Wainscott, a popular place for artists at the time. “A lot of people were there. It was a scene.”
By the late ’80s and early ’90s, she was teaching and selling her work, but “I was getting tired of the art world. I wanted to get a place in Springs and sit in a rocking chair,” not unlike Willem de Kooning, one of her role models. She rented a place in Wainscott during the winter and worked on the text for “The All-Night Movie,” an exhibition catalog that morphed into an artist’s book published in Zurich in 1999.
“I loved it, staying at Wainscott. It was empty and quiet with a lot of farmland.” Without the social distractions of the city, she spent all of her time working. “I would go for a swim, but that was it.”
She began driving and biking around neighborhoods she liked. Eventually a For Sale sign on a Narrow Lane property caught her attention. She purchased the parcel with the house and studio for $300,000, and, after a few years of looking at the adjoining field, decided she had to buy it before someone else did.
It was prescient. The South Fork’s weather observer, Richard Hendrickson, her neighbor, owned the land and was about to sell it. She borrowed the money from Iwan Wirth, her dealer, then mortgaged her studio to pay him back. It was an investment that continues to pay dividends, and not just for its appreciation in value.
Robert and Joanne Comfort, who own land not far from hers on Lumber Lane and have been farming there and on her property for many years, continued as usual, with one exception. “The rows were parallel to my view. I asked him to change it so I could look into the rows . . . he’s now committed to making it look as beautiful as he can.” She bought apple and pear trees from Marders, which supply everyone with lots of fruit. Mr. Comfort grooms the trees into appealing shapes for her.
The Comforts, who have a farmstand on Lumber Lane, also manage an apiary and give riding lessons on their horses. They give the artist whatever produce she wants, “and they help me with my life. I give them a stipend for that. We’re partners now.”
Ms. Heilmann sees how hard the Comforts work to make ends meet in a place with an impossibly high cost of living. That young artists have opportunities to live and work here as she did when she was just starting out is important to her, she said, and to that end she would like to take part in a philanthropic effort to buy up distressed houses, handyman specials that artists could take over and renovate, as has been done elsewhere in the nation. She brings up the idea to collectors and professionals at parties in the hopes of planting a seed and helping to sustain something vital in the community that she said has given her so much.
In May, she was still planning for the June opening at the Whitechapel, which is up all summer. Now back from London, she is thinking about work again. Leading up to her show at New York’s 303 Gallery last November, she said, she completed a lot of pieces. Since then, though, she’s been stuck.
“I got a little frozen after 303.” The sudden and intense interest in her work after decades of quiet respect had taken her by surprise initially, she said, and then it kept coming. “It got me paralyzed, and depressed.”
She expects her schedule to quiet down now. “It’s going to be good. I can hide out and start working again,” beginning with looking at the field and thinking. “Some people work really hard making work all day long. I sit, think, figure out the easiest way to do it. There’s hardly any work here that is really labor-intensive. The new work evolves from the ideas.”