McShine: A Quiet Springs Legacy

During the course of his more-than-40-year curatorial career, most of it spent at the Museum of Modern Art, Kynaston McShine, who died in January at 82, organized some of the most important contemporary art exhibitions of his time. He retired as MoMA’s chief curator in charge in 2008.

Less widely known than his groundbreaking exhibitions is his early and ongoing connection to the East End, especially Springs, where he rented for many years and eventually bought a house on Driftwood Lane.

The artist Robert Harms, who lives in Southampton, elaborated. “For me the loss of Kynaston is really significant in many ways, in part because he was one of the last links to the history of artists, curators, and writers who began to come to the Springs in the 1950s and 1960s. Especially people like Joe LeSueur, Frank O’Hara, Patsy Southgate, and Mary Rattray.” A longtime friend of O’Hara’s, Mr. McShine wrote an introduction to the poet’s book “In Memory of My Feelings.” 

Born into a large, prominent family in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, on Feb. 20, 1935, Mr. McShine attended Queen’s Royal College there before enrolling in Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1958. 

He established himself with “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Artists,” one of the first and most important museum exhibitions devoted to Minimalism, which he organized at the Jewish Museum in 1966. Four years later, at the Museum of Modern Art, he curated “Information,” a survey of work by some 130 artists linked by the effort to extend the idea of art beyond traditional categories.

Other major exhibitions included “Marcel Duchamp” (1973), “Robert Rauschenberg” (1977), “Andy Warhol: A Retrospective” (1989), “The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect” (1999), “Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul” (2006), and “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years” (2007). His commitment to younger and contemporary artists was reflected in the museum’s Projects series, which he launched in 1971 with an installation by Keith Sonnier.

Mr. Sonnier said of that show: “I did a project with Kynaston at MoMA in 1971, his first environmental show for the museum. We followed each other’s work throughout the years and became friends later on when we both spent time in the Hamptons and indulged our shared appreciation of Caribbean food. He will be greatly missed by both our New York City and Hamptons communities.”

Mr. Harms recalled first meeting the curator. “Joe LeSueur brought Kynaston to my small cottage adjacent to the Green River Cemetery for a summer studio visit, and we remained friends over all these years. Springs will be significantly different without Kynaston — his wit, his unique, sometimes brusque charm, and his searing intelligence.”

The artist Billy Sullivan and his partner, Klaus Kertess, who died in 2016, were close friends with Mr. McShine. “I will miss my summers in Springs with him,” said Mr. Sullivan. “One of our routines when I would pick him up was to take a detour along Gerard Drive. Even as he grew increasingly frail, if he wanted to be somewhere, you could count on him being there, and always impeccably dressed.”

While Mr. McShine’s cutting wit was familiar to those who knew him well, so was his kindness, generosity, and loyalty. “When my son, Max, died in 2005 in a paragliding accident,” said Mr. Sullivan, “Kynaston sent me these lines from Frank O’Hara’s notebook: He falls; but even in falling he is higher than those who fly into the ordinary sun.’ ”

He also was especially kind with children, according to the artist George Negroponte, a longtime friend who lives in Springs with Virva Hinnemo, also an artist. “He wanted to know everything. What are they reading? Do they admire Obama? What on earth is crypto currency? My son Viggo was six when we moved to Springs. He and Kynaston met and felt an enormous attachment almost immediately. ‘I think I’m going to be the godfather,’ Kynaston said, and he was.”

Michael Boodro, former editor in chief of Elle Decor, knew Mr. McShine for more than 40 years. “When I first met him, I knew he was famously private, even difficult, and he was notoriously sharp-tongued. But, behind that gruff, even fierce, exterior, was a man of great humor, warmth, and fierce loyalty.”

Mr. Boodro listed opera, theater, poetry, and travel as among Mr. McShine’s passions. “He loved London and he loved Venice. He loved Trinidad, where he grew up, and he loved the Springs. For many years he would rent a small house on Gerard Drive and troop out there every August with assorted friends, a case of wine, and Blossom Dearie CDs.” 

“One of his proudest moments was when he was finally able to buy his own small piece of Springs heaven. There he was most himself, surrounded by his beautiful garden, his endless stacks of books and magazines, with his pool burbling gently in the background and arias wafting out onto the deck.”

Mr. Boodro cited the Museum of Modern Art as Mr. McShine’s greatest passion. “His focus was on not only the original and historic exhibitions for which he was justly acclaimed, but equally on the slow, careful, day-to-day building of the Museum’s collection. He knew virtually every artist, and every collector of modern and contemporary art. He knew every piece they owned, and where each was likely to end up. . . . He regarded each acquisition the museum made as a triumph, each work that went elsewhere as a personal defeat.” 

“He only had good words for MoMA,” according to Mr. Negroponte, who elaborated on Mr. McShine’s curatorial range. “One of the things everybody misses is that there’s a very divided curatorial vision. On the one hand, you have a great commitment to Minimalism, as represented by ‘Primary Structures’ and, later, Richard Serra. . . . But from the early 1970s to 1980, he goes from Marcel Duchamp to ‘Natural Paradise’ to Rauschenberg and Cornell and lays out a whole different range of issues for himself.”

“The Natural Paradise: Painting in America 1800-1950,” which opened in 1976, ranged from the romantic paintings of Washington Allston through the Hudson River School and the Luminists to the New York School. According to a press release, it probed and clarified those attitudes — romantic, transcendental, intent on the sublime — that have linked the aspirations of American artists from Bierstadt and Church to Newman and Rothko.

Writing about the work of Joseph Cornell, whose retrospective he organized in 1980, Mr. McShine said, “Founded in the magic and mystery of the poetic experience, his collages, films, and constructions are affirmations of serenity, recollection, enchantment, beauty, the extraordinary.” 

“He was a big, big presence in the lives of a lot of people,” said Mr. Negroponte. “I’m absolutely floored by how many young people hold his work in such high esteem. I asked him many times if he wanted to do an oral history or something and he always said, ‘The work speaks for itself.’ He did not give many interviews. He didn’t want to deal with the self-promotion side of things.”

The artist Mary Heilmann, who has a house in Bridgehampton, put it very simply: “Kynaston was genius, and I got to see a lot of him while visiting Klaus Kertess and Billy Sullivan. It is sad to see two empty seats at the table at Billy’s house now.”