Toward the end of a lively panel discussion at the Parrish Art Museum Friday night, Klaus Ottmann, guest curator of the museum's current retrospective of the artist James Brooks, zeroed in on the evening's subtext. "Nature and art together in this particular place," he said, "It's beautiful."
That "place" would be the long-dreamed-of Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center in Springs, which, despite having achieved tax-deductible status, a website of its own (brooks-parkarts.org), recognition by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of America's Most Endangered Historic Places, and the passionate support of numerous artists and environmentalists, still exists only on paper.
The museum's Brooks retrospective, which will continue through Oct. 15, features paintings and prints by the pioneer Abstract Expressionist. Dr. Ottmann's scholarly observations on the works was one aspect of the discussion, which veered from there to Mike Solomon's reminiscences of the painter and his artist wife, Charlotte Park -- they occasionally babysat for him, Mr. Solomon recalled, and mentored him after he too began to paint -- to Helen Harrison's appraisal of their idyllic 11-acre surroundings and their place in the nexus of midcentury Springs artists. The panel was smoothly moderated by the artist Scott Bluedorn.
Jackson Pollock, said Mr. Solomon, was one of Brooks's closest friends. They were like "two sides of the same coin," he said. "Jim and Charlotte did party, but they didn't drink hard, they didn't waste themselves. Jim had a kind and loving and stable character -- and not boring! She was the same . . . I never heard an argument between them, not in front of anybody. It was a remarkable equilibrium. They just really loved each other."
When, after World War II, Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, moved to Springs, "Jim and Charlotte lived in their apartment on 8th Street before following them" to the East End, said Ms. Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. They lived first in Montauk, until a hurricane in 1954 destroyed his studio, and then moved their damaged house by barge across Accabonac Harbor to a wooded site off Neck Path. The move, said Ms. Harrison, "opened them up visually and creatively, as it did for Jackson and Lee."
"They were environmentalists," Mr. Solomon observed. "They were not going to throw the house away, they were going to save it."
The new setting proved to be a blessing, creatively. "Imagine getting up in the morning, having a cup of coffee, and then, 'I'm gonna walk through the woods for 800 or 1,000 feet or so to get to the studio,' " said Mr. Solomon.
Unfortunately, the passing years have not been kind to the buildings. Brooks designed a new studio for himself, with north light -- he never worked in artificial light, or at night -- in 1959. Whether that structure can be restored is "problematic," said Ms. Harrison, though an architectural consultant hired by the town to assess the situation reported in May that its deteriorating condition was "reversible."
"This whole property is part of the constellation of the Springs," said Mr. Bluedorn. "It's an important cultural area, not just for the artists but for the natural setting."
"It's so important that you mentioned that," Ms. Harrison said. "Not only were they visual artists, but they had the kind of artistic sensibility that responds so strongly to their surroundings. Charlotte kept nature journals! She reported on when the deer came, when the birds came, the seasons -- just wonderful little snapshots of the surrounding life . . . She had been a very strong Abstract Expressionist for a long time, but after they moved there she became a different artist. I would say much more contemporary than Jim in that way, in her sensitivity to the environment -- and I think that having this as a nature center, as well as an arts center, would please her very much."
"There was a point when they wanted to build her a bigger studio. She declined. She said, 'I don't want to have to account for that kind of space.' "
"Charlette once told me," Mr. Solomon recalled, that " 'In the afternoons, we would go to each other's studios, just to see if it was okay to be doing what we were doing.' I think that they bonded over the difficulty."
Picking up on that, Ms. Harrison remembered something Lee Krasner once told her: " 'There's nothing more horrifying than a blank canvas. Where does it come from, where does it start? From somewhere inside, and you have to summon that up.' "
"So," she continued, "having the support of their fellow artists encouraged them, beyond criticism or anything like that, to keep working at it, keep doing it. Nothing to do with style, either. It's not a style, it's an approach."
"You can see it in this exhibition, from '59 to '60," Dr. Ottmann suggested. "You see Brooks working Pollock into his work, and then you see him working him OUT of his work, trying to find his own. That's the natural process, that's how artists work."
Summing up the evening's underlying goal -- to support the proposed Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center -- Ms. Harrison drew on her own experience. "Not a day goes by," she said, "that some visitor doesn't come to the Pollock-Krasner House and say, 'Oh, NOW I understand. Now I see what was important to them. Now I see how it matters that they were here, what they created here and how it relates to the surroundings."
"It really is a revelation," she continued. "Because when you go to a museum, you see a beautiful display, but the paintings are divorced from the place where they were created. And to bring the human element and the environment back into it, really enriches the work. . . . Interpreting the studio as a place of creative energy is what it's all about."
Proponents of the plan to restore the property and open it to the public, with a focus on the surrounding woodlands, arts and nature activities, and educational programming, have submitted a management plan to the East Hampton Town Board, which will hold a public hearing on it next Thursday at 2 p.m.
