Talented women producing serious art have long been a part of the cultural scene in the Hamptons. Recognition however did not accrue as quickly or easily as it did to their male counterparts, and at times they deliberately remained in the shadows while advancing the careers of prominent painters—who happened to be their husbands.
Thomas Moran was a towering figure of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American landscape painting, justly celebrated for enormous canvases depicting the breathtaking beauty of Yellowstone and Yosemite. Mary Nimmo Moran worked on a much more modest scale creating etchings of the quiet rural charms of the East Coast, particularly of East Hampton.
Moran’s contribution to history, outside of the paintings themselves, was the influence of his work on the establishment of our national parks. Nimmo Moran’s contribution to history is more subtle in the way she captured—or from our perspective documented—America’s agrarian past as the country moved into the industrial era. Mainly self-taught, she was extraordinarily gifted in etching and printmaking, and a member of prestigious etching societies in New York and London. She exhibited under the name MNMoran, concealing her gender. A cultivated woman, she hosted poetry readings and Shakespeare evenings as well as imaginative costume parties in her Main Street, East Hampton home, and she sang folksongs from her native Scotland.
Nimmo Moran died in 1899 at 57 years old in a typhoid epidemic that spread from Camp Wikoff in Montauk, carried there by Spanish-American War soldiers returning from Cuba. She is buried near Goose Pond, one of her subjects.
Moving between figurative painting and Abstract Expressionism, writing criticism for ARTnews, and taking a series of lovers while married, Elaine De Kooning lived an original and unconventional life. When the tall, slender 20 year old met Willem De Kooning in 1938, they fell immediately in love, and as he gave her drawing lessons they began a life together, marrying in 1943. Convinced of his brilliance and vision she set about promoting his career—even making portraits of and having affairs with men in the art world who could help De Kooning become successful.
As she led this liberated and intellectual life, Elaine continued doing portraits, often of writers and painters and performers now famous. In 1962, commissioned to paint President John F. Kennedy, she sketched him live at his home in Palm Beach, then extensively from photographs and TV appearances, finally finishing her most famous work just months before his assassination.
Although they lived apart for many years, the couple never divorced, and Elaine managed De Kooning’s studio in the Springs, always protecting and nurturing him.
Willem De Kooning has long been accepted as one of the titans of modern art, unrivaled by few others. Recognition has come more slowly to Elaine De Kooning but particularly since a 2015 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery she is now considered in the forefront of American portrait painters.
In 1949, as Life ran a feature with the headline “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” Lee Krasner received one sentence in a New York Times review of a group show in East Hampton. Krasner was working out of an upstairs bedroom in their Springs farmhouse while Pollock painted in the converted barn studio. Yet she persevered, keeping her husband sober and working during his most creative period of action painting. And in the three decades after he died she astutely handled the paintings in his estate, deciding when and how they were shown, and helped guide and promote his worldwide fame.
Krasner’s own work ranged across a number of styles in painting and collage. She is now seen as an eloquent and inventive artist with a significant fifty year career—one of only three women to have retrospectives at MoMA. As we move further away from the male dominated post-war art world, a new generation of enlightened scholars and critics has delved into Krasner’s work and new generations of women artists have been inspired by it, securing her legacy.
Mary Nimmo Moran, Elaine De Kooning and Lee Krasner are all represented in the permanent collection at Guild Hall in East Hampton—as are their husbands. The Thomas and Mary Nimmo Moran House and the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, both in East Hampton, are National Historic Landmarks.