Modern Artists

Jesse Curran
October 2023

Soiree at Sand City, Jesse Curran

One of my favorite passages in American fiction is the description of Nicole Diver right in the beginning of Tender is the Night.

Nicole Diver, her brown back hanging from her pearls, was looking through a recipe book for chicken Maryland. She was about twenty- four, Rosemary guessed—her face could have been described in terms of conventional prettiness, but the effect was that it had been made first on the heroic scale with strong structure and marking

The same imagery echoes again a couple pages later:

Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a book open on the sand. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful.

In the 1920s, Sara Murphy used to sit on the beach in Antibes with her long string of pearls wrapped around her neck, glowing on her bronzed skin. The troupe of artists that surrounded her were enchanted by her style. Even Picasso honored her with a portrait sketch with the pearls. The lives of Sara and Gerald Murphy became a type of Modern Poetry in bright colors, though they were haunted by an ocean of sadness (death of more than one child). Despite such immense grief, Living Well, as their biographer Calvin Tompkins titled the reflections he wrote on their lives, was the Best Revenge.

When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with the story of the Murphys, their expat existence, how they became artistic foster parents to the Fitzgeralds, and threw soirees with the Ballet Russe. With their family endowments, they hosted dinner parties, held court on the Riviera sand, and were generous and elegant and knew how to celebrate. I idealized this life. I too wanted to live well. I felt the need for revenge against the deadening culture that my suburban consumer context had blocked me into. I remember reading about Sara Murphy putting sticks of celery in vases when she was unable to obtain flowers for a party and thinking, that’s lovely—that’s what I want to do with my life. Sticks of celery in vases. Pearls on the beach. Making life into art. More than once, I put a bouquet of zinnias on their grave in East Hampton and vowed to make my life into art. I did the best I could, travelling to Italy every summer for about a dozen years, chasing after some archetypal beauty that I swore only the Mediterranean could give me.

Although a contemporary of Gerald Murphy, who was also an accomplished painter, Arthur Dove was part of a different circle. His close relationship with Alfred Stieglitz situated him squarely in a community of modern American artists, though rather than anchoring himself in the streets of Manhattan or the cafes of Paris, Dove was moored in the harbors and bays of Long Island’s north shore. He took one formative trip to France early in his adulthood, but otherwise, he studied storms and raised his sails and tried to make the best of things with the few financial resources he had. He was interested in small scale farming, oystering and clamming, repurposing refuse, painting on discarded pieces of wood and glass, fixing his boat engine, jazz music, and chatting with the locals.

And though I travelled to Antibes and sat on the beach, thought about Sara Murphy’s strand of pearls, and stared off into the sea from the Grimaldi Castle, I was largely a traveler passing through. My life, like Dove and his partner Reds, has largely unfolded—and continues to unfold—in the space between two necks here on Long Island’s north shore. When I first read about Dove and Reds, their story didn’t strike me as being so glamorous. It is not so easy to romanticize the damp Long Island winters, and how the wind cuts in from the Sound. For perhaps a month or two a year, living on a boat in Huntington Harbor seems potentially enticing. The rest of the year, I can feel the chill deep in my bones.

Not all couple-biographies seem so destructively romantic like Scott and Zelda, or so artistically erotic like O’Keeffe and Stieglitz. Nor do they seem so generous and charming like Sara and Gerald Murphy. Some lives look more like Arthur Dove and Helen Torr. Living on a boat, struggling to pay bills, the failed work of idealistic farming, Bright’s Disease, heart attacks, a hysterectomy, pneumonia. Western New York and Long Island. Dentist appointment after dentist appointment. Yet still, a loyalty to creation and an allegiance to a room with a water view. Yet still, dedicated service to art – a life lived by following the Long Island light, a life lived translating into lines, shapes, and colors the seasons and sensory flood of this place I too call home. I am quietly awed by what Dove and Torr referred to as “the work” – and the gentle affection between them as they labored on.

Now, as I begin my fourth decade, I realize that the geography of my life might look a bit more like that of Dove and Reds. I treasure whatever time I can find in my tiny writing shed to jot down words in my notebook. Though I still dream of Antibes, I throw sunset soirees on Sand City, the stretch of beach that juts out from the southern tip of Eaton’s Neck. Instead of chasing rapture on the Côte D’Azur, I work for contentment on this steel blue coast.

Instead of being an expat, an exile, or a traveler, I am beginning to accept this business of being a native to a place. Better yet, I am working to learn more about the peoples who have long been native to this place, hoping to open my eyes and heart more fully to onslaught of history and how it echoes through my days. If Modern Art calls for artists to make things new, I’m swimming in geologic scales to feel at home, and in some ways, it feels like a quiet revolt against needing to leave in order to find. This feels new to me. Dove and Reds are the Modern Artists of my place, opening possibility in the post-modern chaos of my moment. These days, I can’t imagine living here without them.

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Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including About Place, Ruminate, After the Art, Allium, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury. www.jesseleecurran.com