Louis Langrée conducts the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.

The show is a blast of cool oxygen for these hot and heavy city days. Rather, the painters included here (who happen all to be women-among them are rock-stars like Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Krasner, and Joan Mitchell) share what we may call a distinct sensibility, one surely influenced, if intangibly so, by the open skies and fresh air of the East End. But what’s immediately clear upon entry into “Painters of the East End,” a summery exhibition at Kasmin Gallery’s 297 Tenth Avenue space, is that, unlike previous generations of Long Island painters, these midcentury artists shared no discernably unified style, ranging from various modes of non-objective painting to sensitively observed modernist realism. Decades later, when Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner made Springs, East Hampton, their year-round home in 1945, many members of the rapidly blossoming avant-garde movement soon followed. William Merritt Chase formed one of the nation’s first plein-air schools in Southampton soon thereafter. Thomas Moran built his studio in East Hampton in 1884, which soon became a gathering-place for creative types seeking a reprieve from dense Manhattan. “Painters of the East End,” at Kasmin Gallery, 297 Tenth Avenue (through August 16): The history of artist colonies on the far reaches of Long Island is a storied one. Photo: John Jonas Gruen, courtesy of the Estate of John Gruen.

RKīack row, left to right: Robert Rauschenberg, Maxine Groffsky (with parasol), Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Morton Feldman front row, left to right: René Bouché, Jane Freilicher, Jane Wilson holding Julia Gruen, Arthur Gold, Katie Porter, Naomi Newman, Anne Porter, Robert Fizdale, Lizzie Porter. It is written with great assurance, poise, and skill. The portrayal of Lulu, the on-the-make sort-of feminist, is priceless, as is the character of Red Wheeler, the trustifarian who is currently in his seventh year at Devon and is angling to stay forever. Johnston gets the repellant deans of diversity, the stultifying exercise of Soviet-style “justice” against professors and students suspected of what Orwell called Wrongthink, the posturing, fake radicalism fueled by breathless naiveté and lots and lots of money, privilege hypocritically railing against privilege. I suppose I should add Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons for good measure, for Johnston’s portrayal of the super-rich, super-woke “Devon University” (endowment: $38 billion, “just shy of Harvard”) and its denizens is pitch-perfect and Tom-Wolfesque in its sociological anatomy.

Scott Johnston has written a hilarious campus novel to rival Lodge’s Small World and Amis’s Lucky Jim. Photo: Christopher Stach.Ĭampusland: A Novel, by Scott Johnston (St. Installation view of “Painters of the East End” at Kasmin Gallery.

Campusland novel