A Carriage House Where the Art World Gathered in the ’60s

Julia Gruen’s home in Water Mill, New York. Photo: Wendy Goodman

Almost everything in the house was purchased secondhand because there used to be so many absolutely wonderful secondhand stores out there,” says Julia Gruen of the home in Water Mill, New York, where she spent her summers growing up at a time when the East End was alive with artists. Her late parents, the painter Jane Wilson and the critic John Jonas Gruen, knew them all.

In addition to The Sixties: Young in the Hamptons, Gruen’s father wrote The Private World of Leonard Bernstein; a partial view of the cover is seen here with a photograph of Bernstein taken by Ken Heyman. John Jonas Gruen was also a composer, and Julia played four hands with him in the living room, where his piano remains. Photo: Wendy Goodman

Wilson and Gruen arrived in New York City in 1949 from the University of Iowa, where they had met and married. They settled downtown in the center of the art world at a time when the Abstract Expressionists were making history. As she gained prominence as a painter, he became an astute observer of the cultural scene of his time, working as an art and music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, ARTnews, and Vogue; he was also a photographer. Among his well-known books are The Sixties: Young in the Hamptons, which reminds you of a time when the East End was a more casual and bohemian place than it has since become. The couple bought a former carriage house there in 1960.

Julia Gruen continued the family tradition of making a life in the arts. She took ballet classes at the School of American Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre school, studied at Hunter College, and started working with the artist Keith Haring as his studio manager in 1984. Before his death in 1990, Haring chose her to be the director of his foundation, a position she retired from last year while continuing her work as a trustee of the Keith Haring Foundation.

The family breakfast table and chairs, still in the same place they were when Gruen was little, were bought from the East End’s secondhand shops, now long gone. “Those stores were dusty and dank and nasty and things piled on top of each other, and it was so much fun; it was just a wonderful treasure hunt,” says Gruen. Photo: Wendy Goodman

The rattan furniture in one area of the living room was part of the décor when Gruen was growing up. She thinks the cement floor was put down in the 1920s when the barn was converted to a carriage house for farm vehicles and cars. “My parents also asked that the ceiling remain raw wood and not be painted white,” she says. Photo: Wendy Goodman

In Water Mill, her mother painted in the converted hayloft upstairs, and her father wrote, photographed, and played piano in the house, but it was also a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Willem de Kooning, Arthur Miller, Frank O’Hara, Stella Adler, John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Marisol, among others, would gather there for outdoor cocktail parties and informal summer dinners. Julia has used the house, which is now winterized, year-round since her parents’ deaths (her mother died in 2015 and her father in 2016).

The freestanding brick fireplace in the heart of the house almost wasn’t: “My parents halted the contractor from building walls on either side of it that would have divided the room in two,” Gruen says. Things have remained pretty much the same as they were when Gruen was growing up, from the rattan furniture to the glow-in-the-dark snowflakes on the ceiling of her childhood bedroom.

Upstairs, her mother’s studio space in the former hayloft is used today for ballet classes (now virtual) taught by Gruen’s friend the former New York City Ballet dancer Viki Psihoyos when she visits. Photo: Wendy Goodman

Upstairs, her mother’s brushes and paints are still in her studio. “Originally, that skylight only had four ‘lights,’” Gruen says. “Sometime in the late ’70s or early ’80s, my mother had six more lights added and insulated the room and had Sheetrock installed. In its original state, you could peek through the gaps in the very dark wood lath and beams and feel the wind coming in.”

Today, the patio area, where wicker furniture once beckoned guests, is still shaded by an ancient cherry tree. But in the winter months, the giant fireplace is the draw for Gruen; her dachshunds, Alfie and Daisy; and her friends.

From left: In another part of the studio, some of her mother's canvases are stored beneath a staircase leading to a loft bedroom that was added in the ’70s or early ’80s. The photographs pinned to the board are by, from left, Jane Wilson (Gruen's mother), Stephen Rivers, John Button, and Jane Freilicher. Gruen made the cartoon drawings when she was a child. Elisabeth Sussman’s monograph Jane Wilson: Horizons includes the artist’s ethereal landscape paintings as well as photographs of Gruen and Wilson by Diane Arbus and Hans Namuth, plus portraits of the artist and her family painted by Alice Neel and Fairfield Porter. Photo: Wendy Goodman.

From left: In another part of the studio, some of her mother's canvases are stored beneath a staircase leading to a loft bedroom that was added in the... more From left: In another part of the studio, some of her mother's canvases are stored beneath a staircase leading to a loft bedroom that was added in the ’70s or early ’80s. The photographs pinned to the board are by, from left, Jane Wilson (Gruen's mother), Stephen Rivers, John Button, and Jane Freilicher. Gruen made the cartoon drawings when she was a child. Elisabeth Sussman’s monograph Jane Wilson: Horizons includes the artist’s ethereal landscape paintings as well as photographs of Gruen and Wilson by Diane Arbus and Hans Namuth, plus portraits of the artist and her family painted by Alice Neel and Fairfield Porter. Photo: Wendy Goodman.

Wilson’s paints and brushes are still in the studio as she left them. “There really wasn’t a set routine.” Gruen says about her mother’s work schedule. “She didn’t paint on location. In the early days, we went to the beach all the time. We would take these long walks on the beach and then in the open fields, so I think that was informing her sense of landscape, as well as her own childhood in Iowa with these plains and cornfields that went on forever and the huge sky above.” Wilson continues to be represented by DC Moore Gallery. Photo: Wendy Goodman

From left: Gruen’s childhood bedroom down the corridor from the studio remains as it was when she was growing up. Wilson put glow-in-the-dark snowflakes on the ceiling and later added stars (they are also all still there). The dresser in Gruen’s bedroom came from one of the secondhand furniture stores in the Hamptons that have since disappeared. The small painting, Apple Tree (1960), is by Wilson. Describing her work in his essay “It Will Soon Be Here,” included in the catalogue for her 1995 show at the Fischbach Gallery, the critic Hilton Als writes, “For Wilson, nature is the greatest performance of all our lives.” Photo: Wendy Goodman.

From left: Gruen’s childhood bedroom down the corridor from the studio remains as it was when she was growing up. Wilson put glow-in-the-dark snowflak... more From left: Gruen’s childhood bedroom down the corridor from the studio remains as it was when she was growing up. Wilson put glow-in-the-dark snowflakes on the ceiling and later added stars (they are also all still there). The dresser in Gruen’s bedroom came from one of the secondhand furniture stores in the Hamptons that have since disappeared. The small painting, Apple Tree (1960), is by Wilson. Describing her work in his essay “It Will Soon Be Here,” included in the catalogue for her 1995 show at the Fischbach Gallery, the critic Hilton Als writes, “For Wilson, nature is the greatest performance of all our lives.” Photo: Wendy Goodman.

Eclipse (1991), one of Wilson’s oil-on-canvas paintings. From 1990 to 2000, Wilson concentrated on depicting the open vistas of field and sky that she knew so well from her childhood in Iowa and later from the beaches and fields of Long Island. In an interview with the writer Justin Spring, she said, “I suppose I could say that during this time I realized for the nth time that landscape was the most natural or intuitive subject matter, or departure point, for my images, and so I have been pursuing it exclusively.” Photo: Jane Wilson, Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York