Old Buildings Provided Creative Spaces For These 4 Artists
This summer, American Masters’ four-part “Artist Flight” documentary series on PBS traveled to four different moments in 20th-century American history to take us into the lives of four iconic visual artists—Andrew Wyeth, Elizabeth Murray, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Eva Hesse. Here, we look at some of the places where these artists lived, worked, and found inspiration.
Andrew Wyeth
For nearly 70 years, Andrew Wyeth worked in a converted schoolhouse not far from his childhood home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Betsy, moved into the white clapboard structure in 1940, and Wyeth lived and worked there until the couple moved to a new home in the early 1960s. But he continued to use the space as his primary studio, creating thousands of works there until his death in January 2009.
Though there’s a sign on the studio door that reads, “I am working so please do not disturb,” visitors are more than welcome to tour the space today. (Wyeth, protective of his privacy while working, hung the sign decades ago.) His studio is part of the National Trust’s Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program, and it looks almost exactly as it did shortly before his death, with natural light pouring in from the tall windows and painting materials set up throughout the space. His art library is there, as is his furniture and collections of military miniatures and costumes.
photo by: Carlos Alejandro
Elizabeth Murray
photo by: Collar Works
photo by: Collar Works
Painter and printmaker Elizabeth Murray found a great deal of inspiration at her old farmhouse in Washington County, New York. This was her family’s summer home (they split their time between there and a loft in TriBeCa), and it was her creative retreat. She set up a studio in the large dairy barn on the 77-acre property, painting there until her death from complications of lung cancer in 2007.
That farmhouse continues to provide inspiration to artists today: In 2017, Murray’s family partnered with Collar Works, a nonprofit contemporary arts organization in Troy, New York, to establish the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency. In the pilot program, held this past summer, 20 emerging and mid-career visual artists lived and worked on the property, using the old farmhouse, the barn, and the natural setting to create, take creative risks, and commune with fellow artists.
Jean Michel-Basquiat
photo by: Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
photo by: Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
Jean-Michel Basquiat took the 1980s New York art world by storm. The artist and musician, born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Haitian father and a mother of Puerto Rican descent, started out as a graffiti artist in the late 1970s, scrawling messages around Lower Manhattan under the name SAMO. He quickly began to attract the attention of art world giants, and in just a few short years, his paintings were selling for five figures.
In his short life—he died in 1988 at the age of 27 from a drug overdose—Basquiat created thousands of paintings and drawings, many of which were produced in a former carriage house at 57 Great Jones Street in NoHo. The 19th-century structure was originally a horse stable, then in the early 1900s it was a dance hall and saloon. Eventually Basquiat’s friend and mentor Andy Warhol bought the building, and Basquiat lived and worked there from 1983 to 1988. In 2016, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation placed a plaque on the exterior of this small structure to commemorate this important place in the artist’s life.
Eva Hesse
From the early 1960s until her death in 1970 at the age of 34, German-born sculptor Eva Hesse worked out of a small studio with sloped ceilings at 134 Bowery in Manhattan. The building has a long history. Built in the late 1700s as a house for a merchant and his family, it became a commercial building in the 1830s, holding a number of businesses, including a bookstore and a millinery. A cigar rolling factory later set up shop in the space, and then in 1963, Hesse moved in, turning the small top-floor apartment into her studio.
Since 2015, this Federal-style building has housed LOMEX, a gallery named for the unbuilt Lower Manhattan Expressway that “master builder” Robert Moses proposed in 1929. Visitors to that top-floor space can still see the hooks in the ceiling that Hesse used to suspend her sculptures.
