Images of Lois Wright's artwork from her upcoming exhibit in Sag Harbor

From the recent New York Times article, we know that Wright will be having a show at The Gallery Sag Harbor from June 7-30, with a reception on June 14. We haven't seen pictures of the work yet... until now!

From The Gallery Sag Harbor

Lois Wright

A Tribute to Grey Gardens

Eagle-eyed readers will recognize this first picture from Wright's book.

Also, Walter Newkirk will be available to sign his book and CD at the reception.

Update

One visitor posted his experiences at the opening.

From Grey Gardens Yahoo! Group, by adam157, on 18 June 2008

I attended the Lois Wright exhibit at the Gallery of Sag Harbor

Through some strange events, my Partner and I were invited. Back in April we made the 3 1/2 hour drive out to East Hampton to go to what I thought was an exhibit of Lois' work at Guild Hall. When we arrived there, we found Guild Hall to be closed that day. We talked our way into the building by preying on the kindness of some of the support staff. One thing led to the other and we were allowed into the display gallery, unfortunately, no one knew how to turn the lights on. Ends up, it wasn't an exclusive exhibit of Lois' work but a montage on local artists. Lois had one piece on display...we bought it, not sight unseen, but seen in the dark. The helpful ladies of Guild Hall gave us directions to Grey Gardens and to Most Holy Trinity Catholic Cemetery. We couldn't remove the painting until the exhibit was complete, sometime in the next week, if I remember correctly. So, to give us another reason to trek up to East Hampton from our Toms River, NJ home, we purchased tickets to a benefit for Guild Hall featuring Christine Ebersole performing. That event is this Friday, that's when I get my hands on the painting. But in the meantime the owner of the Gallery of Sag Harbor contacted me and asked if she could borrow the painting to show in THEIR Lois Wright exhibit. I made the arrangement for the painting to be loaned out. Unknown to us, the day after we left Guild Hall after spending a small fortune on the painting and the benefit tickets, there was an article in a local newspaper telling the story of two out of town visitors on a quest to buy a Lois Wright painting. That article led to the Sag Harbor exhibit and apparently more sales of paintings for Lois.

Lois and I met at the door of the gallery, after introducing myself she immediately knew who I was and said, "I started all of this", upon which my partner told her, "No, Lois I think you started it". We had a great day, I saw a few other paintings I would like to own, but they were already sold. Lois posed for photos with us in front of our painting.

I'll post the photo with Lois soon.

Chuck

Source

North Carolina artist inspired by Grey Gardens

Nice artwork, and a great story!

From Star News Online, by Isabel Heblich, on 28 May 2008

The Beales are back in town

Local artist's show based on 'Grey Gardens' mother-daughter duo

Thirty years later, Grey Gardens is everywhere. Including Wilmington. Again.

The Maysles brothers' 1975 cult-classic documentary film about inimitable mother-daughter duo Big and Little Edie Beale and their dilapidated 28-room mansion, which housed countless cats and Wonderbread-eating raccoons amid the squalor, has been recently reincarnated in STAUNCH, a series of painted pop portraits by local artist Xris Kessler. The show, which derives many of its images from film stills of the Beales, opens at downtown nightclub Odessa June 5.

In addition to Kessler's show, Grey Gardens has inspired a Broadway musical, an upcoming 2008 movie starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, a Rufus Wainwright song and even a local fashion show put on at Odessa in April.

"The one word (Little Edie) says that stands out to me is 'staunch,'" said Kessler, a true devotee who has seen Grey Gardens "since 1989, maybe a hundred times."

Depending on its context, "staunch" can mean dependable or stubborn. This thin line between the good and bad versions of staunch probably would've pleased Little Edie, who the movie shows slaving over the finicky fashion-compound of her outfits - which often include makeshift turbans, upside-down dresses and pieces of drapery - and suffering from comic paranoia.

"They can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday," reads a quote from Little Edie on one of Kessler's paintings. Kessler has imitated her actual handwriting for the script in his paintings.

When Little Edie uses the word "staunch" she's not talking about herself. The postcards for this show depict Little Edie peering through binoculars, watching the viewer, underlined by the show's title, as if it were an exclamation under her breath, a judgment against the society that ostracized her.

In the show's title piece, Kessler leads us to believe that Little Edie is commenting on the character of cousin Jackie Kennedy Onassis. A 6-by-8-foot acrylic painting juxtaposing the straight-and-narrow-Chanel-suit-Jackie and bathing-cap-clad-Edie (all her hair had fallen out for reasons unknown) against a strobe-lit American flag reads "STAUNCH" in billboard-type letters. Edie looks victorious.

Two other portraits of Big and Little Edie are derived from old photographs Kessler zoomed in on and recreated from film stills.

Big Edie is posed like a cameo, cupping a can of liver pate (her and her daughter's favorite food source) while Little Edie poses behind a tin of cat food. The similarity of the foods and the ease with which the cans can be mistaken for each other is one of the film's jokes.

Split Personality is a large, multi-panel acrylic portrait of Big Edie, whom many psychoanalysts suspect was schizophrenic. With her face sectioned off to different multi-tonal canvases, a quote reads, "I've never had any split-personality ... I have a hell of a temper. It's Southern!"

The painting is a sure-fire crowd-pleaser, and the opening - which will be a carnival-like atmosphere with live music, Edie impersonators and pate served out of cat food cans - is sure to be as well.

The Beales of Grey Gardens, a follow-up to the original film made with the Maysles brothers' extra footage, is where Kessler found most of his favorite Edie-isms. In this footage, Kessler said a movie version of her and her mother's lives was first discussed with Little Edie. "Nobody can play me but me," she said.

Little Edie Beale died in January 2002 at age 84.

The magic of Little Edie is that many of the statements this insane woman makes about life are completely true, insightful and poetic. "I can't get the thumb tack in the wall - I've got the saddest life," Edie said in Grey Gardens while frantically trying to decorate, to make things better in the dying house she is tethered to and sinking with.

The claim that nobody can play her but her, though it seems as if everyone is trying, is the curse of her legacy.

The coolest thing about Edie that no one will ever be able to recreate is that she was living and dressing artfully, exactly how she felt in every spontaneous moment, to the extremes of her emotions, imagination and intellect, without an audience. And in real life.

Much of the magic of Grey Gardens should be attributed to the filmmakers, whose completely neutral, detached but compassionate camera work and editing allowed for a multi-dimensional story that affects every viewer differently.

"I have friends that either love it or hate it," Kessler said of the movie. "I don't think (Edie) is tragic. I think she's fine."

Source

2007 Grey Gardens-inspired fashion shoot by Wendy Bevan

The interiors of Grey Gardens were so much better than the ones used in this shoot, but this photographer really caught something...

From Italian Marie Claire, by Wendy Bevan, on 10 February 2007, via k17k, via this very blog

Generazione Eccentrica

Source

On the name of Grey Gardens

Ever wonder why Grey Gardens is so named?

Forty Years of Gardening
by Anna Gilman Hill

From 27east, by Aimee Fitzpatrick Martin, on 27 May 2008

Putting a Name to It

The infamous East Hampton mansion Grey Gardens was named for the grey color of the surrounding dunes, the grey hue of the cement garden walls and the grey color of the sea-misted garden. When filmmakers Albert and David Maysles set out to make a 1975 documentary about the eccentric lives of Grey Gardens's then inhabitants, Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith "Little Edith" Bouvier Beale (aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis), they could have chosen a title like "Big and Little Edie." Instead, they dubbed their cult classic, "Grey Gardens," after the decrepit, raccoon-infested 28-room estate. The Maysles felt the house--and its name--had as compelling a story to tell as its strange residents.

Yep! And Anna Gilman Hill backs this up:

From Forty Years of Gardening by Anna Gilman Hill

It was truly a gray garden. The soft gray of the dunes, cement walls, and sea mists gave us our color scheme as well as our name.

Note the spelling of gray!

Update

I should note that the text above describes the naming of the house/estate, and that the documentary was named after the house. We learned from The Beales of Grey Gardens that the Edies felt there might be a little confusion if the film were so named. Michael Sucsy writes:

The documentary was originally going to be called "The Portrait" but, obviously, that changed.

Source

Lois Wright's art and memories of Grey Gardens

An interesting little story about Lois Wright and her time at Grey Gardens. I didn't know many of the facts in here!

From New York Times, by Marcelle S. Fischler, on 25 May 2008

Memories of a Former Resident of Grey Gardens

Lois Wright arrived at Grey Gardens on May 7, 1975, with a green canvas cot, cooking pots, a couple of hats and a heavy stick, in case she "had to hit a raccoon." Her mother had just died, and Ms. Wright was going to stay with her close friends Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Big Edie, and her daughter, Little Edie, at their home here on Lily Pond Lane.

"Little Edie loved my mother, and Big Edie and my mother were very congenial," Ms. Wright, 79, recalled.

She stayed with the Beales, the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, for 13 months, leaving when she could not stand the fleas anymore.

The Beales, who had once led a privileged life in Manhattan, resided in squalor, amid raccoons and dozens of cats in a shingled house near Georgica Beach. Ms. Wright, an artist, palm reader, tarot card reader and member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, was a kindred free spirit, setting up her easel in the kitchen, using that "studio" to paint and write, chronicling the lives of her hosts.

The Beales cooked on a hot plate in Big Edie's room and didn't use the kitchen, Ms. Wright said.

In her cluttered two-room cottage apartment nearby, Ms. Wright now paints about her time at Grey Gardens from memory. The walls are covered with paintings of Little Edie and Big Edie and their spirits, self-portraits, the cats and the characters who populated a place where, Ms. Wright said, "the world cannot intrude."

Her work will be on display as part of a tribute to Grey Gardens at the Gallery Sag Harbor from June 7 to June 30, with a Champagne brunch on June 14. A memoir based on the copious journals Ms. Wright kept, My Life at Grey Gardens: 13 Months and Beyond, was published last year.

Rebecca Cooper, the gallery's owner, said that Grey Gardens had "a whole cult following." She said Ms. Wright's paintings "fall into the school of fantasy realism or visionary art; they are about the spirit, and they capture the soul." The paintings will be priced from $750 to $2,000, Ms. Cooper said.

Ms. Wright thought that the famous recluses had found "a perfect way for people to live." Ms. Wright, an East Hampton resident since age 12, had visited Grey Gardens often as a child; her maternal uncle, Dr. John F. Erdmann, a surgeon, had a big summer place down the block.

Wandering on the property on a recent afternoon, Ms. Wright said that Grey Gardens, now owned by Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, looked as if it were "straight out of a magazine" and had lost the "ramshackle charm" of the Beale days.

Stories about the Beales’ ragtag lifestyle were splashed across the tabloids after a Suffolk County Health Department raid in 1971, and it was immortalized in a 1976 documentary by David and Albert Maysles that will be shown on June 14 at the Bay Street Theater in conjunction with the art show. The Beales also inspired a 2006 Broadway show and a forthcoming HBO film starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.

Ms. Wright appears in the documentary as a guest at Big Edie’s birthday party. She presented Ms. Beale with an index-card box.

Ms. Wright said she slept in a room overlooking the broad front porch that was preferred by "a captain" who was "definitely the Grey Gardens ghost" and had previously used the room.

She recalled that Little Edie asked her to do an oil portrait of Julius Krug, who was the secretary of the interior under President Truman and was known as Cap. Ms. Wright said that Little Edie never got over Cap, who was married.

"Edie and Big Edie loved my paintings, and they were very encouraging about my paintings," she said.

To earn money, Ms. Wright read palms at the estate and at a cocktail lounge nearby. "Bette Davis said I read her palm better than anyone from Hollywood to East Hampton," she said. For the last 20 years, Ms. Wright, whose formal schooling ended in the sixth grade, has been the host of her own cable television show on LTV, the local access channel, interviewing area guests.

Ms. Wright said reports of the filth at the 28-room mansion were exaggerated, though she lived there long after Mrs. Onassis had paid for a cleaning that required 40 gallons of disinfectant. "The floors were mopped all the time," she said.

The raccoons "were the practical ones," constantly trying to open the icebox door, she said, and the cats "were mystical."

Still, Ms. Wright said, she wore a hat to protect her head from raccoons and noted that "Edie said that the fleas came from the hedges up front."

Source

Simon Doonan of Barneys on Grey Gardens fashion

The relevant excepts are below, but be sure to read the full article. It's quite fun!

From The New York Observer, by Simon Doonan, on 13 May 2008, via the Grey Gardens Yahoo! group

One Flew Over the Couture's Nest

The Grey Gardens revival and the rise of Amy Winehouse have got me thinkin’ about the intimate relationship between crazy people and fashion

As influential as Amy is, she cannot even begin to compete with Little Edie Bouvier, cousin of Jackie O. Since the release of Grey Gardens in 1975—this award-winning Maysles brothers documentary showed the squalid but fascinating life of Edie and her mother as they wiled away the hours in their raccoon-infested East Hampton mansion—fashion stylists have been mesmerized by the verve and idiosyncrasy of Edie Beale’s fashion choices. In Edie’s closet, anything is possible: a sweater becomes a snood, a blouse becomes a button-through skirt. Little Edie’s all-bets-are-off homemade look has become a yardstick for cool. As I write, a whole new generation of fashion sickos are falling in love with Edie via A Maysles Scrapbook (Steidl Kasher, $60), a newly published collection of snaps and film stills from the archive of her remaining documentarian.

“You’re all sick!” screeched my friend Deb, who works in a psychiatric hospital and has a front-row seat at the unwitting fashion show that is mental illness. “Walk around any in-patient unit: Lots of people are sitting around with things tied around their heads, just like Little Edie. They are not making a fashion statement; they are trying to block out the voices in their heads,” railed my pal when I recently presented her with a copy of the Maysles book.

Source

Little Edie influenced fashion in 1997

There isn't much fresh, new Grey Gardens news right now, but enjoy this Grey Gardens-inspired fashion shoot from 1997.

From Harper's Bazaar, by Terry Richardson, on August 1997, via foto_decadent, via Grey Gardens Yahoo! Group

Sweater Happy