At 89, the indefatigable international weaver, textile designer, author and collector of traditional and contemporary craft, Jack Lenor Larsen, is still passionate about pursuing “concepts outside of the box,” as he puts it again in his just-released 12th book, “Learning From LongHouse.” And he is confident that the 18,000-square-foot private residence he envisioned 37 years ago, and which took five years to build, will exemplify that idea once it is reconfigured and opened to the public as a museum, which he expects to officially announce in 2017.
“I built this place to share,” Mr. Larsen explained recently at LongHouse.
The multi-level private residence, inspired by Japan’s Grand Shrine of Ise, and designed with noted American architect Charles Forberg, is not usually seen by the visitors who amble around the spectacular 16-acre reserve and sculpture garden in East Hampton. LongHouse Reserve is better known for its 25-year-old grounds and large outdoor installations, including ones by the glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, who’ll be marking his 75th birthday next year and it is hoped will be on hand when the upcoming museum is officially announced.
Meanwhile, Jack Lenor Larsen’s been thinking about his upcoming 90th birthday as well as his legacy. As “the last of the mid-century modernists” and a nonconformist, he’s eager not only to showcase his fabulous collection of arts and crafts from around the world—including works now stowed in New York City as well as in the LongHouse basement—but also to demonstrate how they might be displayed. Many museums don’t exhibit contemporary designer crafts, as “fine art draws a bigger crowd,” and MoMA’s range is “too popular,” Mr. Larsen said.
Mr. Larsen is also critical of viewing works online. “One learns best in a space—a photo is not three-dimensional,” he pointed out. And he said he is confident that the museum will continue to attract top-notch artists just as LongHouse Reserve already does. “It’s amazing how much good art is out here … and a lot of people who bought good work don’t want it to be in a museum basement,” he said.
Mr. Larsen yields to the moment as he takes a visitor around. “That table,” he says casually of an elegantly simple asymmetric design that sits near the head of the stairs to his second-floor residence, “it’s Wharton Esherick” —referring to the modernist sculptor who designed iconic prismatic furniture—”from the [1939] World’s Fair.” Almost immediately, he turns toward a window to note a grassy area recently cleared when a diseased 25-foot hedge was taken down. “That’s my motto: Elegance usually derives from subtraction.”
But so could understatement be his motto—he points to George Rickey’s stark, intersecting stainless-steel sculpture, “Six Lines in a T II,” which was installed on the reserve’s grounds earlier this year: “We had to drain Peter’s Pond to get it in,” Mr. Larsen says nonchalantly.
His informed voice and twinkling humor will be supplemented, in the future, by docents who will direct tours by appointment under the administrative eye of a museum director to join the LongHouse Reserve staff now led by Matko Tomicic, the executive director. There will also be apprentices and interns, and the educational component will continue to grow at the reserve, which approximately 3,000 students—including “first-grade cinematographers, middle school architects,” Mr. Larsen said—visit each year.
Everything at LongHouse evolves, and so too have been renovation plans for the museum under the guidance of architect Lee H. Skolnick, a vice president of LongHouse’s board of trustees. The second floor, where Mr. Larsen lives now, will maintain its residential aspect, while the first floor–with guest rooms converted to a reception area, and galleries designed to accommodate rotating exhibits—will concentrate more on displaying what Mr. Larsen has collected. An entranceway will replace what is now a breezeway.
Those are the plans for now, at least. But who knows, Mr. Larsen delights in an intuitive present tense. And even as he superintends ideas about the conversion, he’ll be working on his next book, which will be about “the famous people I’ve known.” These include Frank Lloyd Wright, for whom he designed the music room at Taliesin, and of course Edward Albee, who died on September 16 at his home in Montauk.
Mr. Larsen loves gnomic sayings, and one of his favorites, he smiles, is, “Let’s not be reverent but relevant.” He must surely know, however, that LongHouse, his “case study” private residence and future museum, can easily lay claim to being both.
on Oct 3, 2016