1 Photo
“Passionate. With an omnivorous curiosity about life.” These are the words Julia Gruen uses to describe her father.
A man not afraid to live life to its fullest, John Jonas Gruen, the cultural critic, journalist, author, composer and photographer, died in his New York City home on July 19. A part-time resident of Water Mill, he was 89.
Born outside Paris and raised in Milan, Mr. Gruen and his parents came to America as refugees from occupied Italy—three older brothers, born in Germany, were denied visas. The family first settled on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Mr. Gruen went on to the University of Iowa on the GI Bill and met his wife, aspiring painter Jane Wilson. He changed his major from theater to art history in order to be closer to her.
Ms. Wilson, a revered landscape painter of the post-war era, died last year. They were married 65 years.
After college, Mr. Gruen did graduate work at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and he and Ms. Wilson moved to Greenwich Village. In the 1950s and 1960s they found themselves at the epicenter of the growing arts scene, forming lifelong friendships with some of the most notable artists, writers and musicians of the 20th century.
Like many of their friends—Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns, among others—they soon found themselves on Long Island’s East End, drawn to the light and beauty and open space.
They bought their Water Mill carriage house and barn in 1960 after Ms. Wilson sold a painting for $5,000 to the Museum of Modern Art. The painting she sold was aptly titled “The Open Scene”—one of the many reasons she loved Water Mill was that the low horizons and ever-changing skies reminded her of her childhood in Iowa.
“My parents really loved it out here,” said Julia Gruen by phone from the family home she now summers in. “My mother found great inspiration in the light and clarity and simplicity of those times; the rolling potato fields, flat land and big skies, along with the ocean. She was nourished by quiet and beauty. My father was more of a city guy.”
“He could really write anywhere,” Ms. Gruen said of her father. “But there were times when he had a job all week in the city so he would join us on the weekends.
“We’d go to the train station, in Southampton, and I’d run down the platform into his arms,” she recalled, “Water Mill was really a vacation for him.” And an extension of their social circle. A bohemian zeitgeist—artists, writers and musicians would gather at their house, or they’d go to theirs. “My mother had her studio and my parents were great hosts,” she said. “There was a rhythm that just extended from the Village, out here.”
Mr. Gruen, a self-taught photographer, chronicled these halcyon days as he would chronicle his own life in one form or another.
Later Mr. Gruen would assemble those photographs and others into published works including “The Sixties: Young in the Hamptons” and “John Jonas Gruen: Facing the Artist,” the latter including portraits of luminaries in his circle such as Yoko Ono, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers and Willem de Kooning. His photographs are in the collections of the Whitney Museum and the Parrish Art Museum.
Mr. Gruen began his career as an arts critic for the New York Herald Tribune and New York Magazine, later became an arts columnist for Vogue and enjoyed a prolific career as a freelance writer covering art, theater, music and dance for The New York Times, Dance Magazine, Architectural Digest and many other publications.
“New Songs,” a recording of his musical compositions, was the first album on the newly formed Elektra Records label.
He wrote 14 books, including biographies of artist Keith Haring, conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein, composer Gian Carlo Menotti and dancer Erik Bruhn. He wrote his own memoir in 2008, “Callas Kissed Me … Lenny Too,” which was praised for its wit and candor as Mr. Gruen wrote frankly about his relationships with his famous friends.
“My father was a romantic,” Ms. Gruen said. He called himself, “a reveler in reflected glory,” and his daughter said he was very open about his fascination with well-known people and his desire for recognition.
“The last 20 years were devoted almost exclusively to his photography,” she said. “When you can somewhat reinvent yourself in your 60s and build a new persona, simultaneously pursuing something new and returning to that something with great success—I think he was very proud of that.”
“His years as a writer will cement his legacy but the photography, which he picked up again later in life and found success with, that provided him with a renewed pleasure and satisfaction.”
Ms. Gruen, the executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, said she “grew up in a crucible of artistic achievement.” A former dancer, she is not surprised to find herself working in the arts. She became Mr. Haring’s studio assistant in 1984 and director of his namesake foundation in 1989.
Water Mill was where “I got the best of my parents,” she said. She credits much of what motivated her father to his enduring marriage with Jane—a girl he fell in love with at first sight.
Accomplished in so many areas, Mr. Gruen was a keen cultural observer of life, and also an enthusiastic participant. But Ms. Gruen knows he would say his greatest accomplishment was his daughter.
“My father used to say that nothing he touched ever turned to gold,” she said. “But sometimes they turned into something far more valuable.”
on Jul 25, 2016