ELAINE BENSON, GALLERY PIONEER

Elaine Benson, art gallery owner, weekly newspaper columnist, fund-raising powerhouse, and Hamptons legend, died on Monday at Southampton Hospital at the age of 74.

Ms. Benson was perhaps the most visible, and certainly one of the most active presences on the East End, and friends said it was typical of her strength of character that no one except her family knew she had been diagnosed two years ago with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

"Flesh and blood, of course, does, but monuments are not supposed to - die, I mean," said Robert Dash, a friend and artist who has had many shows at the gallery over the years. "But Elaine was a legend while she was alive - dead and missed, she can only become more so."

The Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, whose 34th season has just ended, is also a legend. Ms. Benson founded it with her second husband, Emanuel Benson, in 1965, when opening an art gallery on the East End was considered rather quixotic.

It was a struggle at first. To support the gallery, Mr. Benson taught at Suffolk Community College and Ms. Benson went to work at Southampton Hospital doing public relations, a job that later snowballed in importance, as did the gallery.

In marked contrast to recent years, when she was besieged by artists wanting a show, in the beginning the Bensons had to coax them to come to Bridgehampton. Artists reasoned that sales were made in Manhattan and the only reason anyone would come to look at art on the East End would be for the opening party and the free wine.

And they weren't entirely wrong. While the art community remained small enough to be a loose-knit family, the Benson's Saturday-afternoon openings were some of the best parties around, where everyone knew everyone else.

After the first few years, though, the gallery not only became a nucleus for artists and writers but also began to break even and then to make a profit. The exhibit space, which had been moved to the barn, gradually expanded until it consisted of seven buildings and an acre of indoor and outdoor display.

While the shows over the years have always included a scattershot of artists such as Larry Rivers, Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, Lee Krasner, and Jane Freilicher, the gallery mainly concentrated on lesser-known or emerging talent. The established artists didn't need her, Ms. Benson maintained, as much as the young, the neglected, and the unknown.

The Bensons decided early on that instead of showcasing one or two artists they would give a number of large group shows with consolidating themes. In that it also showed photography, crafts, and art jewelry, the gallery was a pioneer - it was the first to show Dale Chihuly's glass and Toshiko Takaezu's pottery, for example, two artists whose work now sells in the six figures.

"We knew what we were doing," Ms. Benson once said. "Emanuel had the original connections to bring us artists who had already emerged. Our first show, on the second floor of the house, featured small boxes and prints by Louise Nevelson and drawings and sculptures by David Harris."

When her husband died in 1971, Ms. Benson found herself running the gallery without his knowledge and guiding hand. But with the initial help of one of her sons, William Goff, an art dealer himself, and the later hands-off support of her third husband, Joseph F.X. Kaufman, a historian who died two years ago, she went on to make the gallery the success that it is today.

Though she lacked any formal art training, "when you look at as much art as I do," she said in an interview, "you get a sort of gut feeling. I find I am drawn to extremely personal and poetic art that is not in the mainstream. I am drawn to the offbeat, but I also like very vigorous, bold painters."

In the years that followed, she promoted the careers of hundreds of artists in exhibits that opened with a preview party benefiting a local cause - East End Hospice, the Retreat, the Animal Rescue Fund, the Nature Conservancy, the East End Gay Organization, the Group for the South Fork, the Bridgehampton Child Care Center.

If the Saturday vernissages drew the art community, then one of these benefits, the Meet the Writers book fair, was a magnet for the East End's writers, editors, and publishers. Held in May in behalf of Southampton College's John Steinbeck writing program and library, the fair is considered the unofficial opening of the summer season, a yackfest of epic proportions.

And, since Ms. Benson knew every artist on the East End (not to mention all the writers and nearly everyone else besides), it was only appropriate that she be called upon to manage the artists' team for August's annual Artists-Writers softball game.

"She used to put together very interesting games," said Leif Hope, the artists' current manager. "She didn't know much about baseball, but she certainly knew all about artists and writers."

Ms. Benson was born in 1924 and grew up in Philadelphia. From editing her high school newspaper she graduated to writing a weekly column for a local paper and then to a job at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

She never lost her fondness for writing. A couple of years after arriving on the East End she started to write a weekly column for Dan's Papers, and kept it up for 30 years. Her final column, written in full knowledge that death was approaching, is in tomorrow's issue of Dan's.

And she finally finished a book she had been working on for many years, "Unmentionables: A Brief History of Underwear," which Simon and Schuster published last year.

By the 1960s, Ms. Benson was married to her first husband, William Goff, and had four children. When her husband flunked out of law school she took a job at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art.

Her boss was Mr. Benson, an art critic and director of the museum's department of education for 18 years. The couple fell in love, left their families, and divorced their spouses. They moved to East Hampton when their marriage caused "somewhat of a scandal," as Ms. Benson put it.

The couple traveled all over the world. Rose C.S. Slivka, The Star's art critic and at that time the editor of Crafts Horizon magazine, said Ms. Benson covered crafts for the magazine wherever she went.

"Thanks to Elaine, we covered all of Asia and Africa," she recalled. "She was life in action, brilliantly organized, a genius administrator, and always open to new ideas."

The genius for administration certainly stood her in good stead in her work at the hospital, where she was director of public relations until 1989, and to which memorial contributions have been suggested.

"She came in and filled all the gaps," said Mary Lynch, the hospital's director of special events. "She organized the fund-raisers, started the newsletter, created the hospital's outstanding art portfolio, even went round the hospital with Santa at Christmas. She had such a strong personality that she got more done in three hours than most people did in a day - whatever she was working on had her total commitment."

Commitment to the artists who showed with her gallery also came high on her list. A close friend, the artist Priscilla Bowden, said she had always felt completely spoiled.

"As an art dealer she had good taste, cheerful good manners, and total honesty - but her greatest talent was for friendship. She was a loyal and unwavering friend and majorly interested in everyone she met."

"And don't forget to mention," Ms. Bowden said, that Ms. Benson was "the best source of gossip around, to everyone's delight."

Another friend, Frazer Dougherty, recited the mantra of how to spread news on the East End: "Telephone, telegram, tell Elaine."

In addition to her son William, who lives in Connecticut, Ms. Benson is survived by two daughters, Kimberly Goff of Bridgehampton and Ginny Goff Green of New Jersey; another son, Neal Goff of Manhattan, and three grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. on Oct. 11 at the LTV Studios on Industrial Road in East Hampton.

The Elaine Benson Gallery will continue, with Ms. Goff, who has been working with her mother for the past two years, at the helm, but, as one of the gallery's artists, Pat Moran, put it, "It's the end of an era."

S.S.