Abstract Expressionism fans and admirers of Willem de Kooning have a chance to see the first full-scale retrospective of his work in some three decades, which opened on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. The show, which marks the first time an exhibit has taken up an entire floor of MoMA’s new building, contains close to 200 works spanning about 70 years.

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    While de Kooning, who died at age 92 in 1997, may be thought of here as an East Hampton artist, his full-time move to Springs in the ’60s was preceded by years in New York City and a youth spent in his native Netherlands.

    The exhibit begins as early as 1916 with two still lifes, academic works executed in Holland before a rushed move to the United States in 1926 as a stowaway aboard a coal freighter.

    According to his biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning enrolled as a boy in an eight-year program at the academy in Rotterdam, but felt he had learned as much about technique as he wanted to after a few years, having become aware of modernists such as his countryman Piet Mondrian. He often credited his classical training, however, with enabling him to make abstractions of his subject matter.

    The exhibit continues to 1987, covering every style, medium, and subject matter the prolific and versatile artist worked with. MoMA has brought together such watershed works as “Pink Angels,” circa 1945, a work that distills Pablo Picasso through Arshile Gorky; “Excavation” from 1950, a busy, oddly linear jumble of all-over painting, and his Woman series from 1950 to 1953.

    Black-and-white compositions of the late ’40s, urban abstractions of the ’50s, figurative compositions from the ’60s, and large gestural nonobjective paintings of the ’70s are all represented. There is also a theatrical backdrop the artist painted in 1946 called “Labyrinth.”

    John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the museum, curated the exhibit, immersed himself in the artist’s work for several years before curating this show.

    It is presented in chronological order but marries works that have not been seen together in decades. There are very early experiments in abstraction from de Kooning’s New York arrival and then more fully abstracted works in the biomorphic style of Miro and Picasso, with some vaguely Surrealistic compositions. In the 1940s a series of seated figures, alternating between degrees of realism and abstraction, comprises the first Woman series.

    This series, which led to two others including the most important period of 1950-1953, may be the one for which the artist is most remembered, but MoMA notes that it was the black-and-white series of the late ’40s that established his Abstract Expressionist bona fides. A teaching gig at Black Mountain College in Asheville, N.C., during the summer of 1948 inspired the artist to reintroduce color.

    The breakthrough Woman series, which began with his early work on “Woman I” (1950-1952), freed the artist from his thrall to Cubism and inspired works so painterly and improvisational that a couple were finished before he could complete the first one. These works prompted viewers to decry their apparent misogyny and the artist’s abandonment of pure abstraction.

    Mr. Elderfield noted in a press release that “the exhibition demonstrates how de Kooning never followed any single, narrowly defined path, repudiating the modernist view of art as developing toward an increasingly refined, all-over abstraction to find continuity in continual change.”

    By the time de Kooning came to Springs in the 1960s, his style had changed again to colorful abstract landscapes that resembled blocky spills of paint, still focused on the hand and brushstroke. Indeed, the works at MoMA show a constant shift back and forth between color and its absence and subject matter.

    The first work in the show that relates directly to the artist’s new surroundings is “Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louse Point,” a pretty hilarious title for a painting now in the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam. Before that are drawings of clamdiggers and following is an evocation of a “Woman in a Rowboat,” from 1964. There is a Sag Harbor Woman painting and two Montauk landscapes from the ’60s as well. Throughout all of his time here, the effect of the vaunted East End light is unmistakable.

    And there is more, and more and more to follow: paintings, sculptures, lithographs. In the ’80s, the last phase of his creative inspiration, de Kooning gave up the heavy brushstroke to glaze his work with bold transparent colors, which gave way more and more to white. It is at this point that the artist begins to slow down, coinciding with failing health and dementia. He still manages to simplify his painting process to what the museum calls “drawn paintings in a limited color range that nonetheless evoke constantly changing, swelling, and contracting spaces.”

    The exhibit will remain on view through Jan. 9,

    Tickets will go on sale Friday for the 19th Hamptons International Film Festival and once again film aficionados will wonder how and where they will ever fit in everything they want to see, as the screenings and events will expand from their base in East Hampton to include almost every village or hamlet that has a theater from Montauk to Westhampton, including Sag Harbor and Southampton, and even Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. The festival runs Oct. 13 to 17.

    Over the past few years, the festival has gained attention and prestige with early screenings of films that went on to win Academy Awards. David Nugent, the director of programming, said last week that after “Slumdog Millionaire” had its second North American showing at the festival in 2008 and went on to win eight Oscars, including best picture in 2009, “it really helped us. People pay attention to us now.”

    Since then, films shown at the festival have garnered 62 Academy Award nominations, 30 just from last year. These included the 12 nominations for “The King’s Speech” and four wins including best picture and best actor. It also won for best screenplay by David Seidler, and best director for Tom Hooper, both of whom attended the festival with their film last year.

    “It’s a lot of success, but it’s more than that. What happened is that various studios have decided to share their films with our audience. It’s easier in some ways, but more complicated in others. But the result is we show stronger films and gain more prestige.”

    Those choices continue to be dense this year with highlighted films such as “Jeff Who Lives at Home” opening the festival in East Hampton and the film “Butter” as the kickoff film in Southampton. The closing film will be “The Artist” and the Centerpiece film is “Like Crazy.”

    Mr. Nugent pointed out that last year’s Centerpiece “The Debt” is now in general release. One of its stars, Jessica Chastain, visited the film festival as a Breakthrough Performer. She has since appeared in movies such as Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” and “The Help.” This year’s film “Like Crazy,” a love story, won the grand jury prize at Sundance for best picture and has received raves for its subtle yet real and moving performances by the leads, Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones.

    “The Artist,” about the end of silent films in Hollywood, seems particularly apt today with society’s constant casting away of recently developed yet rapidly outmoded technology. The French film has been lauded for treating the silent movie genre as an art form of its own rather than a forgotten medium. “The Artist” has been embraced by the film community and critics since it was shown at Cannes this year. It has also been gaining buzz for being the first film since the 1920s that could receive a best picture Academy Award nomination, while being, for the most part, silent.

    “Jeff Who Lives at Home” is the latest film by Jay and Mark Duplass, a brother team whose last film was “Cyrus.” It stars Jason Segel, Ed Helms, and Susan Sarandon, who will also be a featured guest in the festival’s A Conversation With series. A Variety review of the movie from the Toronto Film Festival said the film was likable and “seems more tightly scripted than the siblings’ earlier, semi-improvised dramedies, but lacks the wonderful squirm-inducing quality that sets them apart.” The story is about a 30-year-old man who refuses to consider leaving the nest.

    “Butter” takes a not terribly nice look at Middle America through the guise of competitive butter carving, with a cast led by Ty Burrell and Jennifer Garner. Mr. Burrell’s character in this satire has carved Newt Gingrich and scenes from “Schindler’s List,” which earned him the nickname “The Elvis of Butter.” When he steps down from the carving competition, his wife enters the fray with a previous flame, played by Hugh Jackman, and she will stop at nothing to make sure the championship stays in the family.

    Other participants in Conversations this year will include Rufus Wainwright, David Bailey, Bruce Weber, Harry Belafonte, Dick Cavett, Matthew Broderick, and Alec Baldwin. The breakthrough performers will be Emily Browning, Stine Fischer Christensen, Ezra Miller, and Anton Yelchin.

    This year the festival has a new partner in Italy, the Perugia International Film Festival. As a result the Hamptons festival will include six of the Italian festival’s films: “Corpo Celeste,” “A Quiet Life,” “Return to the Aeolian Islands,” “Sul Mare,” “We Have a Pope,” and “The Wholly Family.”

    “We noticed some really strong films coming out of Italy,” Mr. Nugent said. “It seemed like a real moment, a movement like the French New Wave.” When the opportunity to partner with a new Italian festival arose, it seemed a perfect chance to share that moment here, he said.

    At least one familiar face from East Hampton will add a little stardust to his résumé during the festival. Brad Loewen, a bayman and former town councilman from Springs, appears in the short film “The Sea Is All I Know,” written and directed by Jordan Bayne and starring Melissa Leo and Peter Gerety. Mr. Loewen’s natural ease on camera in showing Mr. Gerety how to pull in the nets from his family’s centuries-old pound traps gained him an unplanned part in the film and a Screen Actor’s Guild card application in the process. Mr. Loewen said about the film in April, “It’s a human story about a very human dilemma and I’m very grateful for that.” The film has been well received at other festivals and was released in Los Angeles last week to qualify for Oscar consideration.

    Asked if there was any overarching theme or significant trend this year, Mr. Nugent, who was still in the thick of preparations, said it was difficult to say, but he did note that the effects of the economic downturn continue to be evident in filmmaking. “Film is a medium where traumatic events take a little while to present themselves. When there is a crisis or a tsunami, a poet writes a poem or an artist can make a painting right away.” Because of the lead time involved from idea to conception, production to editing, and editing to release, films take longer to make their statement on those events.

    “It is often a little while after the fact that you see films respond to that and can say ‘Yes, there is a trend.’ ” He said movies in the festival such as the documentary “Hard Times: Lost on Long Island” are indicative of that trend.

    Another trend in America, bullying, will receive much attention in the festival. There will be a screening of Lee Hirsch’s documentary about bullying among American youth, “The Bully Project,” which will also receive the Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for a film of Conflict and Resolution. It is the first time the award will go to a film not about an international conflict. A panel discussion with the director and experts in school bullying will be presented along with an outreach program to schools in the area.

    A full festival guide will be included in next week’s edition of The Star.

Plein Democracy

    Alyce Peifer, of the Wednesday Group of plein-air painters, has organized a show of its members’ work that will be at Ashawagh Hall in Springs tomorrow through Sunday. The Wednesday Group is about a dozen artists who live and work on the East End, often meeting together in the outdoors with their easels in locations that are apparently selected by a vote among those planning to attend.

    This weekend’s exhibit has work by Carol Boye, Bobbie Braun, Toshiko Kitano Groner, Phyllis Hammond, Annette Heller, Andrea Hufstader, Cyndi Loewen, Deb Palmer, Ms. Peifer, Gene Samuelson, Georgette Sinclair, Cynthia Sobel, Frank Sofo, and Pam Vossen. An artists’ reception takes place Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. Ten percent of sales will go to the Springs Improvement Society. Ashawagh Hall is on Springs-Fireplace Road at its intersection with Old Stone Highway.

Three at Crazy

    Amagansett’s Crazy Monkey Gallery on Main Street will show paintings and sculpture by Barbara Bilotta, June Kaplan, and Sheila Rotner during October. Each woman paints in what could be termed abstract forms. In an example of Ms. Rotner’s work provided by the gallery, nearly monochromatic reds and browns form a grid of thick texture.

    Ms. Kaplan’s “dreamscapes” are, as she has described them, a “passage into her turbulent emotional nature.” A painting by Ms. Bilotta evokes a crashing wave or perhaps an explosion, but in a palette of blacks and grays that leaves it open to interpretation. An artists’ reception is on Oct. 15 from 5 to 7 p.m.

Music, Seascapes

    Saturday’s opening at the Grenning Gallery on Main Street in Sag Harbor will coincide with the Sag Harbor American Music Festival, with Bryan Downey and Mariann Megna performing. On the walls will be landscape paintings by Ben Fenske, Melissa Franklin Sanchez, Marc Dalessio, and Nelson H. White. Many of the paintings are of East End scenes, with seascapes predominant. A reception on Saturday runs from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Black and White in Sag

    “Seeing in Black and White” is the title of a group show now on view at the Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery on Sag Harbor’s Main Street. Selected works by Donato Giancola, Mikel Glass, and Rachel Bess have been hung on the main floor along with paintings by the gallery’s roster of artists. A reception is Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Pomianowski Out East

    John Pomianowski’s Montauk landscapes are on display at the Outeast Gallery at 65 Tuthill Road in Montauk. Gallery hours are Thursday through Sunday, noon to 4 p.m., or by appointment.

    Mr. Pomianowski has filled the two-room gallery with his moody images of familiar and not-so-familiar sites — many, as might be imagined, on the bitter end of the Island’s intersection of land and sea. A few watercolors done in Indonesia are included as well. The gallery is adjacent to Duryea’s Lobster Deck and can be found by making a right at the Montauk train station.

Fall Photos

    Tulla Booth, a photography gallery on Main Street in Sag Harbor, opens a “Fall Collection” show tomorrow of local and international images. A reception will be held on Friday, Oct. 7, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Geist’s “Tall Paintings”

    Selected works from the estate of the late Sidney Geist are on view at the Eric Firestone Gallery on Newtown Lane in East Hampton Village. Mr. Geist was a sculptor and writer who was born in Paterson, N.J., in 1914. He died in 2005. A career that spanned six decades included time with the Art Students League and the New Jersey Federal Arts Project. Later, he fell in with New York City’s postwar avant-garde crowd.

    His work moves between the abstract and “figurative totems,” the gallery said in a release. The Firestone show includes his self-described “tall paintings.” A reception is on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

    “They’re having a kid? His life’s over.”

    I heard those only half-joking words at a summer barbecue a few years ago. It took me a while before I could complete the thought: “And a new, richer one begins.”

    What’s nice about “Pobble’s Way” (Flashlight Press, $16.95) by Simon Van Booy is that on a winter walk a father’s flights of fancy match his daughter’s, and the two play off each other. To him, a leaf is a butterfly raft. To her, a mushroom is a frog umbrella.

    And the exercise in imagination extends to a menagerie of woodland animals who, in a furred and feathered Rashomon effect, take turns deciphering what a dropped pink mitten actually is. The options: cotton candy, a mouse house, a wing warmer, a fish coat, or a carrot carrier.

    Mr. Van Booy, originally from Wales but a South Fork resident-slash-visitor ever since he earned an M.F.A. at Southampton College, is the author of a recent debut novel and story collections that range from well received to prizewinning, and the language here is fresh: The duck comes “strutting over to the Something”; the mouse “parked her plump body” on top of it. Or simply fetching: “Dusk had stilled the creaking trees, the branches wore long sleeves of snow. . . .”

    There’s comedy, too. A mitten? “ ‘Never heard of it,’ Mouse muttered.” Rabbits are accused of engaging in gluttony when it comes to carrots? “ ‘Some do, I suppose,’ Bunny said, looking at her paws.”

    Wendy Edelson’s illustrations, in watercolor glaze, capture the woods’ profusion of life. She hails, not surprisingly, from Washington’s Bainbridge Island, where the wildlife is indeed wild and the greenery so green it practically throbs.

    She includes charming endpapers showing where each of the animals makes its bed. Which is where they retreat to as the story, set after dinner but before bedtime, comes to hint at the eternal parental struggle to get a child to sleep.

    And the moon “pulled her white blanket across the woods.”

“My Side of the Car”

    At last, a kids’ book that explores life in the car. It occupies so much of a parent’s time, energy, and worry — from negotiating harnessed safety seats worthy of the Space Shuttle to the use of rolling motion as sleep inducement, and what do you do when the kid’s asleep and you have to run an errand? — you’d think they’d have proliferated like so many side-impact air bags.

    “My Side of the Car” (Candlewick Press, $16.99), by Kate Feiffer with deft pencil-and-watercolor illustrations by her father, Jules Feiffer, is about a long-delayed trip to the zoo that gets put off yet again by rain. Complication ensues when little Sadie notices that it’s falling on only the driver’s side of the car. Her dad splashes through puddles and can barely see past the wipers, but out Sadie’s window it’s all garden parties and sunflowers.

    (The whimsical book, based on an actual argument the two once had in trying to get to a nature preserve on Martha’s Vineyard, is one of a number of projects the cartoonist had lined up for himself when he holed up in a rental off a quiet Southampton street not long ago.)

    Is it merely wishful thinking? To investigate, Sadie steps out of the car and into mud up to her pink stockings. On his side, anyway. She relents.

    But one good turn deserves another, and they don’t get far before the sunshine crosses the (psychological?) divide, enabling father and daughter to stride happily into the zoo together. At last.

“Orani”

    You won’t find a lovelier children’s book than Claire A. Nivola’s “Orani” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16.99). It tells of a family trip she took close to 60 years ago back to the village on Sardinia where her father grew up. (Her father being the artist Costantino Nivola, who kept a house in Springs for many years.)

    Like magpies, she and her Sardinian cousins “flew and settled wherever something was happening” in Orani, a small place of stucco and red tile roofs ringed by mountains. The sheer immediacy of life there renders her experiences indelible. “All I needed to learn and feel and know was down there,” she says from a perch overlooking the village.

    She eats fruit and figs right off the tree. Women bake bread communally at night to avoid the heat of day; neighbors make the cheese and honey. She walks the streets and through open windows hears plates being cleared. Among the sights are a three-day wedding celebration, a nearby newborn, and, in a second-floor room open to children, a corpse laid out for a funeral, “his face rigid and white and cold with the unspeakable strangeness of death.”

    She finds her return home to crowded New York City, with its height and symmetrical layout, equally strange. The book ends with her wondering what different worlds so many people might have come from. It’s a passage with all the feeling, hope, and generosity of a prayer.

    Their own Oranis? They should be so lucky.

    It was a journey of thousands of miles and thousands of dollars, but two pieces weighing more than two tons each, stenciled by the English artist Banksy in the Palestinian West Bank, are now on view in Southampton. While more than 2,000 people have seen them in their new location, not everyone is happy about it, including the artist’s representatives.

    Pest Control, the organization that acts as the official arbiter of all things Banksy (who continues to remain anonymous because his street works are legally considered vandalism), told ArtNet recently that it had not authenticated any of the street-art works in the show, at the Keszler Gallery. The organization said it would not evaluate any Banksy work that has been removed from its original site, adding that it had warned Stephan Keszler that there would be “serious implications of selling unauthenticated works.”

    Mr. Keszler, the art dealer who took the works to a former power plant on North Sea Road in Southampton (one of the few places on the South Fork that could handle their weight), is no stranger to controversy. A few years ago he invited Russell Young, an English artist whom he represents, to a Scope art fair in Miami, where Mr. Young pulled silk-screen works using his own blood.

    On Monday, Mr. Keszler said Pest Control has never contacted him. “They did not warn us up front and did not come after us with proof that they are not real pieces. Further, we are a secondary market and have no need to get authorization from Pest Control.” He added that “we have a lot of proof from the Web site and other documentation that these are real Banksy pieces. I believe they would come after us with all legal recourse if this was not the case.”

    Mr. Keszler said the pieces have been on the artist’s Web site, although they do not appear to be there anymore. Both are seen in a video on YouTube showing them first in a yard and then being packed up to move to England, being restored, and being shipped off to America.

    The artist is believed to have painted “Stop and Search,” an image of a girl in a pink dress frisking a soldier, and “Wet Dog,” which depicts a shaggy dog shaking water off his coat, in 2007. “Wet Dog” was painted on a bus stop’s freestanding wall; “Stop and Search” was part of a building.

    “When he made “Stop and Search,” he did not ask the owners of the building whether he could do this,” Mr. Keszler said. “And they did not know about art. They did not like this.” There is a door where the image used to be, according to photographs in the video and to Mr. Keszler. “People had removed it for the man and put it in a box in a yard somewhere for two years.”

    The entrepreneurs who removed the pieces started asking around if anyone was interested in the work. “They tried to sell it through eBay, but selling a two-and-a-half-ton work on eBay is difficult,” Mr. Keszler said. Eventually, he said, his partner in the venture, Robin Barton, a British art dealer, found the pieces and was put in contact with the men who had removed them. Mr. Barton, he said, was the one who negotiated their export from Palestine, adding that both Israeli and Palestinian government approval had been received before the pieces were moved out of the country.

    Mr. Keszler said he became involved because of his previous show of Banksy’s prints in Southampton three years ago, which included some of his own inventory and works owned by collectors. “I saw his work a while ago and thought he was a very smart artist. I got into Banksy’s work more and more and wanted to show originals.” One work, a painting of a rat with text, was seen in a film about Banksy called “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”

    The art dealer said he was not showing the works for money and would prefer to donate them to a major museum. Referring to bloggers who have complained that he was holding the exhibit for his own gain, he said, “It disturbs me that they talk about the event and me in an unfriendly way.” He noted that the 2,000 people who have seen the works in Southampton may never had had the opportunity had they remained in the West Bank. “We did something very good for Banksy and art lovers,” he said.

    He is now looking for a space in Manhattan’s meatpacking district with solid flooring, able to withstand the five tons-plus weight of the two works in order to show them in the city.

    The Hamptons Black International Film Festival opens today in Manhattan with a premiere of “Obama’s Irish Roots,” a documentary about the President as he traces his Irish ancestry, produced and directed by Gabriel Murray. The festival will continue at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor over the weekend, showcasing films that explore the African Diaspora, with a focus on countries such as Brazil, Burkina Faso, and South Africa. 

    Founded by Angelique Monét, a multimedia artist and filmmaker, the festival originated as a platform for independent cinema. “It’s multicultural and international. I wanted to bring something that’s different than other festivals. It’s a small boutique, and we offer strategic partnerships with other festivals,” said Ms. Monét.

    “Smaller boutique festivals can give filmmakers the love and support that they need,” she added. “With me being a distributor and having a channel on Dish, it’s an asset for filmmakers to have support with distribution.”

    In addition to the Obama film, which will be shown before members of the Congressional Black Caucus on Friday, Sept. 23, this weekend’s selections include “Bellini and The Devil,” a Brazilian thriller that involves murder, an affair, and a search for a missing book, directed by Marcelo Galvao Silva, “Area Q,” starring Isaiah Washington, a sci-fi that takes place in Brazil, directed by Gerson Sanginitto, and “Koglb-zanga or Prince Wendemi,” a documentary from Burkina Faso about women, witchcraft, and social justice, directed by Ilboudo Yalgabama.

    Another documentary is “Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans,” a historical analysis of a neighborhood of free black people in New Orleans from the 1800s to post-Katrina, directed by Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie, writer and co-director, along with “Popa Wu: A 5 Percent Story,” in which the father of the Wu Tang Clan, Popa Wu, discusses growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, directed by Khalik Allah. The festival concludes with “Confessions of a Gambler,” set in South Africa, where a Muslim woman becomes a gambler in order to buy medicine for her son, who has H.I.V., directed by Amanda Lane.

    “Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell,” wrote Currer Bell, alias Charlotte Bronte, going on to explain in her flowing style why she and her sisters, Anne and Emily, sought anonymity:

____

Nom de Plume:

A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms

Carmela Ciuraru

Harper, $24.99

____

    “The ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women because — without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ — we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.” Simply put, women were not supposed to write books in 19th-century England.

    Only after her death was Charlotte Bronte’s explanation printed in editions of “Wuthering Heights” and “Agnes Grey.”

    In “Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms,” Carmela Ciuraru reveals the fascinating variety of reasons why the Bronte sisters wrote as the Bells, why Aurore Dupin wrote as George Sand, why Marian Evans became George Eliot, why Charles Dodgson penned his way down the rabbit hole as Lewis Carroll.

    The curtain is raised on 19 writers in all, and while the diverse motives behind their choosing anonymity are what the author said inspired her to write the book, her clear, anti-pedantic style of presenting the lives and times of her subjects makes it a page-turner.

    In August, Ms. Ciuraru visited the Montauk Book Shop to discuss her book. She pointed out that “nom de plume” was not a French phrase. It was an English invention. The French refer to a pen name as a “nom de guerre,” which in the case of a few of her subjects seems more fitting. O. Henry is a case in point.

    Some say that O. Henry, alias William Sydney Porter, was one of the finest American writers of short stories. He once told an inquiring reporter that his decision to write under an assumed name stemmed from chronic “shyness,” but his shyness was certainly compounded by the fact that William Sydney Porter had been convicted of embezzling money from the First National Bank of Austin, where he worked for a time.

    On the other hand, Samuel Clemens hid behind Mark Twain to accommodate his doppelganger. Ms. Ciuraru tells us that Twain called himself “an independent double,” and his biographer Ron Powers wrote that Twain’s “indifference to the boundary between fact and fantasy became a hallmark of literature, and later, of his consciousness.”

    The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa was not an independent double so much as an extremely dependent Hydra. “I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” Pessoa called himself “a drama divided into people instead of acts.”

    If Eric Blair had kept his given name, we would be calling the excesses of totalitarian states “Blairian” instead of Orwellian. He grew up in Edwardian England, the product of two prominent families. As a young man, he said it was an era that held “the sheer vulgar fatness of wealth without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it.” He had bad lungs and was at times bedridden, which made him sensitive to “disparities in social condition.” Blair was extremely superstitious. He believed a pseudonym would prevent anyone from using his real name against him for evil purposes.

    He attended Eton, worked in India for the Indian Imperial Police, but did a three-sixty, decided to live among the common folk of Paris, where he indulged in prostitutes, and London, where he dressed as a tramp and slept in Trafalgar Square. The experience resulted in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” George Orwell might have been a handle meant to save his family embarrassment, but it was the vehicle that allowed him to leave an ambivalent time behind.

    George Sand (Aurore Dupin), and George Eliot (Marian Evans) were women who wrote under men’s names. Sand, a bohemian, seemed to grow into her androgyny. Eliot, from a small village, needed a shield against repercussions that would surely result from her “autobiographical ideas abut religion, faith, and unrequited love,” Ms. Ciuraru writes.

    “Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation,” Eliot wrote to her editor’s brother.

    Karen Blixen was a Dane, the granddaughter of a shipping magnate. Her father was a writer who, as “Boganis” (American Indian for “hazelnut”), wrote “Letters From the Hunt,” an account of his adventures in America. Blixen grew up in East Africa, as readers of “Out of Africa” will recall, but returned to Denmark to write as her father had. Her decision to become Isak Dinesen  came from the same desire as her father’s, to “express himself freely, give his imagination a free rein. He didn’t want people to ask, ‘Do you really mean that?’ Or, ‘Have you, yourself, experienced that?’ ”

    Ms. Ciuraru writes that Blixen’s name change allowed her to start fresh after the painful losses of her father to suicide, her farm in Africa, and her husband, Fenys Finch Hatton, in a plane crash. 

    “ ‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully. ‘Of course it must,’ Humpty Dumpty said, with a short laugh. ‘My name means the shape I am, and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape.’ ”

    Charles Dodgson became Lewis Carroll because “my constant aim is to remain, personally, unknown to the world.” “Lewis Carroll” was a hiding place for this strange, Victorian, obsessive-compulsive  mathematician with a penchant, as a boy, for naming the snails and toads in the family garden, and his curious attraction to young girls later in life.

    There is not room here to delve into all of Ms. Ciuraru’s subjects, although the chapter on Patricia Highsmith (a virulent anti-Semite who would not allow her books to be published in Israel, and who smuggled her pet snails into France in her underwear), alias Clare Morgan, is a novel in itself. And Pauline Reage (Dominque Aury) remained under cover to distance herself from her own pornography.

    Such delicious insights, but the real reward, the lasting stimulus of “Nom de Plume,” lies in the curiosity it generates to read or reread the fruits of the furtive — “Wuthering Heights,” “Tom Sawyer,” “The Gift of the Magi,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Histoire de Ma Vie,” “A Clergyman’s Daughter,” “Middlemarch,” “Scenes of Clerical Life,” “Strangers on a Train,” “The Story of O,” on and on and on.

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    Carmela Ciuraru lives in Brooklyn and Sag Harbor.

    If it seems as though there are a lot of opportunities to bid on art at events this year, it could very well be. There is a long history of commissioning East End artists to contribute works to charitable endeavors, but this year established benefits have been revitalized and newer events that have not had such components have adopted them.

    The latest is the silent auction of “wine label” paintings that will be part of the Harvest Festival’s tasting and Harvest Moon Gala dinner on Saturday night. Arlene Bujese, a retired art dealer and now independent curator for exhibits and projects such as the Box Art Auction held last week to benefit East End Hospice, asked 24 artists from the region to produce paintings on pieces of 5.5-by-8.5-inch canvas. The resulting “labels” will be adhered to magnums of 2008 Merliance, a cooperative blend of 100 percent merlot made by the Long Island Merlot Alliance and part of a silent auction at the gala.

    The wine auction during the dinner will benefit East End Hospice, of which Ms. Bujese is a board member, as well as the Peconic Land Trust and Group for the East End. The events on Saturday night are the centerpiece of a month-long program of salons and dinners to share information and celebrate the food and wine traditions of the East End. The sale of the labels will benefit the festival, which is its own nonprofit group.

    Ms. Bujese said last week that she was looking for something the artists could use as a template, “to take an object and make something that would turn it into a work of art,” similar to how artists transform cigar boxes for the Box Art Auction. In this case, a wine label seemed an obvious choice, particularly since artists have been designing printed paper labels for regular wine bottles for many years.

    “I still have a bottle of Bedell wine with a label Elaine de Kooning made the design for 25 years ago. It’s faded and who knows what the wine is like now, but it gave rise to the idea to make one-of-a-kind works” with a wine label format.

    Yet, it was important to her that the artists work in their own styles and, in particular, that they not feel the need to adopt a vineyard theme. “I didn’t want to see a lot of grapes and cherubs. I wanted variety, not a lot of vineyard images. That’s asking them to decorate or be designers. I said ‘Do what you want, but it has to be this small. It has to be paint on canvas so it wouldn’t be damaged.’ ”

    When starting out, she made two lists of artists: those who might say yes and those that could say yes, but might not. Out of those lists she found 24 artists: Andrew Hart Adler, Carolyn Beegan, Priscilla Bowden, Stephanie Brody-Ledermann, Jennifer Cross, Eric Ernst, Audrey Flack, Connie Fox, Elaine Grove, John Hardy, Carol Hunt, Sheila Isham, William King, Rex Lau, Paton Miller, Roy Nicholson, Dan Rizzie, Steven Romm, Alexander Russo, Arlene Slavin, Ty Stroudsburg, Michelle Stuart, and Darius Yektai.

    The resulting paintings will be affixed to the wine bottles with a special backing and a protective cover that will allow the artwork to be removed and framed. Bids will be taken during a tasting in the early part of the evening and through dinner and the live wine auction.

    While there are many names that will be familiar to loyal gallery attendees, there are some additions that have not been shown regularly or recently on the South Fork. Ms. Bujese went to old friends and artists who once showed at her gallery.

    Only Mr. Rizzie decided not to use canvas. He chose instead a heavy paper to which a fixative was added in order to make it more resilient. With support selected, he was still at a loss for subject matter. Ms. Bujese recalled that she told Mr. Rizzie that the name merlot was thought to be taken from a French word for black bird. Since Mr. Rizzie uses black birds in his work, it was a natural theme. Ms. Grove, who overheard the conversation, decided to choose the same subject, she said. Ms. Brody-Ledermann also includes blackbirds as a motif in her work and used them here. That each used the birds differently according to their unique style is exactly what Ms. Bujese envisioned, she said.

    “Ultimately, I want them to do what they want to do. A narrow theme forces them into a box.” The labels will start with a $500 bid and the artists will share half of the proceeds with the organization. All of them are invited to the wine tasting.

    The tasting and party will take place at the Ludlow farm in Bridgehampton. The tasting starts at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday with 30 East End wineries offering barrel samples of their yet-to-be-released wines from the 2010 vintage, thought to be one of Long Island’s best. The food offered at the tasting will include East End produce, fish, cheese, and dishes made by regional chefs. Beginning at 7, the party will feature a live auction of rare and unreleased vintages of Long Island wines in different formats. William Holden, Tom Schaudel, and William Schwartz will create a three-course farm-to-table dinner served with wines from across the East End. Swing music will be provided by the Jerry Costanzo Orchestra. Faith Middleton will serve as mistress of ceremonies and Charles Antin from Christie’s will be the auctioneer.

    Tickets for the tasting are $125, tickets for the gala and tasting together cost $275. More information is available at harvesteastend.com.

Jakob’s Garden Notes

    Through Oct. 31, the Drawing Room in East Hampton is showing “Robert Jakob: Garden Notes,” paintings on paper of flowers he has planted in his Springs garden over the past three decades. The work is naturalistic yet gestural in its evocation of poppies, salvia, fennel, and daylilies.

    Mr. Jakob was born and raised in Wiesbaden, Germany, and studied painting there with many Bauhaus-trained artists. He lived in Greece and North Africa and in 1964 moved to New York, where he worked first as a graphic designer and then as an exhibit designer with Arnold Saks for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum. He retired to Springs in 1990.

    A selection of pastels by Jennifer Bartlett is also on view, through Oct. 10.

Schwabe Solo at Ashawagh

    Jerry Schwabe will have a solo show of his paintings and sculpture at Ashawagh Hall in Springs this weekend. Mr. Schwabe, who lives in East Hampton, tends to be inspired by the South Fork landscape, and he has exhibited widely on the East End.

    He started out making sculptures and pottery and now paints in watercolors and oils. He has studied at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, the New School, the Art Students League, and the School of Visual Arts. Several of his sculptures were recently exhibited at the Lon Hamaekers 20th Century Furniture and Art gallery in Water Mill.

    The reception is Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., and the show will be on view through Sunday at 4 p.m.

Wood Masters in Stony Brook

    Randall Rosenthal and William King, both of East Hampton, have work on view in an exhibit called “Long Island Masterworks in Wood” at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook. A third participant, David Ebner, is from Brookhaven.

    Mr. King works in many mediums but has always shown a penchant for wood, carving it into his elongated visions of people or animals. The artist takes inspiration from found wood or decides on his subject matter first and chooses the wood to best suit that idea.

    Mr. Rosenthal is known for his uncanny trompe-l’oeil recreations of objects. He carves one block of softwood and then paints it in a hyperrealistic style. His subjects tend to be printed objects such as newspapers, baseball cards, or bundles of money. Despite his attention to detail, he leaves the wood grain visible to remind viewers of the illusion.

    The show will be on display through Nov. 11. The museum is on Route 25A.

    Eric Alterman’s latest book, “Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama,” analyzes the reasons why President Obama has failed to enact the progressive reforms articulated in his presidential campaign. In sum, Mr. Alterman depicts a system controlled by money and shadow play rather than participatory processes. He marshals an astounding amount of evidence from a wide range of sources to document his central argument: that the banking system, conservative institutions, the media, and lobbyists have warped democracy in the United States.

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“Kabuki Democracy”

Eric Alterman

Nation Books, $14.99

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    His argument about the current political scene, then, becomes an argument about politics more broadly conceived — an argument about the failure of participatory democracy.

    Yet, all of this left me, as a reader and a concerned citizen, as a parent and a teacher, strangely unmoved. I applaud Mr. Alterman’s appeals to logic. I applaud his use of substantive research to document his claims. I applaud his initial efforts to find common ground with a segment of the audience who would likely be dubious of his argument — those progressives who blame President Obama for failing to fulfill his campaign promises.

    I also applaud his precise use of Antonio Gramsci’s theory about the function of ideology. In fact, the most complex and promising element of the book is his neat explication and application of theory to lay bare the techniques by which ideology, in this case the ideology of conservative politics, functions to convince people to act in ways that are at odds with their own best interests. The book is worth reading for this alone.

    But Mr. Alterman perpetuates a problematic divide between progressives and conservatives. The dire state of politics in this country today requires conservatives and progressives to work together. An “us” and “them” or “red state” versus “blue state” approach loses viability when the stakes are the very credibility of the United States, as evinced in the recent crisis over the debt ceiling.

    Not only does this dichotomy amount to a phantom conjured for the sake of publicity by the same new media that Mr. Alterman takes to task, it also conceals the simple fact that all of the states of the United States suffer when our credit rating drops. Similarly, divisive rhetoric only exacerbates the challenges of forging solutions to ocean acidification, rising sea levels, and other environmental problems, problems that require all of us to work together.

    One might question whether Mr. Alterman, who is an English and journalism professor, has the authority to comment on politics. This is the wrong question. Public participation is the foundation of democratic practice, which makes room for all of us — English professors, waitresses, social workers, truck drivers, plumbers, politicians, and so on — to engage in civic discourse. While the Internet provides new and unique opportunities for this, the lack of sustained public debate, the erosion of public education, and the radical right’s manipulation of news create frightening challenges for participatory democracy.

    Back in the 1970s and 1980s, American and European philosophers such as Walter Fisher and Jean-Francois Lyotard criticized the rise of scientific discourse and the decline of the narrative, claiming that this change diminished the capacity of ordinary citizens to make informed decisions. As an alternative, they both proposed a return to an understanding that our stories matter, that our stories are living, dynamic, and changing, and that our stories may, in time, change the world.

    Mr. Alterman obliquely revives this movement, smartly attending to the function of story frames, or narratives, in the shaping of ideas and actions. What I missed in this book was the presence of stories, and for this reason, I felt the author missed an opportunity to more fully depict what’s at stake in our present political moment.

    “Kabuki Democracy” is an important book, a nearly scientfic account of the forces that work against change. Astute readers of it will find that Mr. Alterman has two primary intentions. First, to educate us so that we understand the severity of the problems we face. Second, to teach readers that we can take action.

    Yet, his description of the stakes may put some readers to sleep. What is needed is a live rendering of our problems that is grounded in fact and that does not veer into theater. Mr. Alterman accomplishes only the latter part of that proposition.

    What is at stake has already become an everyday reality to many Americans and people around the world, a reality that most people on the East End of Long Island do not see regularly. It includes living in houses patched up with plastic bags when the roof collapses. It includes living surrounded by garbage when one does not have the money for gas to drive to the dump. It includes hungry people who go unfed. This is a stark contrast to the problems I hear about here — getting a reservation at the right restaurant or buying the latest iPhone.

    The question of how to take action is also an everyday reality for many Americans and people abroad. Live within the confines of available resources. Follow ethical principles. Build community via public spaces and public events. Find joy in relationships rather than shopping.

    Of course, such suggestions sound heretical because the past president told us we could solve our problems by going shopping. That didn't work. Mr. Alterman reminds us that it's time to try something else.

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    Eric Alterman lives in New York and East Hampton.

    Stephanie Wade teaches writing at Unity College in Maine and spends summers in East Hampton.