When Lee Krasner made arrangements for the Springs house and studio she had shared with Jackson Pollock to be gifted to a charitable organization after her death in 1984, she set the stage for future generations to visit, learn from, and be inspired by the home the Abstract Expressionists shared.
Now, Helen Harrison, a longtime steward of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, and her husband, the artist Roy Nicholson, have promised a similar gift. The couple plan to leave their house in Sag Harbor, Nicholson’s studio, and his body of work — worth an estimated $5 million — to Stony Brook University, along with a $2 million endowment to maintain them.
Harrison, who was the director of the Pollock-Krasner House — owned by the Stony Brook Foundation — for more than 34 years, said that Krasner’s gift is “a wonderful legacy,” but she and her husband are planning something different.
Unlike the Pollock-Krasner House, the Harrison-Nicholson property will one day serve as a retreat where artists can connect with their surroundings in the same way Harrison and Nicholson do today.
“It is not intended to be used as a museum,” Harrison said. While the Pollock-Krasner House showcases how the couple lived and created in midcentury East Hampton, she said her house and her husband’s studio would act more as a beacon, bringing artists into the community that has inspired much of his work.
“My years at the Pollock-Krasner House taught me how deeply the East End shapes artists and how much artists, in turn, shape this community,” Harrison said in an announcement from Stony Brook University last week. “Roy and I wanted our gift to further strengthen that relationship, supporting the places and programs that nurture creativity and keep our artistic heritage alive.”
Nicholson’s art is in numerous public and private collections. His public works have been installed at Union Station in Los Angeles and the Hicksville Long Island Rail Road station, which features two 22-foot-long glass mosaics.
The Harrison-Nicholson House will host working artists and scholars as part of an artist-in-residence program. Some may come to the house by way of an endowed research fellowship at the Pollock-Krasner House that was established in Harrison’s name when she retired. “The fellowship is a three-month program that supports the study of Abstract Expressionism as a historically significant movement and enduring art form,” according to Stony Brook.
Harrison and Nicholson have taken some cues from Krasner’s donation of the house she shared with Pollock, but in other ways have learned from Harrison’s work there that they could cut out some of the legwork that had to be done after Krasner died.
Harrison said this week that her initial plan was to create a not-for-profit, but that would require an administrative structure she said already exists within the university.
Along with the Harrison and Nicholson’s planned gift, Harrison, who is a member of the board of the Larry Rivers Foundation, also had a hand in facilitating the recent gift of that artist’s personal library to the Pollock-Krasner Study Center at Stony Brook Southampton. She said the foundation felt that it would be better served by holding onto his artwork and letting the things he owned pass on to the Stony Brook Foundation.
The collection to be housed in the study center includes books, magazines, and catalogues that he may have used for some of the imagery in his works.
Rivers, a Pop Art painter, musician, and filmmaker, died in 2002. Among his many works, one that stirred controversy long after his death, was a pair of 16-foot-tall legs that once adorned the side of a house in Sag Harbor and became the subject of a prolonged legal fight between the village and the sculpture’s owners, Vered and Janet Lehr.
