SATURDAY RUBRICS: 8/10/24

ANDY WARHOL'S COMPOUND IN MONTAUK

SOME JOY: Mick Jagger, Catherine Deneuve, Andy Warhol. At Eothen, Warhol’s Montauk estate. 1975.

Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey bought their Montauk estate Eothen for $225,000 in 1971. According to Vincent Fremont, who ran Andy’s studio for many years, it was Tina Fredericks, the art director of Glamour who gave Andy his first job in the 1950s and was by then a real estate agent, who took Andy and Paul out to Montauk to see the property. Designed by Stanford White in the 1930s, Eothen - which is Greek for “at first light” - consisted of five clapboard cottages originally built for the heirs to the Arm & Hammer fortune. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, one could find the famous letting down their beach-blown hair. Jackie Kennedy and her sister Lee Radziwill rented it from Andy one summer so that their children could have an idyllic few months taking private photography and filmmaking lessons from avant-garde director and poet Jonas Mekas while growing accustomed to the fame all around them that would later frame their lives. Radziwill was dating Peter Beard at the time who also had a place in Montauk and he’d come over to pitch in with the children’s classes in photography and art. John Lennon, Halston, Liza Minnelli, Catherine Deneuve, Elizabeth Taylor, The Rolling Stones, and Keith Haring were among the guests in the years afterward. One summer, The Stones rehearsed cuts from their Black and Blue album amid the dunes. Eothen also inspired Warhol to complete his 1972 commission known as the Sunset series which was done for the architectural firm Johnson & Burgee for a hotel in Minneapolis. It contained 632 unique color variants made from only three screens. Some 472 were installed in the hotel, while 160 were formed into 40 unique portfolios of four.

(Above: One of prints in the Sunset series that Warhol completed in 1972 inspired by the late day skies at Eothen.)

Here is a bit of the recording of my interview with Catherine Deneuve I conducted for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine when I was its Executive Editor.

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