New Breed of Hamptons Paint Slingers

Audra Allen with Rickey in East Hampton.

GIVEN the stratospheric property values and the elitist mind-set of many vacationers here, the notion of welcoming chimpanzees might bring out a person’s inner Charlton Heston: This is no place for an ape. But the inner Heston might do well to remember that long before the $50 million home sales and private helicopters, this town was a refuge for struggling artists seeking to push the boundaries of art.

A half-century after Jackson Pollock’s heyday here, a local resident wants to push for a new breed of paint splatterers: a colony of chimps.

For the last decade Audra Allen has devoted her life to providing art therapy to a loose network of captive chimps in the United States and Britain. Now, rather than drop in on them periodically, she wants to build a permanent refuge where the animals can come to live and to spread paint — both to mitigate the depression of captivity, she said, and to reframe the old “Is It Art?” question.

The sanctuary exists only on paper, but momentum is beginning to grow. She may be overoptimistic, but perhaps as soon as summer Ms. Allen hopes to start bringing the ultimate outsider artists into the ultimate fold.

“This is an artists’ town,” she said recently. “It makes perfect sense to have them here.” She was pulling volumes about primatology from a shelf in her small rented house, a former sea captain’s cottage not far from the estates of Steven Spielberg, Ron Perelman and Paul McCartney. Space not occupied by chimp books was taken up by chimp paintings, chimp ashtrays, chimp pillows and a chimp tea service.

Seeking to locate her sanctuary here has been a gamble for Ms. Allen, who pays her rent by working as a dog caretaker. Few ZIP codes would necessitate setting the fund-raising bar so high, and the community as a whole does not exult in exotic new projects. But if the plan is to succeed — and Ms. Allen recently received encouragement from the Town Board, according to Councilwoman Debra Foster — wealthy supporters in this area will be crucial.

Already something of a jungle print carpet is being rolled out, Hamptons style. The author Jay McInerney said he planned to help Ms. Allen organize a fund-raiser and was putting out feelers to New York artists. “I find it interesting from the point of view of rescuing and rehabilitating chimps,” he said. “And as a naturally curious person, it’s intriguing to encounter these close relatives.”

Meanwhile the law firm of Kaye Scholer in Manhattan is providing Ms. Allen’s Chimpanzee Artists Foundation with pro bono legal help, and the East Hampton veterinarian Dr. Jonathan Turetsky says he is prepared to brush up on primate treatments. Adrienne Kitaeff, a veteran fund-raiser, has volunteered her services. The longtime residents Frank and Carolyn Bistrian have offered the land behind their home as a potential site for the sanctuary.

Dr. Frederick Soroka, a local chiropractor, said he would happily provide periodic adjustments to the young artists. Ms. Allen said a pilot had offered to take her chimps up in his plane; he suggested that it might help their art, she said.

Once a cradle for Abstract Expressionism, perhaps East Hampton is reacquiring a taste for the liberated brush stroke. In a teaser of what the town might eventually see, Sean Yunker, a student at the private Ross School here, has planned his senior project as a curatorial endeavor, drawing work from Ms. Allen’s art therapy sessions for an exhibition of 20 or so works. Called “Gimme Shelter,” an allusion to the proposed sanctuary, it will run from Dec. 19 to 21 at the Ross School.

To hear Ms. Allen tell it, generalizing about primates isn’t much different from generalizing about people. Some of the chimps she has worked with can’t be bothered to lift a paint brush; others demand a palette each morning before breakfast. Some prefer the strictly representational: a bird, a tree. Others translate their chimp experience through wild mooshes of color.

One of Ms. Allen’s charges has the charming habit of signing her creations with a footprint, and the less charming habit of signing fellow chimps’ creations, as well. Another would sooner stay in bed than work with any color besides purple.

A few weeks before opening night Mr. Yunker walked through the gallery space describing what he had learned working with Ms. Allen.

“Certain things stimulate chimps when they paint, just like with us,” he said. “With them it’s often food, or each other. Which is like us, too, I guess.” “Some teachers say, ‘How do you know it’s art?’ But what makes a urinal or Campbell’s soup cans art?” he went on. “If you’re expressing yourself on canvas, that’s art.”

At least until someone disagrees. Ever since the zoologist Desmond Morris exhibited paintings by the famous chimp Congo and other brethren 50 years ago, the creative output of apes has been mostly treated as a gimmick, or as an instrument for mocking the inscrutability of contemporary painting. When an intelligent animal approaches an easel, a series of questions about the nature of art and of humanity bubble up. Where do communication and expression diverge? What constitutes a meaningful visual gesture? Must the artist’s I.Q. factor into the work’s evaluation? If so, how to account for certain visionary artists? The answers often depend on your relationship to the art world.

“Monkey painting is a total joke,” said Damien Roman, a sales representative at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton. “It’s a disservice to artists who’ve trained and studied for years to call it art when monkeys splash paint on a canvas, even if it happens to resemble something.”

The artist John Alexander, who paints in nearby Amagansett, expressed support for Ms. Allen’s sanctuary but found it difficult to weigh in on the chimp-art issue.

“If it’s beautiful and touches people in a magical way, that’s art,” he said. “But beauty alone doesn’t necessarily make art. Neither does self-expression. It has to operate on more than one level. When a bird does its mating call, is that music?”

Elizabeth Hess, a longtime art critic for The Village Voice and the author of “Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human,” to be published by Random House in February, said the debate seemed to be framed in the wrong way.

“The question makes me laugh,” she said. “Toward the end of his life Picasso was putting his name on ashtrays. Is that art? Maybe art is essentially anything you call art.”

But where artistic credentials can be disputed, Ms. Allen considers the need for intervention harder to deny. The number of neglected chimps in this country is staggering, she said.

Initially adopted as pets, birthday party performers and actors, the animals commonly outgrow their owners’ homes, or interest. Zoos seldom accept them, and space at established sanctuaries is limited. They often spend the balance of their lives in cages. (Ms. Allen’s immediate goal is to rescue two chimps in upstate New York who have not set foot outside their cages in a decade.)

“There are so many chimps that people have hidden in their garages and their attics,” Ms. Hess said. “They need sanctuary, and a lot of stimulation — like art.”

Geraldine visits Ms. Allen’s house.

A picture of a rhododendron by Josie, from the Twycross Zoo in England.

December 9, 2007