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It began with a painting of a spiraled shell.
When Eva Greguski, art curator at the Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages in Stony Brook, saw a photo of the work in a Connecticut auction catalog a few years ago, she noted that it was painted on Long Island, that it didn't cost much, and that it was made by an artist named David Burliuk.
"I must have had some awareness of him, but not very much. So I did a little research," Greguski says. She called Helen Harrison, who teaches at Stony Brook University and is director of its Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton. Harrison, it turned out, knew a lot about Burliuk: She had curated a show on him more than 20 years before at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. Burliuk immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1922 with his wife and two sons. He bought a summer home in Hampton Bays in 1941 and soon attracted a small colony of artists to the area.
Intrigued by the history, Greguski had the museum purchase the 1951 "Surreal Beach Scene" (for a small sum she says she can't reveal). Soon after, in the early 2000s, the museum bought a small landscape by Nicolai Cikovsky, one of the Russian-
migr artists who followed Burliuk to the East End.
"I said, 'Whoa, there! That's a show,'" Greguski says as she guides a visitor through her recently opened "Bohemian Paradise: David Burliuk, Nicolai Cikovsky and the Hampton Bays Art Group." She mounted the show after doing a few years of research, contacting the artists' families and gathering more art.
The exhibit tells the story of the lively group, which used Burliuk's home as both art center and social party-central. They...