David Salle

The Tribeca painter turned Hamptons writer.

- Carl Swanson

THESE ARE UNREHEARSED comments,” David Salle warns me, or maybe himself, as we pause in front of one of his paintings, Fooling With Your Hair, from 31 years ago. We’re walking through a show of his early work, along with that of two contemporaries and fellow Hamptonians, Ross Bleckner and Eric Fischl, called “Unfinished Business,” at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. Salle is attempting, for my benefit, to push himself into a kind of reverie about his old work, but his cautiousness over the performance keeps getting in the way. (He’s better at ginning up appreciation for Bleckner and Fischl.) Fooling is a high-style Salle collage of seemingly disparate images, including several mid-century-modern lighting fixtures he tells me he copied from a book his friend Philip Johnson had given him and three possibly anesthetized women in positions of ghoulish sexual presentation on what looked to me like coroners’ examination tables. Critics categorized what he did as postmodern, and Salle, who wore his hair in a matador’s ponytail at the time, was a charismatic figure in the art scene, celebrated, and resented.

It’s a late-August Thursday—a flawless, getting-your-money’s-worth day in the income-inequality Elysium of the East End—and he’d ferried me to the museum in his purring dark Audi. Salle is trim and tanned and in flip-flops, his shirt carelessly frayed at the collar. He not only does not look his age, which is 63, but he doesn’t quite look of this current age either: There is something of the exiled aristocrat about the artist (Salle is a name his grandfather made up when they emigrated from Russia, but they were Jews, not Romanovs). His paintings have a similar sense of remove.