Keith haring biography john gruen photography

John Jonas Gruen, a writer, critic of several arts, composer, and photographer who for more than five decades chronicled this country’s loftiest cultural circles, died on July 19 in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

He was 89 and had been ill for five weeks.

Mr. Gruen and his wife, the painter Jane Wilson, came to the East End in 1957 and bought a carriage house in Water Mill three years later. They became an integral part of the cultural life on the East End as well as in New York City.

Mr.

Gruen’s photographs documented the lives of artists and poets at leisure here, both separately and in groups, among them Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Jane Freilicher.

Many of his photographs were published in his books “Facing the Artist” and “The Sixties: Young in the Hamptons.”

In addition to his books of photographs, he wrote “The New Bohemia” (1967), “The Private World of Leonard Bernstei