PANIC at the House Museum!

Can today's tame tastes satisfy the public's appetite for historical homes? 

- CAROL KINO

There was a time when interesting people routinely left their curious, captivating dwellings to the public for the bene fit of future generations. That was the idea when Victor D’Amico, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art’s education program, and his wife Mabel, an artist, set up their house museum in Amagansett. Built in the early 1940s by the couple themselves, its windows show off Mabel’s colored glass constructions and the view of Gardiner’s Bay. The airy interior holds fascinating artifacts associated with MoMA, like the museum’s first boardroom tables (now for dining), scores of artworks, design experiments, and Mabel’s handmade jewelry. There’s even a second house museum on the property, a repurposed fishing shack where the Jazz Age portraitist Alexander Brook once entertained his theater friends from New York.

But, unfortunately, the D’Amicos left no endowment. The museum is partly supported by a school, the Art Barge, a dry-docked navy vessel in Napeague owned by MoMA where East Enders and summer visitors have taken art classes since 1960. The rest is up to the unflagging efforts of Christopher Kohan, the president of the institute’s board, who has been with the D’Amico Institute of Art since he took a class there nearly 50 years ago.

In the old days, Kohan says, the East End had wealthy summer visitors who enjoyed playing at being bohemians and were happy to fork over big checks if they found a cause they liked. But today, even though the area has become a magnet for billionaires, those checks are harder to come by. Despite the area’s vaunted artistic roots, it’s now more of “a real estate investment location,” he says.