How Hydra, a Bohemian Haven for Leonard Cohen in the 1960s, Became a Modern Art Magnet

Hydra holds mythical status for Leonard Cohen fans, many of whom make the pilgrimage to the Greek island each year to stand outside his house, eat at the cafes he frequented, and soak up the 1960s bohemian vibe.The Canadian folk singer, often called Bob Dylan’s “dark twin” for his melancholic lyrics, spent much of the 1960s living on Hydra. He famously wrote “So Long Marianne” about his seven-year romance with Norwegian beauty and mother, Marianne Ihlen, whom he met and later lived with on the island. Cohen became a surrogate father to her son during these years, and Marianne played his muse. Cohen wrote another of his hits, “Bird on a Wire,” when telephone lines were first installed on Hydra in the mid-to-late 1960s. The island, a two-hour ferry ride from Athens, was a sanctuary for artists, and the wires signaled an encroachment of the outside world that even birds couldn’t escape.I travelled by ferry from Athens to Hydra this month while listening to Cohen’s “So Long Marianne” on my headphones like a cliché. Would I find an artists’ retreat on the island, famous for architectural preservation and banning cars, or would I find a commercialized monument — or mausoleum — to the past like the Haight Ashbury is to the hippie movement today?Donkeys lined the port where we disembarked, their handlers offering to carry tourists’ luggage up the meandering alleys and stairs that traverse the hills for a fee — in cash, of course. With a permanent population of only 2,000 residents, the island depends on tourism. The whitewashed buildings dotting the hillsides look the same as they do in photographs from the 1960s.Hydra already had a reputation as a sanctuary for artists when Cohen first arrived there in the spring of 1960. Henry Miller sojourned on the island in 1939, describing Hydra as “flawless anarchy” and “wild and naked perfection.” Marianne landed there in the late 1950s with her then-husband, the novelist and serial philanderer, Axel Jensen.Cohen met an Australian writer couple, Charmian Clift and George Johnston, who let him board in their Hydra home and inducted him into the scene. They wrote in the mornings, swam in the afternoons, and drank heavily into the night. Cohen says he wrote three pages a day and subsisted then on bread and honey, speed and alcohol.Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen in Hydra. Getty ImagesCohen largely thought of himself as a poet in these early years, not amusician. He bought his own three-story Hydra home in the fall of 1960 for $1,500. Now, homes there routinely sell for over $1 million. The telephone wires are no longer symbols of connection to the outside world but feel like relics, when everyone carries a cell phone with internet access at their fingertips. There is no more getting lost.When his two novels, published in the mid-1960s, didn’t sell well, Cohen realized he couldn’t make a living on words and verse alone. He released his first album, “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” in 1967. This didn’t mark the end of Cohen’s time on Hydra — he owned a home there until his death at 82 in 2016 — but it was the end of this chapter of his life and his romance with Marianne. “You know that I love to live with you/ But you make me forget so very much,” Cohen sings in “So Long Marianne.”It’s easy to romanticize the 1960s Hydra artist scene, but the hard-work, hard-partying life didn’t bode well for many involved, particularly the children. Clift and Johnston left the island in 1964 with their three children. Clift had been one of the only women in the scene with a successful career of her own, as opposed to just being a muse. She killed herself in 1969 in Sydney, Australia. Johnston died of tuberculosis a year later. Their daughter killed herself several years after that.Marianne sent her son, also named Axel, away to boarding school in England when he was eight. His father gave young Axel a tab of LSD when he was fifteen, reportedly triggering a mental decline. He’s spent most of his life institutionalized.After his second album, released in 1969, hit number two on the UK charts, Cohen played a series of concerts at psychiatric hospitals. “Those people are in the same landscape as the songs come out of. I feel that they understand them,” he explained.The freewheeling 1960s screeched to a halt, much like in the United States with the Altomont Speedway concert and the Manson murders. A military dictatorship took over Greece in 1967. In October 1973, Cohen traveled to Israel and played music to soldiers on the front of the Yom Kippur War. He seemed to be undergoing his own crisis at the time, contemplating retiring from music, when his experiences in Israel prompted new song writing, most notably, “Who by Fire.” Does an artist therefore need seclusion to produce great work or does he need pain, struggle, and crisis?‘Apollo’ by Jeff Koons. Pace GalleryHydra is still a mecca for artists looking for a break from the outside world. There are several artist residencies on the island. A Greek Cypriot billionaire and art collector, Dakis Ioannou, established an exhibition space for his DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in an old slaughterhouse overlooking the sea. A permanent, reflective gold Jeff Koons sculpture of a sun, Apollo Wind Spinner, stands atop of the slaughterhouse space, a new destination for island tourists.After Cohen’s death, the island renamed Cohen’s street, Odos Leonard Cohen, or Leonard Cohen Way. A blue plaque adorns a whitewashed house on the corner across from Cohen’s. Yet that’s the extent of the tribute. His home, still owned by his family, is not listed on Google Maps. Instead, Google directs inquiries to a memorial bench that the island’s municipal government allowed a Cohen fan group to install on a path overlooking the Aegean Sea, near a place where Cohen reportedly liked to swim.Leonard Cohen Way. Caroline McCaugheyMr. Koons, with his factory approach to art production, involving scores of assistants, is in many ways the antithesis of Cohen and his peers. Mr. Koons’ metallic sculptures sell for tens of millions of dollars and are supposed to say something about consumerism but have become a status symbol only accessible to buyers who epitomize that world. Yet this contrast to Cohen is part of what makes the island dynamic and not simply a monument to a time past.

How Hydra, a Bohemian Haven for Leonard Cohen in the 1960s, Became a Modern Art Magnet

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