For several decades the little city of Sarasota boasted a reputation as an artists' colony, a period long-time arts writer Marcia Corbino explored in a chapter of the recent book A History of Visual Art in Sarasota, written with Pat Ringling Buck and Kevin Dean. Not every story about those famous artists made it into the book, however; here Corbino recalls some little-known anecdotes about such outstanding art personalities as Julio de Diego, Fletcher Martin, Boris Margo, Lois Bartlett Tracy, Jon Corbino, Ben Stahl and John Chamberlain. (A History of Visual Art in Sarasota, is available in local bookstores.)

An obscure fishing village on the Gulf Coast of Florida-now a playground for the rich and infamous-once enjoyed a national reputation as a flourishing art colony. What made Sarasota different from other art centers in the state, such as Miami and Palm Beach, was the number of nationally known artists who established studios in the area from the 1940s through the 1970s. They were attracted by the natural wonders of the tropical landscape-the dazzling light, exotic colors and misty shadows. But even more seductive for an artist was the subliminal aura of eccentricity that had invigorated life in the small community since the turn of the century.

In the early 1900s, circus baron John Ringling roamed through Europe searching for Baroque masterpieces to fulfill his fantasy of a world-class museum, while Chicago socialite Mrs. Potter Palmer reinvented herself as a savvy cowgirl, breeding prize-winning cattle at her ranch on the wild west coast of Florida. Later, families of circus midgets walked their tiny dogs along South Osprey Avenue, and the elegant A. Everett Austin, the first director of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, drove around town in a Rolls Royce flaunting a long cigarette holder. After World War II, author John D. MacDonald and his alter ego Travis McGee plotted complex crimes from McDonald's Siesta Key home, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author MacKinlay Kantor hid in his car on the back roads of Myakka to dictate his Civil War novel Andersonville into a tape recorder.

The idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes of the artists added a mix of buffoonery, insanity, egomania, sex and violence to the ambience of the art colony. Although their personalities were as variable as the unsettled climate, they all had a passionate interest in life-its joys, mysteries and anxieties. Their work has an individual artistic identity and is a significant response to the contemporary world. These artists brought a larger and more eclectic view of art and life to the provincial art scene in Sarasota.

The most flamboyant artist-in-residence was Julio de Diego, who usually appeared in a black wool cape, a bizarre hat, heavy gold rings and necklaces. His odyssey began in Spain, where he was born in 1900, but he had cavorted through France, Mexico and the United States, and for several lustrous years was married to Gypsy Rose Lee. Generally his paintings were politically focused, but in his final years in Sarasota he exhibited biographical scenes of luscious paganism in bold, sensuous colors.

Julio had a whimsical sense of drama and entertained guests at dinner parties with a foolish game he liked to play. "I take a big cloth napkin and put it in front of my face like I pretend it was a theater curtain. Then every time I lift the curtain, I appear with a new face. Sometimes I announce what kind of faces they are going to be-like a woman who is against modern art," he once explained.

Like many artists, Julio was interested in film as an art form. He collaborated with local resident Jay Starker on an educational film titled Julio de Diego-Painting in Egg Tempera. In the last scene he paints faces on a girl's bottom and watches her saunter across the room with all the painted eyes winking at every step.

Julio was an imaginative raconteur, and the art crowd congregated on his patio at Alameda Way to listen to his stories. A favorite was about the games artists played at his soirees during World War II. The guests who came to his studio at 65 W. 56th St. in New York City were mostly refugees, such as Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Andrés Segovia, Anais Nin and Max Ernst (father of Jimmy Ernst, who was a prominent member of the Sarasota art colony in the 1970s). The evening began with films compiled by Joseph Cornell, who searched the junk shops on Sixth Avenue for stills from silent movies and objects to use in his magical boxes. Then they played a game of disclosure. As Julio once described it: