Renee by simon dinnerstein triptych

The work caused a stir when it premiered at Staempfli's gallery in New York in Inthe Palmer Museum of Art of Pennsylvania State University acquired the work and—perhaps because of its monolithic scale—rarely removed it from storage or lent it for exhibitions. This exhibition recovers missing works and provides clues for his development. Art market.

In fact, Dinnerstein had rarely painted before. But in what must have been a flash of creative compulsion, he conceived of and began laboring over a single monumental painting that occupied him for nearly three years.

Renee by simon dinnerstein triptych

When completed back home in Brooklyn, the result was a head-scratching creation. But clearly there is something more going on here. In making the work rigidly symmetrical and inserting odd details, Dinnerstein created a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces start together and only make sense when they get pulled apart. S o what is The Fulbright Triptych?

The Fulbright committee can sleep well. Dinnerstein studied printmaking in Germany after all. At its center, The Fulbright Triptych is about printmaking. This is literally true. The middle panel of the Triptych depicts a black worktable with an engraving plate front and center. Beside it are the tools of the printmaker: the burnisher, scraper, burin, mat cutter, and lens.

The plate itself is made of etched gold leaf, meant to stand in for copper. The Concord Monitor. November The Art of Simon Dinnerstein. Foreword: The University of Arkansas Press. The New York Times. Painting Perceptions. Retrieved 18 May Richmond Times-Dispatch. June 14, Milkweed Editions. Jews of Brooklyn. Brandeis University Press.

Hudson Hills Press. Simon Dinnerstein: Painting and Drawing. Richmond Style Weekly. American Artist. The University of Arkansas Press. Art News. The tools of his trade sit on a large black table beneath windows that look out onto modest homes, a tranquil, Ferdinand Hodler-like landscape behind them. But Dinnerstein painted each element of the room—its roughed-up floor, its drab pegboard walls—with such humble care that the work stands as a kind of monument to close looking.

It exemplifies how making, and even viewing, art can be a meditative act. The foot-wide and roughly 6-and-a-half-foot-tall work is, among many other things, a self-portrait and a family portrait. Dinnerstein appears in one side panel, stone-faced, with a big beard, about 30 years old, while Renee appears in the other, also deadpan, holding their young daughter, Simone, who was born in Brooklyn while her father was midway through work on the piece.

Altogether, they show Dinnerstein studying and celebrating his influences—everything that made him the artist and person he had become. He assembled his own personal museum in a single artwork, and it teems with connections between pictures, panels, and epochs. The longer I looked at it, the richer and stranger it seemed.