Sari Dienes (8 October 1898 – 25 May 1992) was a Hungarian-born American artist. During a career spanning six decades she worked in a wide range of media, creating paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, textile designs, sets and costumes for theatre and dance, sound-art installations, mixed-media environments, music and performance art. Her large-scale 'Sidewalk Rubbings' of 1953–55 - bold, graphic, geometrical compositions, combining rubbings of manhole covers, subway gratings and other elements of the urban streetscape - signaled a move away from the gestural mark making of
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depressi ...
towards the indexical appropriation of the environment that would be further developed in Pop art, and exerted a significant influence on
Robert Rauschenberg
Milton Ernest "Robert" or "Bob" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combine painting, Combines (1954� ...
and
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker. Considered a central figure in the development of American postwar art, he has been variously associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and ...
.
Life
Early life in Europe - 1898–1928
Dienes was born Sarolta Maria Anna Chylinska on 8 October 1898, in
Debreczen,
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary, also referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy or the Habsburg Monarchy, was a multi-national constitutional monarchy in Central Europe#Before World War I, Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. A military ...
. Her father, Lovag Gyorgy Chylinski (b.1861), was descended from Irish and Polish nobility. Her mother, Etelka Stegmüller (1870–1932), was of Swiss and German parentage and was a relative of the celebrated opera singer
Etelka Gerster
Etelka Gerster (25 June 1855, Košice20 August 1920, Pontecchio) was a Hungarian soprano. She studied with Mathilde Marchesi at the Vienna Conservatory, and made her debut at the La Fenice in Venice with great success as Gilda in Verdi's ''Rigo ...
(1855–1920).
As a child she studied piano, before turning to dance, training in Budapest with Valéria Dienes (1879–1978), a disciple of
Raymond Duncan. In 1919 she became romantically involved with Valéria Dienes’ husband
Paul Dienes
Paul Dienes (Hungarian people, Hungarian: ''Dienes Pál''. November 24, 1882 Tokaj, Austria-Hungary – March 23, 1952) was a Hungarian mathematician, philosopher, linguist and poet.
Born in to a wealthy and aristocratic Protestant family, he mar ...
(1882–1952), a mathematician and poet, who headed a commission to reform university education during
Béla Kun
Béla Kun (, born Béla Kohn; 20 February 1886 – 29 August 1938) was a Hungarian communist revolutionary and politician who in 1919 governed the Hungarian Soviet Republic.
After attending Franz Joseph University at Kolozsvár (today Cluj-N ...
’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Following the collapse of the revolutionary government, Paul fled to Vienna in 1920, where Sari joined him before moving to Paris. They married in July 1922 and moved to
Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth (; ) is a University town, university and seaside town and a community (Wales), community in Ceredigion, Wales. It is the largest town in Ceredigion and from Aberaeron, the county's other administrative centre. In 2021, the popula ...
in Wales, where Paul Dienes was appointed a lecturer in mathematics at Aberystwyth University. In the following year the couple moved to Swansea and then, in 1929, to London, where Paul Dienes headed the mathematics department at
Birkbeck College
Birkbeck, University of London (formally Birkbeck College, University of London), is a public research university located in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. Established in 1823 as the London Mechanics' ...
.
London and Paris - 1928–1939
Between c.1928 and c.1935 Dienes studied fine art in Paris with
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (; February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painting, painter, sculpture, sculptor, and film director, filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism (known as "tubism") which he gradually ...
and
Amédée Ozenfant
Amédée Ozenfant (15 April 1886 – 4 May 1966) was a French cubist painter and writer. Together with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier) he founded the Purist movement.
Education
Ozenfant was born into a bourgeois ...
at the
Académie Moderne, with
André Lhote
André Lhote (5 July 1885 – 24 January 1962) was a French Cubist painter of figure subjects, portraits, landscapes, and still life. He was also active and influential as a teacher and writer on art.
Early life and education
Lhote was bor ...
, and with Ozenfant at the Académie Ozenfant. She was appointed assistant director of the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts London in 1936. Dienes recruited the school’s first students,
Leonora Carrington
Mary Leonora Carrington (6 April 191725 May 2011) was a British-born, naturalised Mexican Surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movem ...
and
Stella Snead, and employed
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore (30 July 1898 – 31 August 1986) was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract art, abstract monumental Bronze sculpture, bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. Moore ...
to teach a course in modeling in clay at the school in 1938.
New York and Japan - 1939–1960
In September 1939 Dienes travelled to New York for a brief visit but was prevented from returning to Europe by the outbreak of the Second World War. She helped Ozenfant establish his new art school at 208 East 20th Street in New York, where she taught until 1941. With Ozenfant's help, Dienes attempted to find a teaching position for her husband at an American university but was unsuccessful; Paul Dienes remained in England, where he died in 1952. Dienes later taught drawing and composition at the Parsons School of Design and the
Brooklyn Museum Art School. Around this time she befriended abstract painters
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko ( ; Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz until 1940; September 25, 1903February 25, 1970) was an American abstract art, abstract painter. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular reg ...
and
Theodoros Stamos
Theodoros Stamos (Greek: Θεόδωρος Στάμος) (December 31, 1922 – February 2, 1997) was a Greek-American painter. He is one of the youngest painters of the original group of abstract expressionist painters (the so-called " Irasc ...
, the composer
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
and choreographer
Merce Cunningham
Mercier Philip "Merce" Cunningham (April 16, 1919 – July 26, 2009) was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of American modern dance for more than 50 years. He frequently collaborated with artists of other discipl ...
. From the mid-1950s Dienes attended
D.T. Suzuki’s weekly afternoon lectures on Zen Buddhism at Columbia University together with composers
Earle Brown
Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of "open form," a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since, ...
, John Cage and
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, a development associated with the experimental New York School o ...
and
Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low (September 12, 1922 – December 8, 2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practitioner of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compos ...
, artists
Ray Johnson
Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as < ...
, and
Isamu Noguchi
was an American artist, furniture designer and Landscape architecture, landscape architect whose career spanned six decades from the 1920s. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Grah ...
, often followed by a soirée at her 57th Street studio.
From 1949 through 1952 she created prints at the
Atelier 17
Atelier 17 was an art school and studio that was influential in the teaching and promotion of printmaking in the 20th century. Originally located in Paris, the studio relocated to New York City during the years surrounding World War II. It moved ...
studio.
From the spring of 1957 until December 1958 Dienes lived in Japan, where she studied ceramics with master potter Teruo Hara. Through Noguchi, she befriended the industrial designer Isamu Kenmochi, who wrote that, "Her work has great vision, grandeur rather than beauty: overwhelming by the vigorous power flowing forth from within ... poetry wrung from the body.' She had solo exhibitions in Kyoto and Tokyo.
Stony Point/NYC 1961–1992
In 1961 Dienes moved to the
Gate Hill Cooperative at
Stony Point, New York
Stony Point is a Administrative divisions of New York#Town, town in Rockland County, New York, United States. It is part of the New York City Metropolitan Area. The town is located north of the town of Haverstraw, New York, Haverstraw, east and ...
, a rural community established in 1954 by Paul and
Vera Williams. Her neighbors there included
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
, the writer and potter
M.C. Richards, the pianist
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.
Life and career
Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefa ...
, the ceramicist
Karen Karnes, the sculptor David Weinrib, the filmmaker
Stan VanDerBeek, and the early music champion LaNoue Davenport. Dienes was a founding member of the woman-owned and operated
A.I.R. Gallery founded in 1972, and in 1976 was presented with the International Women’s Year Award for her contributions to the art world. In 1977 Dienes helped establish the downtown pub,
The Ear Inn wit
Rip Haymanand Paco Underhill, which became her New York City home base. Dienes lived at Stony Point until her death in 1992.
Career
Pioneer of assemblage
A three-month trip to Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah in 1947 had a profound effect on Dienes' aesthetic, as she later recalled: 'Experiencing the natural formations as pieces of sculpture changed my whole attitude to life, to art.' The stark beauty of the desert landscape, together with her studies of Zen Buddhism, allowed her to see the artistic potential in her surroundings, inspiring her to assemble works of art from found materials. The ''New York Times'' review of her show at the Carlebach Gallery in April 1948 noted the inclusion of ‘ingenious surrealist shock objects composed of driftwood and sea shell fragments’. She was soon using all manner of natural and man-made detritus in her works. Reviewing her exhibition ''Found Objects and Constructions'' at Mills College in ''The Village Voice'' in February 1956 John Wilcock listed some of the components of her sculptures: ‘a rusty garbage-can lid, considerably battered; chips off a pine cone which look like ducks on a pond, a mannequin’s leg in a whiskey bottle topped with a seashell; about one-third of a shovel, which looks like a bird; an automobile hubcap, dented by passing trucks; innumerable pieces of well-rounded charred driftwood, burned orange crates, and scorched easels; and an enormous sheet of rusted metal (“we had to cart it home in a taxi”) which resembles a map of ancient Egypt.’
In 1956 Dienes began to construct complex assemblages of glass bottles held together with epoxy resin, which she called 'Bottle Gardens'. The writer and ceramicist M.C. Richards wrote that Dienes' 'bottle sculptures rehearse for us that radiant void of which the sages speak. Forms press forth invisibly. The glass captures their reflections, and we think we see multiple dwellings for a genie, quiet seas for small ships, messengers from floating islands of light and color."
Dienes' pioneering role in assemblage was acknowledged by her inclusion in the American Federation of Arts touring exhibition ''Art and the Found Object'' in 1959 and ''The Art of Assemblage'' at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961. In 1964 Dienes created an assemblage on a grand scale in her mixed-media installation ''A Surrounding'' at the Smolin Gallery, New York, a labyrinth of plastic sheeting, netting, charred wood, ropes, lighting elements and a zebra skin.
Dienes continued to work with found materials throughout her career, using driftwood, shells, bones, seed pods, bottles and mirrored glass, tin cans and other scrap metal, and impermanent materials such as flower petals and tumble-dryer lint. Her large-scale installation ''Bone Fall'' of 1973, comprising a cascade of animal bones collected over a twenty-five-year period, was later followed by ''Glass Fall'' and ''Shell Fall''.
Sidewalk Rubbings
At a residency at
Yaddo
Yaddo is an artists' community located on a estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.". On March  ...
artists’ retreat at Saratoga Springs in the spring of 1953, Dienes made a large number of monoprints by taking rubbings from textured surfaces using a printmaker’s brayer. Back in New York in the summer of 1953 she began taking rubbings of the sidewalks, subway gratings and other urban features on very large sheets of paper or Webril. As she told ''The Village Voice'' in 1956: ‘About 5 o’clock on Sunday mornings is the best time because there aren’t as many hecklers, and traffic is light. I take those big sheets of paper that photographers use but I have to keep a firm hold or they blow away. Sometimes I take rubbings of cracks in the sidewalk and sometimes I take rubbings of rubbings.’ Dienes sometimes enlisted the aid of younger artists
Rachel Rosenthal,
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (; April 25, 1928July 5, 2011) was an American Painting, painter, Sculpture, sculptor, and photographer.
Twombly influenced artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, and Jean-Michel Bas ...
, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Johns later recalled assisting Dienes: ‘After finishing my work at a bookstore on 57th Street, I used to visit Sari, who lived nearby. After midnight we would go out on 6th Avenue and she would work over the cracked street and various cast-iron manhole covers. I was responsible for keeping the sometimes enormous sheets of fabric or paper that she used from blowing away.’ ‘She was very uninhibited, I thought. People would come up and ask what was going on, and she would talk as she continued to work, in the middle of the street.’ Dienes’ ‘Sidewalk Rubbings’ were featured in solo exhibitions at the
Betty Parsons
Betty Parsons (born Betty Bierne Pierson, January 31, 1900 – July 23, 1982) was an American artist, art dealer, and collector known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism. She is regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic f ...
Gallery in April–May 1954 and November–December 1955, in the windows of the New York department store
Bonwit Teller
Bonwit Teller & Co. was an American luxury department store in New York City, founded by Paul Bonwit in 1895 at Sixth Avenue and 18th Street, and later a chain of department stores.
In 1897, Edmund D. Teller was admitted to the partnership a ...
in July 1955, and at the Contemporaries Gallery in New York in 1959. Reviewing an exhibition of Dienes' work at Gump's Gallery in San Francisco in 1957, noted critic
Alfred Frankenstein Alfred Victor Frankenstein (October 5, 1906 – June 22, 1981) was an art and music critic, author, and professional musician.
He was the long-time art and music critic for the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' from 1934 to 1965. He was noted for champio ...
described her rubbings as follows: 'A circular saw and various spiky forms lead to a sunflower as eloquent as any of Van Gogh's, but most of the pictures are not as specifically representational as that. Manhole covers, perforated steel plates, boards, sidewalk grilles and other surfaces have been drawn upon for a series of designs laying stress on the movement of rectilinear and circular forms and on exquisitely sensitive resonances of color and tone.
Textile designs
Dienes’ rubbings technique was well suited to surface printing techniques and in the 1950s she enjoyed a successful career as a textile designer, producing designs for L. Anton Maix Fabrics, the Associated American Artists Galleries and
Jack Lenor Larsen. Her designs ''Tree Saw'' and ''Circles'', the latter created by the imprint of egg cartons, were included in the exhibition ''Design by the Yard: Textile Printing from 800 to 1956'' at the
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly known as Cooper Union, is a private college on Cooper Square in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-s ...
in New York in 1956.
Fluxus and performances
Dienes was closely associated with many of the artists around
Fluxus
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental performance art, art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finishe ...
, including
Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.
Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
and
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
, and collaborated on numerous musical performances and theatrical events. In 1964 she performed in ''Hruslk'' an opera by
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins (15 March 1938 – 25 October 1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was ...
and
Philip Corner at the Café Au Go Go in New York. Throughout the 1970s she contributed works to the Annual Avant Garde Festivals of New York organized by
Charlotte Moorman, and collaborated with
Charlie Morrow,
Simone Forti
Simone Forti (born March 25, 1935) is an American postmodern artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer. Since the 1950s, she has exhibited, performed, and taught workshops all over the world. Her innovations in Postmodern dance, including her se ...
, Rip Hayman,
Jackson MacLow,
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016) was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music.
She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center ...
and
Alison Knowles.
Ceaseless experimentation
Dienes continued to experiment with materials into her seventies and eighties, exploring such divergent paths as the emergent colour Xerox technology and painting on snow. Interviewed in 1980, she expressed a completely open attitude to the creative process: ‘In the 1930s, all I cared about was technique. I studied drawing every day from 9 to 5. I've completely changed. My art is very much like having a baby. You can't plan how big it will be or what color eyes it will have. It is what it is. Technique can be taught, but knowing the human anatomy will not make you a better artist.’ In the 1980s she used Styrofoam packaging elements as printings blocks or sprayed them with metallic paint, delighting in the sounds and smells as the chemical reaction caused the Styrofoam to sputter and melt. She believed that even the humblest of materials could be transformed into a work of art: ‘Spirit lives in everything. It has no age, no color, no sex.’
New Generations of Influence
Dienes was an enormous influence on younger artists than her like
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann (October 12, 1939 – March 6, 2019) was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and ...
and
Ray Johnson
Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as < ...
who, in turn, have now become important
influencers
A social media influencer, or simply influencer (also known as an online influencer), is a person who builds a grassroots online presence through engaging content such as photos, videos, and updates. This is done by using direct audience intera ...
of young artists today interested in body performance and social media, respectively. Dienes' innoivative procedures have enjoyed a recent resurgence with the book, "Sari Dienes: Who I Am?!", edited by Barbara Pollitt.
References
External links
Archivio ConzWebsite of the Sari Dienes FoundationAlice Neel, Portrait of Sari Dienes, 1976, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dienes, Sari
1992 deaths
1898 births
People from Stony Point, New York
20th-century American women artists
20th-century Hungarian women artists
Atelier 17 alumni
Hungarian contemporary artists
Hungarian emigrants to the United States
Hungarian printmakers