September 22–23, 2017

Perspectives onThe Lasting World

Symposium

MUSEUM OF ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

(Detail)Simon Dinnerstein (American, b. 1943)

Rear Window, 1994

Simon Dinnerstein Biography

Simon Dinnerstein, a Brooklyn-based painter and graphic artist, holds a B.A. (1965) in history from the City College of New York. He

studied painting and drawing from 1964 through 1967 at the Brooklyn Museum Art School with Louis Grebenak, David Levine and Richard Mayhew. Dinnerstein received a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany, and from 1970–1971 he and wife Renee resided near Kassel, in north-central Germany. While in Germany, he attended the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Kassel, traveled to Nüremberg to see the exhibit commemorating the 500th anniversary of Albrecht Dürer’s birth, and visited Colmar, France, to view Gruenewald’s Isenheim Alterpiece. Simon Dinnerstein has also received many other prestigious art awards, such as the Rome Prize for living and working in Italy at the American Academy in Rome, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, the Ingram Merrill Award for Painting, a New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant, three Childe Hassam Purchase Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was elected (1992) to the National Academy of Design. He has been represented in New York by Staempfli Gallery and ACA Galleries, and his work is included in numerous private and public collections. Dozens of articles and books, especially The Suspension of Time: Reflections on Simon Dinnerstein and The Fulbright Triptych, edited by Daniel Slager (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2011) reflect upon multiple aspects of his work. To learn more about Simon Dinnerstein and view other examples of his work, visit his website athttp://simondinnerstein.com.

101 Swallow Hall(On the Francis Quadrangle)

Perspectives onThe Lasting World

Symposium

Friday, September 22, 2017

5:30pm Welcome and Introductions

5:45pm Keynote Address Dr. Melissa Wolfe Curator of American Art Saint Louis Art Museum

Followed by audience questions

6:45pm Film Introduction by Simon Dinnerstein

7:00pm MAA Ad Hoc Film Series Screening The Quince Tree Sun

9:00pm Film discussion

FridaySeptember 22, 2017The Quince Tree Sun (1992)Directed by Victor EriceStarring Enrique Gran, Antonio López Garcia, and Maria Moreno

The Quince Tree Sun, which won the International Critics’ Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, explores the creative process of world-renowned contemporary artist Antonio López Garcia, whose work has strongly influenced that of Simon Dinnerstein himself. Spanish director Victor Erice loosely documents the ongoing efforts of the artist to capture before the end of the season the distinctive light falling on the leaves of a tree López Garcia had planted in his backyard. The film begins as documentary, with voiceover narration from López Garcia himself, then slowly evolves from narrative storytelling to nature film to philosophical meditation on art and mortality, offering an excellent complement to the symposium and The Lasting World exhibition.

101 Swallow Hall(On the Francis Quadrangle)

Perspectives onThe Lasting World

Symposium

Saturday, September 23, 2017

9:00am Welcome and Introductions

9:10am Matthew Ballou Associate Teaching Professor Studio Art, School of Visual Studies, University of Missouri

9:35am [In absentia] Dr. Steven Mansbach Distinguished Professor and Professor of the History of Twentieth-Century Art, University of Maryland

9:50am Short break

10:00am Dr. Anne Rudloff Stanton Associate Professor, Medieval and Northern Renaissance Art Art History, School of Visual Studies, University of Missouri

10:25am Dr. Rachel Lindsey Assistant Professor, Theology Department of Theological Studies, Saint Louis University

10:50am Dr. Rabia Gregory Associate Professor Department of Religious Studies, University of Missouri

11:15am Dr. James van Dyke Associate Professor, Modern European Art Art History, School of Visual Studies, University of Missouri

11:40am Audience discussion and wrap-up

Abstracts

Symposium IntroductionDr. Arthur Mehrhoff

Academic CoordinatorMuseum of Art and Archaeology

University of Missouri

Near the center of The Fulbright Triptych, Simon Dinnerstein included a quote from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:“And to the question which of our worlds will then be the world, there is no answer. For the answer would have to be given in a language, and a language must be rooted in some forms of life, and every particular form of life could be other than what it is.”

The Museum of Art and Archaeology has applied Wittgenstein’s aphorism to our exhibition of Simon Dinnerstein’s works entitled The Lasting World. This exhibition in particular helps augment the Museum’s collection by exploring modern American art, one of the less developed of the Museum’s interests and collections. Some of the ‘languages’ we are using to more fully understand The Lasting World include: a musical work by noted composer Robert Sirota that was inspired by several Dinnerstein drawings; a book discussion of John William’s novel Stoner, a Simon Dinnerstein favorite; text labels reflecting multiple backgrounds and perspectives; this academic symposium featuring artists, art historians, cinema, and even scholars of religion. Although we have no single answer to the question of what this exhibition ‘means,’ we hope the different ‘languages’ and answers put forward in this symposium broaden and deepen your appreciation and understanding of The Lasting World.

Dr. Melissa WolfeCurator of American ArtSaint Louis Art Museum

In recent years, critical inquiry has been directed toward twentieth-century American artists whose works had often been seen as

idiosyncratic or detached from the more mainstream problems and issues of the art world. Artists such as George Tooker, Jared French, Gregory Gillespie, or Honore Sharrer, produced work in the last half of the century that, in both their technical and conceptual mastery and in their pertinence to lived experience, have well warranted this renewed inquiry. The works of these artists offer a fertile dialogue within which to consider the themes and motifs that construct meaning in the works by Simon Dinnerstein.

Sleepers, Dreamers, and the Persistent Object Simon Dinnerstein and A Narrative

of American Art

Simon Dinnerstein (American, b. 1943)The Fulbright Triptych, 1971–1974

Oil on wood panelsOn loan from the Palmer Museum of Art at the Pennsylvania State University

Paying Attention To SinksMatthew Ballou

Associate Teaching Professor Studio Art, School of Visual Studies

University of Missouri

Simon Dinnerstein and Antonio López Garcia have built their careers on tenacious attention. People, places, objects—as well

as their associations and meanings—have come alive under the gaze of these two artists. In a time when our attention is called away incessantly, the work of Dinnerstein and Garcia stand as paragons of the great value our focused minds may create. In their eyes, darkened windows and dirty sinks become embodiments of profound understanding. Like all great wisdom, artworks crafted from acts of observation and translation cause the banalities that surround us to blaze with resonating, transformative power. This talk will explore just a few instances of the artists’ attentive creativity, and will posit a connection between representational attention and symbolic intent.

A Triptych Between Past and PresentDr. Steven Mansbach

Distinguished University Professor andProfessor of the History of Twentieth-Century Art

University of Maryland

The historical monumentality of Dinnerstein’s tripartite composition merits emphasis. His embrace of the triptych

format, along with the rigorous compositional choices both within and among the panels, constitute a brilliant wedding of art historical tradition and modern aesthetics, Renaissance reference and contemporary aesthetic practice. Indeed, the creative combination of a long-established religious format and a time-honored figuration, on the one hand, with a fully modern focus on strict geometrical organization united to an ingenious strategy of symmetry, on the other, elevate this painting to an iconic level. The Fulbright Triptych thus functions as a monumental work of art that hovers between religious allusion and secular description, between the highly personal and the accessibly public, between the art historical past and the insistently present.

The Fulbright TriptychRenaissance Roots, Modern Eyes

Dr. Anne Rudloff StantonMedieval and Northern Renaissance Art

Art History, School of Visual StudiesUniversity of Missouri

This talk will address The Fulbright Triptych as a latter-day descendant of one of the Renaissance paintings it resembles,

which communicated meaning through visual and spatial relationships with other works of art, and with the functions of the spaces in which they were viewed. The Renaissance triptychs Dinnerstein echoes were altarpieces, their large scale and careful symmetries intentionally imposing a transformational presence that was emphasized by the meticulous depiction of surfaces and textures. Like these works, The Fulbright Triptych demands slow and immersive looking.

All on the TableBanality as Spiritual Inventory in Simon

Dinnerstein’s The Fulbright TriptychDr. Rachel Lindsey

Assistant Professor, TheologyDepartment of Theological Studies

Saint Louis University

Beyond adopting the compositional structure of the triptych, which has been a popular visual form of Christian theological

narrative since the middle ages, Simon Dinnerstein’s The Fulbright Triptych conscripts even the most seemingly banal artifacts of daily life—his artist’s tools, childhood art, newspaper articles, government IDs—into a visual narrative of spiritual contemplation. For all of its much-deserved celebration as a triumph of American art, and notwithstanding Dinnerstein’s own reservations about classifying his artwork as religious, The Fulbright Triptych invites scrutiny as an object of study within the framework of American religion; albeit an object that stretches rather than affirms conventional boundaries of what religion is and can be in the modern world. This paper works to situate The Fulbright Triptych in relation to other twentieth-century artistic engagements with banality as spiritual inventory in order to define its contribution to the study of religion in the United States.

Dinnerstein and Dürer(Un)natural Women and

the Veneration of ArtDr. Rabia GregoryAssociate Professor

Department of Religious StudiesUniversity of Missouri

This presentation explores the use of nudity and clothing, human beauty and lived imperfection as they pertain to Dinnerstein’s

substitution of “art” for “icon” as an object of veneration in the secular twentieth century by comparing Dürer’s and Dinnerstein’s approaches to portraiture, representations of sexualized and sacred human bodies, apocalyptic expectations, and the sexual epidemics of sixteenth-century Syphilis and twentieth century HIV/Aids. After a discussion of the gendered hierarchies of viewer and subject, and the possibilities introduced by physically unnatural but artistically idealized nudes, I conclude with Dürer and Dinnerstein’s portraits of their wives in the posture of sainted women and the ways they appropriate iconography in their own self-portraits to discuss Dinnerstein’s skillful adaptations of sacred art.

Dinnerstein and the Flatbed Picture PlaneDr. James A. van Dyke

Associate Professor, Modern European ArtArt History, School of Visual Studies

University of Missouri

PresidentHistorians of German, Scandinavian, and

Central European Art & Architecture

Reviews Editor DesignateThe Art Bulletin

This paper will think about Dinnerstein’s early work, especially The Fulbright Triptych, in relationship to an important

critical term—“flatbed picture plane”—that was coined in 1972. Leo Steinberg, the critic who first used it, did so to describe what distinguished Robert Rauschenberg’s work from earlier Modernist art. Thinking about Dinnerstein’s painting in this framework will lead to a discussion of his pictures in relationship to the tradition of critical realism, which is associated with the expression of political dissidence in times of historical unrest and crisis.

NotesNotes