Sari Dienes: Pioneering Mid-Century Artist

“Spirit lives in everything, it has no age, no color, no sex” is the landmark quote by the late artist Sari Dienes (1898-1992), celebrating her legendary life in art. Dienes’s pioneering work in the Mid-Century New York art world influenced male peers of the era (including her friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg). But like many women of her time, she was never fully credited.

Years Ahead of the Curve

Dienes foreshadowed the Pop Art Movement by over a decade, and her visionary use of assemblage and found objects was years ahead of the curve. She continually pushed herself and her circle of artist friends and collaborators into new forms of artmaking that helped shape our visual culture.

In 2023, the exhibition Sari Dienes: Incidental Nature was displayed at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. It was the first time a museum in the Southeastern United States dedicated an entire solo exhibition to the artists’s impactful work.

“Celebrated as the Doyenne of the American Avant-Garde, Sari Dienes is finally receiving the national acclaim she deserves,” said Irvin Lippman, the Executive Director of the Museum. Three core elements of Dienes’ six decades of artmaking were featured:

Her 1950s street rubbings
Works inspired by her time in Japan
Portraits of her famous circle of artists

Most of the works in the exhibition were from the Sari Dienes Foundation. The Foundation’s Curator/Artistic Director, Barbara Pollitt, worked closely with the Museum on the endeavor and created the video Sari Dienes: A Life in Art. The exhibition was curated by Kelli Bodle, the Associate Curator of the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and featured more than 50 works by Dienes, plus ephemera, including a Polaroid portrait by Andy Warhol.

A Career Spanning Decades

Dienes was a descendant of Eastern European royalty (born in Debrecen, Austria-Hungary), and her stature in the art world stretches back to the 1930s in Paris and London. In 1939, she emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 41 and was an original member of the Neo-Dada movement of the 50s and 60s.

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. In her large-scale “Sidewalk Rubbings” of the 1950s and 1960s, she created bold, graphic, geometrical compositions via impressions of manhole covers, subway gratings, and other elements of the urban streetscape. This she did often in the middle of the night to avoid pedestrians, accompanied by some of Manhattan’s most famous artist friends who helped her stretch her 30-foot-long fabric onto the sidewalk.

Dienes lived and worked alongside a stellar circle, including Yoko Ono, the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, as well as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. A portion of the Boca Raton Museum of Art exhibition featured her portraits and rubbings of some of her famous artist friends, including a large portrait of John Cage and bodily rubbings of Ray Johnson’s arm.

Materials Out of the Studio

Dienes was known for making the exterior world her canvas, taking her materials out of the studio and into the streets. This central idea to her work, of making the outside world her canvas, stemmed from Zen Buddhist philosophy, which she absorbed during her sojourn to Japan (a selection of works created in Japan were also on view in the exhibition). She also created rubbings from ancient rock carvings known as petroglyphs.

Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Dienes’s art is also in the permanent collections of many of the world’s leading institutions. Scholars often use another of Dienes’s quotes to encapsulate her boundless energy and spirit – “My definition of an artist is … just a human being, only more so.”

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