Book Description

A dramatic traveling exhibit of 15 works, The Lasting World: SIMON DINNERSTEIN and The Fulbright Triptych, is the theme of this new publication. The title, The Lasting World, comes from an essay on Simon Dinnerstein by the noted art theorist and psychologist, Rudolf Arnheim. Granted a Fulbright Fellowship in 1970-1971, Dinnerstein traveled to Germany where he began working on The Fulbright Triptych, his best known work. The triptych, which measures 14 feet in width, has been the subject of much critical response, including Roberta Smith and John Russell, both senior art critics of The New York Times: "This little-known masterpiece of 1970s realism was begun by the young Simon Dinnerstein during a Fulbright Fellowship in Germany and completed in his hometown, Brooklyn, three years later. Incorporating carefully rendered art postcards, children's drawings and personal memorabilia; a formidable worktable laid out with printmaking tools and outdoor views; and the artist and his family, it synthesizes portrait, still life, interior and landscape and rummages through visual culture while sampling a dazzling range of textures and representational styles. It should be seen by anyone interested in the history of recent art and its oversights."Roberta Smith, The New York Times, August 11, 2011: "Neither scale nor perseverance has anything to do with success in art, and Mr. Dinnerstein's triptych could be just one more painstaking failure. But it succeeds as an echo chamber, as a scrupulous representation of a suburb in the sticks, as a portrait of young people who are trying to make an honorable go of life and as inventory of the kind of things that in 1975 give such people a sense of their own identity. It deserves to go to a museum."John Russell, The New York Times, February 5, 1975. The publication includes an interview with noted art historian Lynn F. Jacobs on the triptych form and essays by Alex Barker, Director of the Art Museum at the University of Missouri and Tom Healy, who served three terms as Chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which oversees the worldwide Fulbright Program.