Sari Dienes

Sari Dienes, c. 1950s. Photo: Bertrand de Jeofroy. Courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation.

b. Debreczen, Hungary, 1898
d. Stony Point, NY, 1992

Sari Dienes was a groundbreaking experimental artist whose career links European Surrealism, American Neo-Dada, and Pop art. Dienes is best known for her mixed media frottage paintings (painterly rubbings from textured surfaces) of rural and urban environments. Dienes’s foremost artistic belief was that raw materials and forms existed everywhere, and her goal was to see and reflect them. This attitude influenced her younger contemporaries and friends, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who, like Dienes, began using found objects and iconic visual symbols as the basis of their compositions and assemblage works.

Sari Dienes (pron. SHAR-HAHree dDeens) was born Sarolta Maria Anna Chylinska. During her teenage years, she studied dance in Vienna, leading to her involvement with poet and mathematician Paul Dienes, who she would marry in 1922. In the following decade, Dienes lived between Paris and the UK, studying with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne, later attending the Académie Ozenfant. During this time, Dienes frequented Paris’s Café du Dôme, which was a hub of Montparnasse’s avant-garde scene as a gathering place for artists including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in the period. In 1936, Dienes became assistant director of Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts in London, recruiting the school’s first students, who included Leonora Carrington and photographer Stella Snead. In 1937, she met Max Ernst, a pioneer of Dada and surrealism, whom she would go on to introduce to Carrington.

After separating from her husband, Dienes came to New York in 1939. Intended as a short trip, she was unable to return to the UK as a Hungarian after the outbreak of the Second World War. Instead, she helped establish the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York. By 1941, she began teaching out of her own studio and at the Parsons School of Design. Her first solo exhibition—of twenty drawings—was held at the New School for Social Research, NY. In the mid-1940s, she moved to a large studio at 57th Street, which would become a hub for her artist community. It was at this time that she developed friendships with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Ray Johnson. All four would later study Zen Buddhism, through a series of lectures given by D.T. Suzuki at Columbia University.

The principles of Zen Buddhism were formative in the development of Dienes’s work. She embraced the philosophy that artmaking was more about finding, rather than seeking. A three-month trip to Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico was also a profound influence. After returning to New York, she exhibited paintings, watercolors, and assemblages of found objects in the major exhibitions Art and the Found Object at the American Federation of Arts 1959 and The Art of Assemblage, at MoMA in 1961.

Sari Dienes at Atelier 17, c. 1949. Courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation.

In 1949, she worked with Stanley Hayter at the famed Atelier 17 at the New School. Printmaking techniques would also become an integral part of her practice, even when making unique works, and were the focus of a 1950 exhibition, her first of four solo exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery. Through Hayter, who was experimenting with “plaster prints,” Dienes would also begin creating plaster collages.

It was during a residency at the Yaddo retreat in Saratoga Springs, NY that Dienes first made rubbings of natural materials and household objects, using a printer’s brayer and colored inks. Upon returning to New York, Dienes would bring her materials to the streets of New York. She worked in the wee hours of the night, when the streets were quiet from traffic, taking rubbings of manhole covers and sidewalks. She engaged her friends John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Rachel Rosenthal to assist her by making sure the massive sheets and fabrics did not blow away. Her second exhibition at Betty Parsons, in 1954, consisted of large-scale sidewalk rubbings, in which pigment was applied to her surfaces with a combination of brushes, rollers, rags, and her fingers.

In 1955, Dienes created an installation of plaster collages and sidewalk rubbings in the windows of department store Bonwit Teller. She was invited by Johns, Rauschenberg, and Gene Moore, who were working as window dressing designers, joining a lineage that had famously included Salvador Dalí in the late 1920s, and which would help launch the career of Andy Warhol in 1961.

In 1956, she was commissioned by the University of Washington to participate in an expedition making rubbings of several hundred Native American petroglyphs soon to be submerged due to the construction of the Dalles Dam across the Columbia River in Washington State. A year later, Dienes traveled to Japan to further her study of Zen, stopping en route in Hawaii to create more petroglyph rubbings. Her Walls of Kyoto rubbings comprised her fourth and final exhibition at Betty Parsons.

In 1961, Dienes moved to Gate Hill, an artistic commune known informally as ‘The Land,’ in Stony Point, New York, where she would live for the rest of her life. There, her neighbors included John Cage, M.C. Richards, David Tudor, and Johanna and Stan VanDerBeek. Her relationships with Fluxus artists, including Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono, would deepen during this time, as she showed in the annual Avant-Garde Festival organized by Moorman and collaborated on numerous musical performances and theatrical events with Dick Higgins and Jackson MacLow. In 1973, she joined the feminist artist cooperative A.I.R., where she would exhibit through the end of her life. In 1971 she established a home base in New York City above the city’s oldest bar, and in 1977, she took over its lease, along with Rip Hayman and Pico Underhill, establishing it as the Ear Inn, the site of numerous experimental art performances.

Sari Dienes creating a rubbing outside Cedar Tavern, June 23, 1970. Photograph by Peter Moore; © Northwestern University, Courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation.

Dienes was the subject of a 2023 solo exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL. She was also included in the recent exhibition Women’s Work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY which closed in March of 2025, as well as Fragments of Memory at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX and Fresh Window: Art of Display and Display of Art at Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland. She will also be represented in the forthcoming Betty Parsons, an Artist with a Gallery, which will open at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College in 2026. Aside from the MoMA and the Menil Drawing Institute, Dienes’ work is also present in the collections of Buffalo AKG, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.