Sari Dienes

Sari Dienes, c. 1945. Courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation.

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

Sari Dienes (pron. SHAR-ee deens) 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.

Between 1924 and 1935, Dienes commuted to Paris to attend the Académie Moderne, where she studied with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant, 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. That same year, she met Max Ernst, a pioneer of Dada and surrealism, whom she would go on to introduce to Carrington.

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 held the idea that art was about expressing the whole of reality, stating in 1987 that reality could be defined as “a circle without circumference, where the center is everywhere.” She embraced the philosophy that artmaking was more about finding 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. In the late 1950s, Dienes traveled to Japan to further her study of Zen, and her Walls of Kyoto rubbings comprised her fourth and final exhibition at Betty Parsons.

Sari Dienes and Stanley Hayter at Atelier 17, New York, NY, c. 1949. Courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation.

From 1947-1953, 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. Through Hayter, who was experimenting with “plaster prints,” Dienes would also begin creating plaster collages. During a residency at the Yaddo retreat in Saratoga Springs, NY, Dienes first made rubbings of natural materials and household objects using a printer’s brayer and colored inks. After the residency, Dienes brought 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 Cage, Rauschenberg, Johns, Cy Twombly, 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 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 amid neighbors including Cage, M.C. Richards, David Tudor, and Johanna and Stan VanDerBeek. She would continue to work with found materials, including a multi-year project of an elaborate landscape of driftwood, glass and scrap metal around her house. She would create impermanent artworks, like a performative Snow Painting, documented by the renowned photographer Peter Moore.

Her relationships with Fluxus artists, including Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono, would deepen during this time. 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. That same year, 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 Paco 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. Artwork © Sari Dienes Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In the decades since her death, her stature has risen with her inclusion in numerous shows, most recently a 2023 solo exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; Women’s Work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Fragments of Memory at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX; Fresh Window: Art of Display and Display of Art at Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland; and On the Street at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, all between 2024 and 2025. Dienes will 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. Her work is found in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York, NY; the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX; 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.