The Realism of Harvey Dinnerstein.
The Importance of Being There.
Harvey Dinnerstein, Walking Together, Montgomery, 1956, lithograph, 36 x 51 in. Photo by Ed Watkins. Courtesy the Art Students League of New York.
Two roads diverged in 1956; a riddle unfurling in real time: Will a modern art hold a mirror to a modern America, or will it stare eternally into the void? Art about something, or art about nothing?
Harvey Dinnerstein never had any doubt: he was a born realist, a preternaturally gifted limner who might have attained the same heights even if he hadn’t studied under the best realists of the day at the Art Students League in the 1940s.1 His first solo show, in 1955, was praised in The New York Times for his sensitive domestic scenes, “treated in an intimist way as Vuillard’s, a master whom Dinnerstein obviously admires.”2 Dinnerstein was a Brooklyn native, and he and his childhood friend Berton Silverman were confident about their neo-classical realism. What their art needed was a subject—something with drama, justice, and the grand historical sweep of the academic masters they admired.
While Dinnerstein’s first show was up in New York, in Montgomery, Alabama, the grand historical sweep was just warming up. Rosa Parks was arrested for violating Jim Crow laws on December 1, 1955, and the Montgomery NAACP leapt into action. A boycott of the city’s buses began on December 5th, and a 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., reportedly lukewarm on the idea of a bus boycott,3 was enlisted to lead the campaign. By the 57th day of the boycott, King’s house was bombed. The boycott was rattling the Jim Crow establishment, privately reshaping King’s views on nonviolence, and gaining attention far beyond Alabama. Dinnerstein and Silverman, both the same age as Dr. King, believed passionately in the cause. They headed for Montgomery.
II. An Intimist’s Way.
It seems obvious in retrospect: why not go and be in the room with Rosa Parks? Why hurl paint at unprimed canvas on the floor when you could go and sit with Dr. King as he prayed and prepared? Why drip paint everywhere when you can give your viewers an unflinching portrait of the courage of these young people standing up to the violence and legal cudgels of bigots—what more could you want as an artist?
But we always live in interesting times, and studio artists mainly stay in their studios. To whit, the studio artist par excellence: on August 11th of the same year, Jackson Pollock died in a car crash. His path had led him deeper and deeper into his own id, and that pursuit and its tragic end elevated him immediately to the highest ranks of modern art firmament. On December 19th, 1956, a memorial retrospective opened at MoMA.4 The following day, the Montgomery boycott ended.5 Two worlds, far apart.
Dinnerstein’s drawings from 1956 are powerful because of the intimacy that the Times noted in his earlier work: the frankness of the organizers’ exhaustion and resolve, the electric sense of profound changes on the wing. Twelve years later, King was assassinated in the midst of planning the Poor People’s Campaign— “the beginning of a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.”6 Esquire Magazine hired Dinnerstein to document the Poor People’s Campaign as it evolved, in the wake of King’s death, into an encampment on the National Mall called Resurrection City. The encampment proceeded as planned, but the efforts were further demoralized by the death of Robert F. Kennedy that June. The relentlessness of the violence against the movement took a toll that Dinnerstein noted with sadness:
“The last time I had been this close to ‘The Movement’ was 12 years ago in Montgomery, Alabama. One evening I drew the 10-year-old daughter of one of the organizers. That child is 22 years old today and I doubt that her dreams have in any measure been fulfilled.”7
III. Down Time.
This was Dinnerstein’s path: realism in a dramatic world. His long career encompassed a vast swath of intimate moments beyond the Civil Rights era, but many of his most poignant works embrace the dark drama of our times: first responders after 9/11; his wife, Lois, in the hospital during Covid. The work is immediate, sympathetic, and human. Perhaps surprisingly, Dinnerstein didn’t think his sketches of Parks and King were his best:
“The drawings were frankly reportorial, concerned with the individuals involved, church meetings, courtroom scenes, and the general locales. In retrospect, the drawings seem limited and anecdotal . . .”8
It’s an interesting criticism; what I find most engaging about these sketches is that they show what organizing really looks like. Marching and speaking, yes, but also going to a lot of meetings, listening, and handing out pamphlets: a lot of down time. Dinnerstein was coming at it from the academic tradition, where the picture isn’t just a time-stamp of having been there, but itself a dramatic elevation. His biggest pictures grapple with antiquity and academic history paintings, tell stories and study relationships, elevating the commonplace into icons.9 Dinnerstein was a magician of that elevation: while his pictures are filled with every-day people, there is no down time.
That magic will be on display when a major retrospective of Dinnerstein’s work opens at the Art Students League of New York, where he taught for four decades, on Thursday, June 6. Dinnerstein died in 2022,10 a steadfast devotee to the realist tradition:
“We clung to the notion that Realism—an artist's way of looking at the world with critical appraisal—could be an invaluable tool in recording momentous events of our time.”11
These remain momentous times; being there is important.
Thanks for reading. It’s not too late to catch Brian Rutenberg: Celebrating 25 Years, and you can find out more about Harvey Dinnerstein’s retrospective at the Art Students League of New York here.
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Namely Moses Soyer, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Julian E. Levi at the League, before further studies at Temple University; he was drafted during the Korean War before launching his career in earnest.
“Dinnerstein Show at Gallery Here Bears mark of Philadelphia Tradition,” The New York Times, Dec. 31, 1955.
Clayborne Carson, “The Boycott That Changed Dr. King's Life,” The New York Times, Jan. 7, 1996.
Find the catalogue here.
Dinnerstein’s work received praise, but not canonization, decades later.
SCLC Press release, “Black and White Together,” March 15, 1968.
As quoted by David Apatoff in Illustration Art, “The Journalist Illustrators: Harvey Dinnerstein,” here.
Ibid.
A few examples in Dinnerstein’s own words, here.
His eloquent obit here.
Dinnerstein and Silverman as quoted by Vivien Raynor, “Art: A Naif and Nine Realists”, The New York Times, March 31, 1985.