Simon Dinnerstein: Revisiting The Fulbright Triptych

Simon Dinnerstein
The Fulbright Triptych, 1971–74
Oil on wood panels
Palmer Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania State University, Purchased with funds provided by the Friends of the Palmer Museum of Art
Image courtesy of the artist.

This exhibition highlights Simon Dinnerstein’s monumental three-panel painting, The Fulbright Triptych, begun in 1971 during the artist’s Fulbright fellowship in Germany and completed in Brooklyn in 1974. A complex work, it offers an intimate view inside the artist’s studio and showcases a fascinating array of engraving tools, artistic materials, and personal ephemera. The painting also incorporates portraits of the artist and his family, and a glimpse of the German town seen outside the studio windows. Encompassing an entire wall in the Eisenberg Gallery, the triptych resembles an altarpiece—not devoted to God or saints, but to the secular subjects of art and family.

Dinnerstein had traveled to Germany to study printmaking—specifically the work of Old Masters like Albrecht Dürer—and he made engraving the focus of the painting’s central panel. Revisiting The Fulbright Triptych reexamines this vital connection by incorporating several of Dinnerstein’s engravings and related drawings as well as the actual engraving plate illustrated in the painting.

View exhibition catalogue here

Read more about The Fulbright Triptych here.