美国国家公共电台 NPR A Painting Stored Away And The Artist Who Wants It To See The Light Of Day

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RAY SUAREZ, HOST:

A painting that's been called a contemporary masterpiece has spent the better part of the past three decades in storage. It's only now making the rounds of museums across the country. It's called "The Fulbright Triptych." It's nearly 14 feet wide and features near life-size portraits of the artist, Simon Dinnerstein, and his family. Reporter Jon Kalish has our story.

JON KALISH, BYLINE¹: It's the details that get you. In the right panel sits the artist - in the left, his wife holding their infant daughter and, in the middle, his workbench covered with engraving² tools. On the walls behind - carefully reproduced paintings, postcards and photographs and, in between, two windows looking out on a small town, all rendered in a hyper-realistic kind of folk art style.

PETER TRIPPI: There is a sense of, what the heck is this? And then you recover from that, and you start falling into it.

KALISH: Peter Trippi is editor of Fine Art Connoisseur³ magazine.

TRIPPI: You back up away from it because you need to kind of give yourself some distance. And you think, this is slightly mad but also completely wonderful.

KALISH: The artist began the triptych in Germany while on a Fulbright scholarship, hence the title. Simon Dinnerstein finished it four years later in his Brooklyn studio. While it was still a work in progress, Dinnerstein says a prominent Manhattan gallery owner - the late George Staempfli - came to see it with an assistant.

SIMON DINNERSTEIN: They looked at this painting for maybe a half hour - didn't say one word, no questions. I couldn't make out what was going on. At the end of the half hour, George Staempfli said to me, I think this is a great painting, and I'd like to own it.

KALISH: Staempfli sent Dinnerstein a monthly stipend⁴ for two years as payment. When "The Fulbright Triptych" debuted⁵ at the Staempfli Gallery in 1975, "The New York Times" raved⁶ about it.

DINNERSTEIN: I went up in the elevator, and people had "The New York Times." And they were reading the paper, and they were talking about my painting. And when I got into the gallery, I met the former director of the Whitney Museum and the then-director of the Guggenheim Museum. And it was kind of like a fairytale.

KALISH: Seven years later, in 1982, Staempfli sold the painting to the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State. The museum didn't display the work for two years and then hung it for just two months before putting it back into storage. It's only been shown a handful of times since then, none of them at Penn State.

The painting's checkered⁷ life has frustrated⁸ its creator, so in an effort to raise its profile, Simon Dinnerstein corralled more than a dozen prominent figures in the arts to write about the work for a book he compiled. One of them is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Anthony Doerr.

ANTHONY DOERR: You know, if you're a writer and you want to revisit your work, you can bring it up on your screen or grab it off a shelf quite easily. And for Simon, you know, this is years of his life. Back when you have that energy in your 20s and 30s to make work - a painting like this, those are thousands of hours compressed into a small space. And to have that be in a warehouse⁹ must be really, really hard.

KALISH: Now, just about all museums have works that spend a lot of time in storage but are sometimes taken out for specific shows. "The Fulbright Triptych's" immense size and unusual style might make it a difficult fit for a general exhibition. But no one associated with the Palmer Museum will explain the painting's life in darkness. The curator who acquired the triptych for the Palmer is dead, and both his retired¹⁰ successor and current museum officials declined to comment for this story. But the artist is persistent¹¹.

DINNERSTEIN: It seems to me that the purpose of museums is not just to safeguard art, but it is also to share the art. It's a very difficult situation. I mean, this is like a giant baby, and the baby's being locked away in the basement.

KALISH: Simon Dinnerstein's "Fulbright Triptych" is on view now in Columbia, Mo., as part of a touring exhibition of the artist's work. It then travels to Elmira, N.Y., and Reno, Nev., before eventually going back into storage. For NPR News, I'm Jon Kalish.

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