WOODEN STEPS TO SARI'S STUDIO are generous and wide, tangled roses climb the railing. Our knock on the door is answered by the ubiquitous "Hello, hello!" The entry hall is lined with photographs, posters, fan mail, birds' wings, tree roots, mushrooms, invitations to exhibitions, chimes, hats, masks. The telephone rings. "Hello, hello!" Sari is a busy woman. Entering the studio is vertiginous, like the eye of a kaleidoscope that seems to be endlessly opening. Shelves, walls, and windows are laden with assemblages, drawings and prints. On the large tables are works in progress arid accumulations of material. "Isn't this fantastic?" Sari asks, holding aloft a tubular triangle with a silvery hemisphere dangling from one corner . . . "a friend brought me this." (It's a convex rearview truck mirror.) We have all been friends for a long time. "Would you like a little beer?" This visit is different, though. "Perhaps some apple cider, or would you like some of my special humus?'' (Sari is a superb cook.) Our curatorial task changes the environment. It demands order, continuity and choice. We no longer have the luxury of sipping cider with a friend and spinning with the kaleidoscope. Of course we make lists and consider placement, chronology and style, materials and technique. There is a sense of the show taking shape. And then during another visit Sari says, "Did I ever show you these things?" Then moving a curtain aside, "When I was in Japan . . ." and a completely unknown chapter of her career unfolds. . Every exhibition brings with it unique challenges, discoveries and wonders. We have just been trying to keep up with Sari. (And the curators make yet another list.) Certain artists do not separate studio and home. Thinking, feeling and creating, walking, shopping and clothing one's self are all inclusive. The studio environment becomes a careful extension of the art work. One thinks of Mondrian's pristine studio of verticals and horizontals; Kurt Schwitters' constructed rooms called "Merzbau" (literally trash construct); Constantin Brancusi's studio/home; Georgia 0’Keeffe; Alexander Calder's kitchen utensils, toys and constant 
arranging. Sari, much of whose work is collage, has made of her studio and home an enormous collage. On the second floor the bedroom walls are a continuous wood construction, patiently fitted and joined. Upstairs also is the room of mirror shards and plants. Inexplicable blue footprints meander the floor. The collagist assembles casual elements into a sly order, creating novel juxtapositions of meaning and wit. How often we've been surprised by her punning: "Bulldozer." She repeats the word. "Isn't that funny?" One is mystified. "Bulldozer, bull dozing, dozing bull.'' Sari in her person is not separate from her work. This retrospective is an embodiment of a particular mentality. We have moved Sari's house to the gallery, edited some of the contents to permit a greater concentration
on individual works. The polarities between the orderly, the unexpected, and the random typify Sari's environment. Every corner is a discovery; the studio becomes the work becomes the home becomes the museum. As sunlight slants through stained glass and bottle constructions, mirror collages shimmer in the shifting light. The telephone rings again. "Hello, hello! . . . yes, you found a what? Isn't that fantastic!"
B I L L H O C H H A U S E N
D A V I D W E I N R I B
Co-curators
ONE SUPPOSES THAT WRITING an appreciation about the remarkable Sari Dienes would be a simple task. Alas, it is more than that-in fact, a good deal more than a mere listing of accomplishments and honors, perhaps garnished by an anecdote or two. For a summing up of Sari finds one seeking meanings and explanations, for which there may be only elusive answers. How else does one assess statements—seemingly direct and guileless—made to a newspaper reporter earlier in this, her 87th year of productive life, in which she is quoted as saying: "I'm a Zen Buddhist, and believe that you should bend with the wind." And "Nothing is more certain in life than change . . . (and) art always changes. I never look back at what I've done, but only ahead ... You can't go back. Never." There, you have it—simple, direct, innocent, feisty. Sari Dienes. . Now, perhaps, one can understand her own self-assessment, "My life and my work are the same thing." She was once described by People magazine as "the doyenne of the American avant-garde movement ." Which may very well be. But Sari Dienes, whose halo of white hair and creative costuming have become something of a trademark, is above all the stuff of which legends are made. Yes, a one-of-a-kind. Though she has never achieved the great fame of a Georgia O'Keeffe or a Louise Nevelson. Sari does not begrudge the fact. Nor does it escape her that fame takes strange bounces, during one's lifetime ... and 
beyond. During an interview with this reporter at her mountainside home in Stony Point some years ago, she said, "Critics don't know what the hell to do with me. I don't work in any kind of tradition, so they find it hard to categorize me. I can't explain why I've not become better known. Maybe it will all come later." Sari's long career as an artist has been like a touch of yeast in the cauldron of the avant-garde movement in America, and most particularly, that which is encountered in New York. Her experimentation with new ideas and techniques—some of it, quite frankly, bizarre—has provided the art would with an effervescence that has been a force in shaping the direction of art in this century. One eminent critic has written: "She is one of the consistently inventive artists of recent decades ... and the wealth of her new ideas is still in the process of exploration." And this goes on to this day. If life is said to imitate art, then we have in Sari Dienes a strange mix, almost an anomaly. As vibrant, exciting and inscrutable as are her artworks, she, herself, is perceived as serene and, yes, almost grandmotherly. But don't be fooled. Closer scrutiny reveals that here is a person in absolute control of her creative vision. Nothing escapes her appraising eye. Sari once also described herself to this reporter as being " ... a painter, collagist, earthworker and troublemaker." Now, that's no mean assessment. Her artworks have been executed on scales ranging from the easily manageable to the grand. They have involved the discovery of a method of preserving Indian carvings and New England gravestone designs, to the creation of extraordinarily sensitive "pictures" lifted from city streets, to complex assemblages utilizing sound and light and articles found in garbage dumps. To Sari, there is nothing so humble it cannot be turned into an art form. Her ability to stretch the imagination to encompass every bit of the world around her has not gone unnoticed. LIFE magazine during its heyday in the 1950s documented her discoveries in both picture and story and turned her into a national celebrity. In 1980, People magazine devoted a two-page article to her over a headline that 
read: "Like Any Other Masterpiece, Sari Dienes Seems to improve With Age—She's 81 Going on 60." Awards also have come Sari's way. In 1972, the State of New York commissioned two large silk-screens depicting the state's tree (Sugar Maple), flower (Rose), bird (Bluebird), animal (Beaver) and gemstone (Garnet) to hang in a hearing room of the Legislative Building in Albany. She's also received a gold medal in art from the Academy of Parma (Italy) and funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1976, Sari was presented with the International Women's Year Award for her contributions to the world of art. She also visits New York regularly where she appears in exhibitions at the A.I.R. Gallery, the first woman's art 
cooperative in SoHo. Needless to say, she has also appeared in numerous shows in the most prestigious of galleries, including the Whitney and Museum of Modern Art, both here and abroad. She's had important shows in Japan and India. Born Sari Chylinska in Debrocen, Hungary, in 1899, she studied dance and philosphy in Vienna and Paris. While in Paris, she studied with Fernand Leger and Andre Lhote. She later married Paul Dienes, a poet and mathematician, and moved with him to London, where she began her studies with sculptor Henry Moore. While on a visit alone to the U.S. in 1939—her husband remained in London—World War II broke out, preventing her from returning. Dienes died in London in 1952. As Sari Dienes moves into her ninth decade, her creative energies remain undiminished. She delights in welcoming young artists to her Stony Point studio to share with them her own vitality and vision of art. Sari claims that the source of her inventiveness comes in part from the special communion with nature and the environment, both of which she feeds into her work. "All the forces of nature are alive," Sari Dienes says as she assembles and paints glass bottles, clay fragments, old bones, broken mirrors, dried beans and other "found" objects into works of art, charging them all with renewed mystery and beauty.
MICHAEL HITZIG writes on Rockland's cultural and entertainment scene for The Journal-News. He is also editor of the newspaper's Weekend Magazine.
LONG AGO, I USED TO SEE A MAN ON a street corner in the mid-town area of Manhattan, and he was playing on a tin whistle or perhaps a recorder. The sounds were hardly audible because he was not blowing into the instrument, but simply placing his fingers with great deliberation on the holes. He was able to amplify these faintest of sounds by means of a tape recorder, and out came a mysterious melody which he said he had composed himself in a tempo called "snake time". This original musician reminds me somewhat of Sari Dienes who also stands outside of the regular art world, yet is of it, at the same time, also. Sari Dienes makes art out of things which one doesn't think of as art to begin with as the way a musician might be inspired by steam whistles or a poet by the rumbling of a train. If this is all she was doing she could be placed by art historians (who, like most people, have a mania for classification) into a neat little category already occupied by a large group of collagists and assemblage artists. But her uniqueness as a creative individual lies in her concern for the unclassifiable suchness of the world's things. She responds to any number of
disparate objects: plastic buttons, leaves, a dead mouse, bones, branches, a broken stained glass window, a manhole cover, a human face. From these she is able to extract a mysterious melody. In her last show, previous to this one, some of the works produced sounds, but most belong to the inaudible order of things, and any sensed melody is heard by association rather than directly through the ears. Sari Dienes is only marginally concerned with the previous history or function of the objects she collects and assembles-as Eleanor Heartney indicated in her thoughtful review of her recent show at the A.I.R. Gallery in the magazine Art in America, July, 1986.
Thus she is quite different from an artist like Kurt Schwitters to whom it mattered a great deal that the things he 
picked up had been thrown away and that he was the first to realize their significance. I think the closet to her is Robert Rauschenberg, and Rauschenberg, I understand, was at one time influenced by her. I Also, for a time, I thought there was something in her work which could be likened to that of Braque and Picasso when they were inventing Cubist collages and three dimensional constructions in the period 1912-1914. However on a careful examination of the bits of newspapers and other things they used one discovers that they were more than ordinarily selective in the pages they cut from, and that what always interested them was something which had some art or musical reference to it. All their collages can therefore be read the way one reads a book or newspaper. It wasn't only the textures that had attracted their eyes. They were interested in extending their collages into the written history of their time. However, Sari Dienes' use of everyday reality as the real stuff of poetry makes me think of Braque and Picasso, also of the Futurists, and very much of Marianne Moore, the American poet, and of the French poet Blaise Cendrars of whom Leger once said, "We are on the same wave-length. Like myself, he picks things up on the streets." During her long career she has experimented with various kinds of multiples, with printmaking, with frottage or rubbing, with photostats, photography and xeroxes, ceramics, with snow-painting, with found objects and ready—mades of all kinds. This present exhibition includes examples of all of these plus some quite early drawings and paintings. When I first knew her in the 1930's Sari Dienes seemed more interested in creativity and the act of creation and experiment than in making art things to be framed and sold by art dealers. I knew her first in 1938 through a friend who was also her friend. I visited her in London in 1939, just before the war began when the newspapers were filled with the news of the latest frontier crossed by German armies. She was at work on a large, black painting. This impressed me deeply, although being then quite new to art, I couldn't pretend either to be able to fit it into any preconceived order, or to be able to tell myself that I understood what she was doing. But, after all, is it ever really possible to understand anything in the world? Yet I received an emotional message, and that memory left its own memory behind, so I see that large
black painting still. It seemed then sensationally "modern", and that's the way I still think of it and also of everything that she has done since. Sari Dienes seems to have long ago mastered a discriminating sense of what lies beyond what we consider as attainable by the five senses. I know no one more truly liberated, and yet at the same more practical, more sane, more in touch with reality.
L A W R E N C E C A M P B E L L
Painter/Critic