Sari Dienes

Sari Dienes (8 October 1898 – 25 May 1992) was a Hungarian-born American artist. During a career spanning six decades she worked in a wide range of media, creating paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, textile designs, sets and costumes for theatre and dance, sound-art installations, mixed-media environments, music and performance art. Her large-scale 'Sidewalk Rubbings' of 1953-55 - bold, graphic, geometrical compositions, combining rubbings of manhole covers, subway gratings and other elements of the urban streetscape - signalled a move away from the gestural mark making of Abstract Expressionism towards the indexical appropriation of the environment that would be further developed in Pop art, and exerted a significant influence on Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Dienes was born Sarolta Maria Anna Chylinska on 8 October in Debreczen, Austria-Hungary. Her father, Lovag Gyorgy Chylinski (b.1861), was descended from Irish and Polish nobility. Her mother, Etelka Stegmüller (1870-1932), was of Swiss and German parentage and was a relative of the celebrated opera singer Etelka Gerster (1855-1920).

As a child she studied piano, before turning to dance, training in Budapest with Valéria Dienes (1879-1978), a disciple of Raymond Duncan. In 1919 she became romantically involved with Valéria Dienes’ husband Paul Dienes (1882-1952), a mathematician and poet, who headed a commission to reform university education during Béla Kun’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Following the collapse of the revolutionary government, Paul fled to Vienna in 1920, where Sari joined him before moving to Paris. They married in July 1922 and moved to Aberystwyth in Wales, where Paul Dienes was appointed a lecturer in mathematics at Aberystwyth University. In the following year the couple moved to Swansea and then, in 1929, to London, where Paul Dienes headed the mathematics department at Birkbeck College.

Between c.1928 and c.1935 Dienes studied fine art in Paris with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne, with André Lhote, and with Ozenfant at the Académie Ozenfant. She was appointed assistant director of the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts London in 1936. Dienes recruited the school’s first students, Leonora Carrington and Stella Snead, and employed Henry Moore to teach a course in modelling in clay at the school in 1938.

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