Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, US.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.



Sari Dienes' work remains a testament to a radical, unflinching exploration of materials and urban life. Born in Hungary in 1898, Dienes spent much of her artistic career in New York, where she embarked on a daring experiment in the 1950s that would become the cornerstone of her legacy: the Sidewalk Rubbings, to which Square Man, Petroglyph Rubbing - Dalles River Gorge belongs. Althoughthese large-scale works made by transferring the textures of the city's streets to paper, Dienes offered an abstraction rooted in the gritty, tactile reality of urban space—an art that was both a direct engagement with the environment and an act of transformation of it.

Dienes' Sidewalk Rubbings were not mere representations of the city but embody a profound interaction between artist and city. Armed with a brayer, the printmaker's roller, Dienes pressed paper to the surfaces of manhole covers, subway grates, and cracked sidewalks, capturing the rough textures that defined New York's streets. These bold, abstract works seemed to transcend the physicality of their sources, rendering the urban landscape as a series of energetic, metaphysical imprints. In this, Dienes wasn't simply documenting the street; she was mapping the forces that gave it life—its rhythms, its decay, its constant change.

Dienes' work are not isolated from the artistic currents of her time. In fact, it profoundly influenced the next generation of artists, including figures like Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. Johns, who often assisted Dienes with her late-night outings to the streets of Manhattan, described the experience as one of intimate collaboration: "After finishing my work at a bookstore on 57th Street, I used to visit Sari, who lived nearby. After midnight we would go out on 6th Avenue and she would work over the cracked street and various cast-iron manhole covers. I was responsible for keeping the sometimes enormous sheets of fabric or paper that she used from blowing away. She was very uninhibited, I thought." (Jasper Johns, letter to Barbara Pollitt, June 1, 2011.)

This image of Dienes, tirelessly working in the middle of the night with a group of equally committed artists, speaks to a spirit of experimentation that permeated her practice. Unlike the solitary genius myth that often surrounds artists, Dienes was deeply collaborative, a mentor to many, including Rauschenberg, Johns, and Twombly. Her open, almost reckless pursuit of artistic possibility provided the fertile ground from which these artists grew.

Her Sidewalk Rubbings, though often overshadowed by the more flamboyant gestures of her peers, stand as a critical precursor to the Pop Art movement. Dienes' embrace of urban textures anticipated the appropriation of everyday objects that would characterise the work of Rauschenberg and Johns. Yet her work was never simply a prelude to these movements. It was a deep, personal exploration of materiality and perception, one that invited a careful reconsider.

Sari Dienes' work is now held in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, solidifying her place in the canon of 20th-century art. Her Sidewalk Rubbings and other works continue to inspire and resonate, offering a lasting legacy.