CBH Talk | Simon and Simone Dinnerstein Discuss Art, Place and Imagination in the Work "Nocturne"

In considering this drawing, I wondered about the ‘baggage’ we take with us – in terms of associations with the past, loyalties to some location or dream, irrational pushes and pulls, and secret ambiguous longings.

~Simon Dinnerstein on his painting Nocturne; American Artist, April 1986

Simon Dinnerstein’s 1982 painting Nocturne is a quiet but powerful breakthrough. The work portrays a newly arrived Polish immigrant seated before a window that opens onto a row of Brooklyn brownstones. The solid band of townhouses grounds the scene in the borough’s built environment, while an upper register of dreamlike vignettes—church towers, tree-lined streets, Polish heraldry—unfolds the subject’s inner life. Together, these elements capture the emotional complexity of displacement: the pull of memory and homeland set against the steady presence of a new place.

Currently on view through March 31 in the Center for Brooklyn History’s Centering Collections exhibition, Nocturne serves as the starting point for a rare and intimate conversation between Dinnerstein and his daughter, acclaimed pianist Simone Dinnerstein. Together they will reflect on the pivotal role of Nocturne in Dinnerstein’s artistic evolution, the stories behind its creation, and the dreamlike works that followed. They will explore Brooklyn as both muse and home, its brownstones, streets, and people, and as a lifelong creative community that has shaped Dinnerstein’s work. The evening includes an opportunity for a final, close look at Nocturne on its last day on view, guided by Dinnerstein and the CBH curatorial team.

Pictured above: Nocturne by Simon Dinnerstein, 1982, Conte crayon and colored pencil on paper, 2024.014 ; Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History. Gift of Lucille Nurkse.

About CBH's Centering Collections exhibition

Centering Collections: Recent Work at the Center for Brooklyn History is a regularly updated exhibition that showcases new additions to CBH’s collection, feature materials that have been reorganized, digitized or otherwise refreshed, and stories from the archives that are just too good to stay on the shelf. 

Participants

Simon Dinnerstein was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn and has resided in Park Slope for the past 60 years. In addition to 33 one-man exhibits, Dinnerstein is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany and a Rome Prize for living and working in Italy at the American Academy in Rome. Other awards for his work include a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, the Ingram Merrill Award for Painting, two grants from the E.D. Foundation, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant and three Childe Hassam Purchase Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among the four publications on his work, Dinnerstein's large-scale painting The Fulbright Triptych is the subject of THE SUSPENSION OF TIME: Reflections on Simon Dinnerstein and The Fulbright Triptych  (Milkweed Editions, 2011). This is the only book out now which is entirely devoted to a single painting of a living American artist.  A member of the National Academy of Design, he has been represented in past years by Staempfli Gallery and ACA Gallery in New York.  Photo by Renee Dinnerstein.

American pianist Simone Dinnerstein first came to wider public attention in 2007 through her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which The New York Times called, “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.” Dinnerstein has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic to the London Symphony Orchestra and has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Seoul Arts Center and Sydney Opera House. She has made fifteen albums, all of which have topped the Billboard classical charts and was nominated for a Grammy for An American Mosaic.

In recent years, Dinnerstein has created projects that express her broad musical interests. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. Following her recording, Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the U.S. for the first time, performing eleven concerts. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera and the Cleveland Orchestra. The Washington Post comments, “it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative.  Photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco.