The Windows in Simon Dinnerstein’s The Fulbright Triptych, 1971-1974.

Susan Stickney

When I saw images of The Fulbright Triptych I was instantly reminded of what it was like to be in a foreign country for the very first time. Like Dinnerstein, I, too, was in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship in 1970-1971. I even met Simon on the boat carrying Fulbrighters from Europe back to the States after the year of the grant. However, I did not see images of The Fulbright Triptych until recently, and was surprised at how strongly it brought back memories of that year. What is it about that painting personal to Simon’s life that brought back that time for me?

The windows stand out for me. The landscape they show takes up almost half of the top of the central panel, and since that panel is the largest, the view out the two windows commands a lot of space. Yet, how powerful is that landscape compared with the rest of the painting? The colors are cool, much cooler than the palette used for the interior. This coolness and the one point perspective used for the outside view contrasts strongly with the warmth of the interior wall which is on one plane, where each object is as important as any other. The view through the windows is from high above the street; therefore the houses are small, becoming smaller and smaller as the little town fades into distant, less distinct hills. The cool colors and the rapidly dwindling landscape gives the view out the window a sense of otherness.

Windows impose a two-dimensionality on the scene framed. What is outside the window may be real, but it is removed, maybe several times removed. Seeing the triptych’s windows reminded me forcefully of looking at Germany through windows. Train windows heap up impressions of a landscape on the move, ones completely different from what one sees at home. Is that landscape less real than the one I know or am I now less real? Once I was in my apartment I often looked out my windows to see what the people who were at home were doing. I was not at home. Not only was the outside different, so was the interior: the stove was different, the production of hot water was different. Was I different? How did I end up here?

I think the contrast between the landscape outside the windows, and the interior in The Fulbright Triptych gives me a clue to why I am reminded of my Fulbright year in Germany. Simon’s warm, brown, worktable, covered with the tools for engraving, sits front and center right under those windows. That worktable is the reason he and his wife are in Germany on a Fulbright grant. His engraved plate, the year’s project and the single circular art object in the whole painting, glows on the table. The golden plate and the worktable on which it sits, are removed from the outside landscape by a simple sheet of glass.

Yet the windows are not the only items in the wall – far from it! If one feels estranged from the outer surroundings, what about the interior, the private spaces? Simon depicts himself and Renée on either side of those windows, facing forward, looking seriously ahead but also with a gaze pointed inward. Here we are, they are saying, inside our space on the top floor apartment in a small town in Germany. Renée’s bare feet bespeak groundedness, as does Simon’s posture which is alert yet not anxious. Yet those two sitters as well as the two windows are surrounded by a plethora of images on paper, fastened to the walls.
If one extends a line from the base of the windows out through the side panels, one sees the head of each sitter surrounded by a myriad collection of reproductions of paintings, letters, grade school exercises, photos, postcards, and children’s drawings. Aren’t these also windows? The uncanny reproduction in oil of all the various media of the items surrounding each figure communicates powerfully the value these words and images have for the two. They enclose each of them as an aura, an essence made visible. These are the windows, in spite of their size, that speak of discovery over an arc of time.

This collection also seems familiar to me from my Fulbright year. Over the time of the grant one pins up things that speak to one, that carry a significance, a challenge, a question, or a confirmation. These pieces may come from a home far-away, furthering a new perspective on “home”, or from the process of establishing oneself in the new place. Over the months my refrigerator’s surface slowly acquired cards and pictures: a postcard of a painting that spoke to me when in a museum; a photo of a street in a foreign city that represented a connection in the present to the past; a photo of Franz Kafka with an amazing quotation that deepened how I thought of “homework.” Du bist die Aufgabe. Kein Schüler weit und breit.* Often these items represented an encounter that expanded ones conception of who one is. A reflection of a newer self, or perhaps more accurately said: an amalgamation of former and current selves begins to take shape within that once strange and empty apartment. I like to think that all the items surrounding Renée and Simon were gathered there slowly, a record of the months spent during the Fulbright year. Nothing there is random, each is significant. To mention just one instance: the Holbein portrait of a man with the tools of his trade hangs immediately above Simon’s worktable – an image of the worktable Dinnerstein has depicted in his image. And that Y, out there in left field so to speak, seems no longer to be of central importance, though its homonym why has been the driving question.

The questions that arose for me during the Fulbright year are not unknown to any seeker of meaning. But living away from the familiar structures of one’s day-to-day life – so familiar that one is practically blind to them – makes the quest to find oneself even more pressing. What is one’s identity? Will one successfully meet the challenge of studying in Germany? That question seems fully answered by The Fulbright Triptych. It seems right that the quest, supported by a Fulbright year, stands in the middle of the middle panel. It is complete. Simon’s hands have finished carving the plate using the process that Dürer used. The tools are neatly ordered; the artist’s hands are folded.

The great challenge of a Fulbright year is how independent the Commission leaves the recipients once they have been granted the fellowship and assigned their location and institute of study. They may recommend some language study, but all else they leave up to the foreign student. This independence, at times problematic, often results in great personal and what will become professional growth, perhaps directly as a result of how pressing questions of identity, personal and professional, become when removed from the usual frames of day-to-day existence and one has to find the springs of one’s own resources and strengths. Take the example of Simon Dinnerstein, who went as a draftsman and returned to the States as a painter in oils! This very painting contains in itself the shift in his life from one discipline to the one he continues to pursue. When I looked at The Fulbright Triptych I saw that Simon had had those same crucial questions that I had had during that significant year, and he had painted his answer, an answer that speaks to me.


Susan Stickney June 9, 2025

*You are the assignment. No scholar anywhere. -Kafka

Susan Stickney is Tutor Emerita, Classics Department, St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico