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OBITUARY
Terry
Dintenfass,
a dealer of art outside the mainstream
By Roberta Smith
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
November 10, 2004
NEW YORK – Terry Dintenfass, a longtime New
York art dealer whose gallery brought together several currents from
outside the mainstream of 20th-century art, died Oct. 26 at her home
in Manhattan. She was 84. Her death was reported by her son Andrew
Dintenfass.
For nearly 40 years the Terry Dintenfass gallery swam mostly against
the tide of the rest of the art world. In the era of Pop and Minimal
Art, Mrs. Dintenfass was drawn to politically aware figurative painting
rooted in the Social Realism of the 1930s.
She also represented the estates of first-generation American modernists
such as Arthur Dove and Charles Sheeler, as well as that of Ben Shahn.
While nearly all artists showing in New York galleries were white,
she represented several black artists, most notably Jacob Lawrence,
but also Raymond Saunders, Richard Hunt and Walter Williams, a little-known
painter whose work she showed in her first gallery, which was in Atlantic
City, N.J.
She also represented the estate of Horace Pippin, a black folk artist,
and worked on an important traveling exhibition of his work in 1977
that was organized by the Phillips Collection in Washington.
Although the line separating high and low culture was fairly firm,
she also exhibited artists with a strong illustrational bent, including
Ronald Markman, Richard Merkin, Robert Andrew Parker and Edward Koren,
a cartoonist for The New Yorker.
Mrs. Dintenfass' life was an unusual mixture of propriety, activism
and bohemianism. Born Theresa Kline on Easter in 1920, she grew up
in Atlantic City, where her family owned a small department store.
She and her brother, Nathan S. Kline (author of "From Sad to
Glad," about depression), lived in a house full of art, books
and music, with parents who wanted their children to be aware of people
different from themselves.
Mrs. Dintenfass attended finishing school in Virginia and studied
art on and off for years, mostly at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art
in Philadelphia. In 1938 she married a surgeon, Arthur Dintenfass,
and had three children; after World War II they settled in Atlantic
City, where she ran her husband's medical office for several years.
Using a small trust fund, Mrs. Dintenfass began buying one painting
every year, often from the Whitney Museum of American Art's annual
exhibitions of painting and sculpture.
Her first galleries, called D Contemporary Gallery, were in Atlantic
City hotels. She showed work on consignment from prominent New York
dealers, and became especially close to Edith Gregor Halpert, whose
Downtown Gallery represented several artists from the Alfred Stieglitz
circle. She also sold the work of Milton Avery.
In 1959 she opened a gallery in a garden apartment at 18 East 67th
St. in Manhattan, where she also lived for several years. In 1975
she moved her gallery to a large space in Manhattan, at 50 West 57th
St., and retired in 1999. Her business is now run by her son Andrew.
Mrs. Dintenfass' first marriage and a brief second one ended in divorce.
In 1976 she married James M. Reed, a career diplomat who also worked
for the American Friends Service Committee. Reed died in 1985. In
addition to Andrew, of Pacific Palisades, Mrs. Dintenfass is survived
by two other children from her first marriage, Dr. John Dintenfass
of Manhattan and Susan Subtle Dintenfass of Berkeley; and three grandchildren.
