Guardians of the Temple

Simon Dinnerstein reflects on The Fulbright Triptych 50 years later.

- MICHAEL PEARCE

The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University reopened June 1, in new buildings that doubled the size of the existing exhibit space. Along with collections including African and Asian art, studio ceramics and glass, in its American holdings the museum boasts some intriguing paintings. Thomas Hart Benton's Shallow Creek is an uncanny landscape of the strangeness and alienation of a riverside, and Georgia O'Keeffe's Lake George enters a blue landscape, finding the sweep of wind and wave blown over wide water. Richard Diebenkorn's Man and Woman, Seated, divides the space around a conferring couple in bright color and gray, hanging somewhere between conspiratorial figuration, and the composition and experiment of modernism. But, while these paintings are interesting, doubtlessly the most immediate, intriguing and intellectually challenging star of the collection is Simon Dinnerstein's The Fulbright Triptych, which haunts the visual lexicon of 20th century American representational art. Fifty years have slipped into the past since Dinnerstein completed the painting in 1974-enough time for two generations to be born.