RENO, NEV.- Simon Dinnerstein’s tour de force The Fulbright Triptych makes its West Coast debut in a traveling exhibition this summer. The Lasting World: Simon Dinnerstein and The Fulbright Triptych presents the noted New York artist’s rarely seen magnum opus, and several works that illustrate the breadth of his five-decade career. The exhibition explores Dinnerstein’s creative arc from early, hyperrealist works to introspective and fantastical later works. Organized by the Museum of Art & Archaeology, University of Missouri, in collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art, The Lasting World launched an American tour in July 2017. It will make its way to the Nevada Museum of Art later this summer, where it will be on view July 21, 2018 through January 6, 2019.

The Lasting World’s centerpiece is The Fulbright Triptych, a monumental three-part work measuring 14-feet across that Roberta Smith, The New York Times art critic once described as “a crackling, obsessive showboat of a painting, dreamed up during a decade when the medium supposedly teetered on the brink of death.” The visually complex Triptych is part autobiographical essay, part homage to Renaissance artists and their craft, part reflection on the historical legacies of the twentieth century, and part mediation on the power of images to inspire across time and place.

Dinnerstein began working on the Triptych in 1971 when he was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany; he completed the painting in his Brooklyn studio in 1974. Nearly life-size portraits of the artist and his wife Renée holding their infant daughter Simone on her lap flank windows with views of the German neighborhood where they lived, a table covered with printmaking tools, and on the wall behind it, numerous postcards of masterpieces by van Eyck, Vermeer, Holbein, Degas, Seurat, and Donatello.

In addition to The Fulbright Triptych, the exhibition includes several examples of Dinnerstein’s subtly evocative drawings and paintings from the artist’s five-decade career, works which continually interrogate the role of art in lived human experience.