Harvey Dinnerstein graduated from the High School of Music and Art and attended the Art Students League before enrolling in 1947 at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Returning to New York in the early fifties, he was one of a group of recent Tyler graduates who rebelled against the prevalent modernist and Abstract Expressionist styles by painting realistic pictures of still lifes and interiors that seemed deliberately unfashionable.
Throughout his long career, Dinnerstein’s pastels, paintings, and drawings documented what he called “the powerful visual language of this cultural legacy” in images that “combine aspects of naturalism, or incidental observation, with classical elements of form and structure.”
Dinnerstein was on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1965 to 1980, while also teaching at the National Academy of Design from 1975 to 1992. In 1980 he moved to the Art Students League.
In 1998, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Dinnerstein’s numerous awards included Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grants, 1948 and 1961; Allied Artists Gold Medal, 1977; Audubon Artists President’s Award, 1978; and American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, 1974, 1978, 1987.
