Simon and Simone Dinnerstein — Art, Place and Imagination in Nocturne
Painter Simon Dinnerstein and pianist daughter Simone discuss his 1982 Brooklyn painting Nocturne, exploring memory, immigrant longing, and place as inspiration.
Why we picked this
A father-daughter conversation between a painter and a pianist about one painting that captures sixty years of Brooklyn life — the evening concludes with a guided viewing of the work on its final exhibition day.
Simon Dinnerstein’s Nocturne, completed in 1982, depicts a Polish immigrant standing at a window and looking out at a row of Brooklyn brownstones at night. It is a painting about displacement and belonging — about what it means to look at a place and feel its weight as both home and elsewhere simultaneously. Dinnerstein, who has spent much of his career in Brooklyn, built the work out of close observation of a specific street corner, but the painting resonates far beyond its address. It has the quality of work that manages to be about one particular moment and about something much larger at the same time.
This evening at the Center for Brooklyn History pairs Simon with his daughter Simone Dinnerstein, a concert pianist with her own significant career — her 2007 debut recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was widely noted for its restraint and emotional clarity. The father-daughter conversation has its own resonance: two artists working in different forms, both shaped in part by the same family history and the same borough, exploring how a single painting becomes a container for memory and immigrant longing across generations.
The talk concludes with a guided viewing of Nocturne in the gallery — March 30 is the final day of the work’s exhibition at the Center for Brooklyn History. Seeing the painting on its last day of public display, in the company of the artist and his daughter, gives the evening a finality that feels appropriate to the painting’s own themes of impermanence and attachment to place.