Anton van Dalen, whose art examined an evolving neighborhood, dies

He was 85

NEW YORK — Anton van Dalen — a socially conscious artist, dedicated pigeon keeper and longtime assistant to illustrator Saul Steinberg — lived on the Lower East Side for more than 50 years, documenting the neighborhood’s evolution from dereliction to gentrification in paintings, drawings and sculptures.

His best-known work was, perhaps, a performance piece called “Avenue A Cut-Out Theater,” a 3-foot-tall cardboard model of his town house at 166 Ave. A. He filled it with handpainted and photographed cutouts of police officers in riot gear, junkies, homeless people, sex workers, hawks, pigeons and dogs, as well as a burnedout car, churches, temples and community gardens.

At performances, often for students at his home studio, he reached inside the model, removed the cutouts and laid them on a table and on the floor.

He told the story of a neglected part of the city that reminded him of a war zone — like his native Holland during World War II — when he moved there in the late 1960s and how it turned into an enclave of wealthy residential and commercial developers.

Describing a performance by van Dalen in 2015, critic David Frankel wrote in Artforum: “The box also gave him something of the quality of the oldtime itinerant musician or carny with a hurdy-gurdy or box of puppets on his back — in other words, someone unfixed and mobile, making a self-contained kind of art that he can produce easily wherever he goes.”

“It was magical, like seeing Calder’s Circus,” said Wendy Olsoff — a founder of the PPOW Gallery in Manhattan, referring to the troupe of miniature circus performers and animals that sculptor Alexander Calder created and performed with. The gallery has hosted three solo exhibitions of van Dalen’s work.

Van Dalen (pronounced van DAH-len) — whose art bears the influences of surrealism, graphic art, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Hieronymus Bosch and M.C. Escher — painted and drew many works based on his local environment, including “The War Comes Home,” a stylized depiction of an invading tank and warplane, and the black and gray “Avenue B Tableau With Junkie,” in which a man shoots up in a car stripped of its tires, doors and windows.

“From my studio, I could hear the constant noise of fire trucks,” he told online art mag