Dutch-born artist Anton van Dalen , who for more than fifty years chronicled New York’s East Village and its wild denizens, from people to pigeons—a particular passion—died at his home on June 25. He was eighty-six. His gallery, P.
P.O.W, confirmed that he died of natural causes.
Working in a Surrealistic style at a time when more experimental genres such as Minimalism and Conceptualism were in vogue, he captured the eclectic life forms and crumbling structures of his adopted neighborhood in works whose evident traces of humanity reflected the vibrant milieu of which he was an intrinsic part. “I consider myself a documentarian of the East Village, yet I am a participant and spectator to its evolution,” he told respected New York blog EV Grieve in 2020. “Began documenting my street surroundings in 1975, urged on by wanting to note and remember these lives.
Came to realize I had to embrace wholeheartedly, with pencil in hand, my streets with its raw emotions.” Anton van Dalen was born November 11, 1938, in Amstelveen, Netherlands, to a conservative Calvinist family. As a child, he witnessed the Nazi occupation: Its horrors would loom shadowlike decades later in the East Village, whose bang-bang street life of the 1970s he cast as “a replaying of my own war.
” After graduating from what was the Amsterdamse Grafische School (now Mediacollege Amsterdam) in 1954, he moved with his family to Toronto before settling in New York in 1966. In 1971, following a stint on R.
