Est. 1960 · Madison Avenue · New York
Sixty‑four years of placing landmark American modernism into the permanent collections of museums worldwide.
A discreet secondary‑market house and estate‑representation program, operating by appointment from a 4,200 square‑foot exhibition floor on West 57th Street.
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The Program
Six decades of museum‑grade scholarship, offered to a small number of serious collectors each year.
Since 1960 the Terry Dintenfass Gallery has placed landmark works by Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Hans Hofmann, Ralston Crawford, and Vaclav Vytlacil into the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and one hundred forty other institutions on three continents. Our program is built on the archival records of those placements — provenance correspondence, exhibition history, and lender documentation that travel with every work we offer.
We are not a primary‑market house. We do not maintain a roster of living artists, we do not list prices publicly, and we do not invite walk‑in browsing. Viewing is by appointment, with each enquiry answered personally by Catherine Dintenfass, who has directed the secondary‑market program since 1996.
- Institutional collections
- 140+
- Solo exhibitions hosted
- 220+
- Years on Madison Avenue
- 64
- Press features, lifetime
- 200+
A Director's Note
“The transaction is the smallest part of what we do. The work begins with provenance — reading the correspondence, tracing the exhibition history, confirming the lender records — and it ends only when a work finds the collection where it will be studied for another generation. Everything between is patience, scholarship, and discretion.”
Inventory
From the Inventory — Selected Works Currently Available
The following works are held in the gallery's secondary‑market inventory and are offered by appointment. Provenance, exhibition history, and lender documentation are available on request. Inquiries are answered personally by the director.
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No. 01
Milton Avery
Spring Sea, 1958
Provenance: Estate of the artist → private collection, Connecticut → Terry Dintenfass Gallery.
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No. 02
Hans Hofmann
Untitled (Red and Blue), 1962
Provenance: Estate of the artist (represented by the gallery since 1966).
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No. 03
Ralston Crawford
Steel and Sky, 1954
Provenance: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York → private collection, Pennsylvania → Terry Dintenfass Gallery.
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No. 04
Vaclav Vytlacil
Composition No. 27, 1947
Provenance: The artist → Sidney Janis Gallery, New York → private collection, New York.
Stewardship
Estates Represented — An Institutional Record
The gallery maintains long‑standing exclusive representation of four estates central to the canon of American modernism. Each relationship is documented in the gallery's archive, transferred to the Smithsonian Institution in 2018.
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N° I
The Estate of Hans Hofmann
Represented continuously since 1966.
The gallery has placed more than forty works from the Hofmann estate into museum collections, including acquisitions by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Catherine Dintenfass has served on the estate's authentication committee since 1996.
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N° II
The Estate of Ralston Crawford
Represented since 1972.
The Crawford estate's holdings trace the artist's progression from Precisionist industrial subjects to the lyrical abstractions of his late period. The gallery has organised eight solo exhibitions of estate works and maintains the definitive exhibition record.
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N° III
The Estate of Vaclav Vytlacil
Represented since 1968.
Vytlacil's role in transmitting Hans Hofmann's European modernism to a generation of American painters is now central to the historical literature. The gallery is the principal secondary‑market source for his work.
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N° IV
The Estate of Milton Avery
Principal secondary‑market representation.
Terry Dintenfass gave Avery his first major Madison Avenue exhibition in 1960, and the gallery has remained the principal secondary‑market venue for his work ever since. Avery paintings offered through the gallery have entered more than thirty institutional collections.