140+
Institutional collections holding works sold by the gallery, including MoMA, the Whitney, the Met, and the Smithsonian.
Est. 1960 · Madison Avenue · New York
A six-decade program in American modernism, conducted by appointment on Madison Avenue.
Viewing is by appointment. We maintain a quiet viewing room at 50 West 57th Street and welcome institutional curators, estate representatives, and established collectors by prior arrangement.
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Founder · 1960–1994
Terry Dintenfass, one of the earliest female gallerists on Madison Avenue.
Terry Dintenfass opened the gallery in 1960 at 53 East 80th Street, at a moment when the women operating commercial programs on Madison Avenue could be counted on a single hand. Over the next three decades she built a roster that included Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Hans Hofmann, Ralston Crawford, and Vaclav Vytlacil, and placed works from that program into the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and dozens of other institutions. A 1988 New York Times feature titled The Quiet Force on 57th Street profiled her practice of refusing to advertise and of treating every transaction as a long correspondence.
Her daughter, Catherine Dintenfass, joined the program in 1989 and has directed the secondary-market program since 1996. The continuity is deliberate: the gallery's address has moved twice, but its editorial line — American modernism of the first half of the twentieth century, treated with scholarly seriousness — has not.
Three addresses · One continuous program
The gallery's physical migration across Madison Avenue, chapter by chapter.
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1960
53 East 80th Street
Upper East Side · 1960–1975
The founding location, a townhouse gallery near the Whitney Museum's earlier Madison Avenue home. Terry Dintenfass opens with a solo exhibition of Ralston Crawford and admits 11 works from her first season into institutional collections.
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1976
29 West 57th Street
Midtown · 1976–1996
The move south to the established 57th Street gallery corridor. Admitted to the Art Dealers Association of America in 1962, the program expands its representation of estates, including Hans Hofmann following the artist's death in 1966.
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1997
50 West 57th Street
Midtown · 1997–present
A 4,200 square-foot, purpose-built exhibition space designed by the late architect Peter Blake. Catherine Dintenfass formally assumes direction of the secondary-market program here in the same year. Viewing remains by appointment only.
By the numbers
Institutional facts, not marketing figures.
220+
Solo exhibitions hosted between 1960 and 2015, drawn from the gallery's inventory and estate programs.
1962
Year of admission to the Art Dealers Association of America — one of fewer than 180 member galleries nationwide.
4,800+
Files of correspondence with collectors, acquired by the Archives of American Art (Smithsonian Institution) in 2018.
Scholarly credential · 2018
The gallery archive at the Archives of American Art.
In 2018, the gallery's correspondence archive — comprising more than 4,800 letters, consignment files, exhibition records, and photographic plates documenting sixty years of transactions with American collectors — was acquired by the Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution's specialized repository for the history of American art. The collection is open to qualified researchers by appointment at the Archives' New York research center and is indexed in the Smithsonian's online finding aid. For curators and estate representatives preparing provenance research, the archive provides documentation that is unavailable through any commercial record.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution · Terry Dintenfass Gallery Records, circa 1960–2015.
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In a corridor better known for its loud rooms and louder prices, Mrs. Dintenfass has for nearly thirty years conducted a quiet program in American modernism, with a clientele that includes every major museum on the Eastern Seaboard and very little fanfare.