Walter Lee Dinteman "Cats"

Walter Lee DINTEMAN CATS: 2006-2009


Walter Lee Dinteman was an American (b. 1922) art teacher, photographer, and writer living in Denmark until his death in April 2009. Walter explored various mediums for his creations including oil painting, water color, acrylics, collages. During the last three years of his life he worked with polychrome wax-oil pencils to create drawings, mostly on heavy A4 size paper. The latter form a body of work of 200+ drawings, mostly of nudes and cats. These are included in a trilogy of three art books which he called the “Naughty Cat.”

Walter’s unique work achieves a richness and variety of color through mixing and shading on paper. His drawings range from a spare, “Picasso-esque” style that leant his son, Walter Anthony Dinteman (b. 1945) to think of haiku captions for that series of drawings conceived as an art book entitled Bawdy Cat.

A more elaborate and detailed style appears in a second book with much inspiration coming from 17th and 18th Century lithographs, especially satirical ones. One can see the influence of artists such as Hogarth. That series, entitled Ribald Cats, forthcoming in book form, has captions in limerick style, also by Walter A. Dinteman.

In a third series, Erotic Cat, Walter’s style turned to the surreal. The images are sometimes dreamlike; some more like nightmares, and, in any case, defy a short caption. Here Walter Lee was influenced by Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali.

The three books are a various stages in pre-publication form. They may be ordered now. Publication is anticipated early in 2010.

A fourth group of drawings, made in 2009 shortly before his death, Walter created a dozen “cat portraits.” These have been among his most popular works especially in greeting card format.

All of Walter Lee Dinteman’s work is for sale including original work, framed or unframed, and as prints and greeting cards. If the piece you want is not already available in print, you may place an order that will be directly shipped to you.

The Art of Walter Lee Dinteman

Walter Lee Dinteman

Born Walter Lee Barringer August 26, 1922 in Falling Waters, West Virginia, Walter was adopted by his mother’s 2nd husband James Dinteman when he was eight. Walter attended local schools including a technical high school where he learned drafting. He worked summers in the Fairchild Aircraft Company, attended Potomac State College and West Virginia University majoring in art education. He enlisted in the US Army Air Corps and was trained as a B-24 bomber pilot. In the late fall of 1944 he flew his plane, later called Miss Behavin’ to Cerignola, Italy. From there he flew many missions over enemy territory in Romania, Austria, and Germany until the end of the war in Europe. He earned an Air Medal for his service. He returned from Europe just a day before his first son, Walter Anthony Dinteman, was born on July 6, 1945.

Following WWII he had various high school and art school positions and earned a Masters Degree in fine art from NYU. During the Korean War he had a position teaching art to GI’s at a base in Japan. Later he worked as an Art Director at AVCO Corporation in Boston and had a position in advertising and public relations for the Port Authority of New York. As a professional photographer, Walter Lee Dinteman, won various prizes and exhibited in many East Coast photography shows. His photographic book on the Eastern Pennsylvania coal region called Anthracite Ghosts was published by Scranton University Press.

In the late 1960’s, Walter returned to the classroom where he taught photography and the new art of videography at several community colleges in New York and New Jersey. After retiring from classroom teaching, Walter took a job in Egypt for four years where he made training films for the Egyptian textile industry. That experience led to another assignment in the Sultanate of Oman where he ran a very large video education department at Sultan Qaboos University. It was in Oman that Walter met, and later married, Charlotte Munck Dinteman of Nykobing, Denmark. His colorful photographic history of Oman called Forts of Oman was the centerpiece of an exhibit at the Arab Institute in Paris in the mid 1990’s.

In his later retirement years, Walter wrote many short stories and made hundreds of wax pencil drawings at his home in Stege, Denmark. His paintings drawings of the quaint village continue to be exhibited in several art gallies on the Island of Mon. In the past three years he produced fifty drawings in a series entitled Bawdy Cat for which his son composed haiku captions. He also collaborated with Walter Anthony Dinteman on a second volume of more than fifty drawings called the Ribald Cat . In that series, Walter Anthony composed limerick captions to fit the style of those drawings. In a third volume, again with fifty plus drawings, Walter Lee created Erotic Cat with themes so surrealistic they defied short captions. And then, in the last weeks before his death in April, 2009, Walter made a series of a dozen cat portraits. Long a lover of cats, Walter Lee was fascinated with their beauty and all manifestations of cat behavior.

The works presented at this exhibition are drawn from the three “Naughty Cat” books (2007-2009) and the cat portraits collection (2009).


--Walter Anthony Barringer Dinteman, 2009