Be Bop

Miriam (Mimi) Dimondstein

In 1948 New York-born Miriam “Mimi” Dimondstein was living in Los Angeles, working in the Screen Cartoonists Guild and operating her own framing business. With the aim of providing affordable art to a public still recovering from the war, she and her husband, Morton, created lithographs and serigraphs that they would sell at the shop.

An avid music and dance enthusiast who had pursued both arts as a teenager in New York during the war, “Be Bop” was likely inspired by the burgeoning jazz style that had made its way to Los Angeles in the mid 1940s. Dimondstein captures the essence of the fast paced, artfully chaotic sound in a flurry of energetic lines and shapes, the arched body of the saxophonist taking the left-front of the stage, the drummer wielding his percussion brush as if in triumph.

Dimondstein teamed up with Los Angeles lithographic Master Printer Lynton Kistler to create this work, she drew directly on the stone and then went back and scraped the crayon to achieve the grays and light areas in the composition and define spaces on the surfaces of the figures.