Sari Dienes, 93, Artist Devoted To the Value of the Found Object By ROBERTA SMITH Published: May 28, 1992

Sari Dienes, an artist whose career spanned many different media and several decades of the New York art world, died on Monday at her home in Stony Point, N.Y. She was 93 years old.

She died of cancer, said Rip Hayman, a friend and the curator of the Sari Dienes Foundation.

Mrs. Dienes, whose original name was Chylinska von Daivitz, was born in Hungary in 1898 and in her youth studied dance, music and philosophy. She was married at the age of 19 to a French mathematician, Paul Dienes, and she did not decide to become an artist until she was 29 and living in Wales with her husband. Over the next decade, she studied art in Paris and London with Ferdinand Leger, Andre Lhote and Henry Moore. Stranded in New York at the outbreak of World War II, she made the city her home, supporting herself by teaching art. 'Nothing Is So Humble'

As an artist, Mrs. Dienes had an innately experimental approach to materials and techniques and a lasting faith in the power of the found object. "Bones, lint, Styrofoam, banana skins, the squishes and squashes found on the street: nothing is so humble that it cannot be made into art," she once said, and her work tended to prove her right.

During her career she made elaborate rubbings of American Indian petroglyphs and New York City manhole covers, created assemblages out of bones and sundry other materials, painted Abstract Expressionist drip paintings and turned her studio- house in Stony Point, in Rockland County, into a walk-in art environment. When her 57th Street studio burned in 1957, Mrs. Dienes spent two years in Japan studying with a master potter, and thereafter added ceramics to her repertory.

Throughout her career, Mrs. Dienes was a more or less visible fixture on the postwar New York art scene, distinguished in later years by her round, beatific face and halo of frizzy white hair. In the 1950's she exhibited at the Gallery, a prominent showplace for the Abstract Expressionists, but her work was more in the neo-Dada spirit of younger artists like and and the composer , who were her friends. Influence of Encouragement

In a short reminiscence that appears in a catalogue for an exhibition of Mrs. Dienes's work that is touring Europe, the art dealer Leo Castelli says that in the 1950's, Mrs. Dienes "was very encouraging to the younger artists and gave their new work her seal of approval."

"In this way she exerted a real influence," he adds.

He also notes that Mrs. Dienes gave Mr. Rauschenberg the large stuffed eagle he used in "Canyon," one of his most famous combine paintings.

In the early 1970's, Mrs. Dienes became an early member of A.I.R., the first women's cooperative art gallery in the United States. Her most recent exhibition at A.I.R., a retrospective that closed last month, included a number of Styrofoam prints and paintings that the artist made in the 1980's. In her later years she was also the principal owner of the Ear Inn, a bar on Spring Street west of SoHo known for its new music and performance programs.

Mrs. Dienes's husband died in London in 1955. There are no immediate survivors.