NEW YORK, NY.- Anton van Dalen — a socially conscious artist, dedicated pigeon keeper and longtime assistant to illustrator Saul Steinberg — lived on the Lower East Side for more than 50 years, documenting the neighborhood’s evolution from dereliction to gentrification in paintings, drawings and sculptures.

His best-known work was, perhaps, a performance piece called “Avenue A Cut-Out Theater,” a 3-foot-tall cardboard model of his town house at 166 Ave. A. He filled it with hand-painted and photographed cutouts of police officers in riot gear, junkies, homeless people, sex workers, hawks, pigeons and dogs, as well as a burned-out car, churches, temples and community gardens.

At performances, often for students at his home studio, he reached inside the model, removed the cutouts and laid them on a table and on the floor. He told the story of a neglected part of the city that reminded him of a war zone — like his native Holland during World War II — when he moved there in the late 1960s and how it turned into an enclave of wealthy residential and commercial developers.

Describing a performance by van Dalen in 2015, critic David Frankel wrote in Artforum: “The box also gave him something of the quality of the old-time itinerant musician or carny with a hurdy-gurdy or box of puppets on his back — in other words, someone unfixed and mobile, making a self-contained kind of art that he can produce easily wherever he goes.”

“It was magical, like seeing Calder’s Circus,” said Wendy Olsoff — a founder of the PPOW Gallery in Manhattan, referring to the troupe of miniature circus performers and animals that sculptor Alexander Calder created and performed with. The gallery has hosted three solo exhibitions of van Dalen’s work.

Van Dalen (pronounced van DAH-len) — whose art bears the influences of surrealism, graphic art, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Hieronymus Bosch and M.C. Escher — painted and drew many works based on his local environment, including “The War Comes Home,” a stylized depiction of an invading tank and warplane, and the black and gray “Avenue B Tableau With Junkie,” in which a man shoots up in a car stripped of its tires, doors and windows.

“From my studio, I could hear the constant noise of fire trucks,” he told online art magazine Hyperallergic in 2016. “There were a lot of empty buildings and fires. It was suddenly as if I was in World War II, except it wasn’t Holland, it was here. It was like I was living in a German occupied community again. I saw it in the abandoned buildings, the fires, the stabbings, people openly shooting up heroin, cops and firemen being very brutal to the community.”

Even as van Dalen was building his reputation as a chronicler of the Lower East Side, he was working for Steinberg, an influential artist and cartoonist for The New Yorker. Van Dalen became aware of Steinberg’s drawings while in Holland.

For 30 years, van Dalen spent nearly every Wednesday in Steinberg’s studio on Union Square West, and later, at his apartment on East 75th Street, doing “the little things that were difficult for him to do,” including repairs, wiring, making calls to framers and photographing buildings, he told The New York Times in 2004. And van Dalen stayed quiet publicly about his connection to Steinberg, who was notoriously private.

“Steinberg was this bright sun,” van Dalen told the Times that year, when he was curating an exhibition, at the School of Visual Arts, of the drawings, postcards, postcards, collages, clocks and tables that Steinberg had given him. “He could warm you. But if you got too close, he would burn you. I was like his shadow.”

Van Dalen died June 25 at his home. He was 85.

His daughter, Marinda van Dalen, said the cause was septic shock.

Van Dalen was born July 13, 1938, in Amstelveen, the Netherlands, near Amsterdam, one of three children of Calvinist parents. His father, Arie, was an elementary schoolteacher and principal; his mother was Martina (Zwart) van Dalen.

Anton was not yet 2 years old when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940. During the war, the van Dalens’ house was seized and they were forced to move into another house that had been confiscated from a Jewish family. He recalled having nightmares about a warplane crashing into the bomb shelter in his schoolyard.

Anton, who graduated from a vocational art school in Amsterdam, lived in the expropriated house until he, his parents, his brother and his sister immigrated to Toronto in 1954. At 16, he was hired as a graphic artist at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., designing television program advertisements. He later worked for Saturday Night, a Canadian magazine.

He moved to Brooklyn in 1966, then to the Lower East Side two years later. In 1971, he and another buyer acquired the two-family house on Avenue A, where his studio was on the fourth floor.

By then he had begun working for Steinberg after cold-calling him in 1968 and was told to call back in a year. When he did, Steinberg invited him to his studio.

“He said, ‘Come over right now,’ and I did and I brought my drawings with me,” he said in “Anton: Circling Home” (2020), a documentary directed by Dennis Mohr, Morgan Schmidt-Feng and Katy Swailes. “He said, ‘they were very good — they have obsessions.’ I just started talking with him and almost immediately, he said, ‘I need someone to work in my studio. Do you know anybody?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that would be me.’”

Van Dalen said that he kept his relationship with Steinberg from everyone but family and close friends, as a survival tactic.

“I was self-conscious that people might think that either I was shaped by him or advantaged through him — I would not allow either,” he told Steven Heller, a former senior art director of the Times who teaches at the School of Visual Arts, in an interview for the catalog of the Steinberg exhibition that van Dalen curated in 2004.

Van Dalen taught life drawing at SVA for many years, bringing to class chickens and rabbits from his menagerie of pets.

“Then he’d arrange for the human nudes,” said Marinda van Dalen, his daughter.

In addition to his daughter, van Dalen is survived by a son, Jason; three grandchildren; and a brother, Leen. His wife, Rebecca Mays Owen, a psychologist, died in 2002. He credited her with opening his eyes to the social problems on the Lower East Side through her work as a city welfare caseworker.

Van Dalen was also known for keeping white pigeons in his rooftop coop, a hobby that he started at age 12. The birds represented migration, freedom and peace to him, and he depicted them in his art.

In his painting, “Self-Portrait with Pigeon Coop Looking South” (2014), van Dalen stands on a ladder and releases the birds, who take flight toward the World Trade Center. And, as cars move on Avenue A, van Dalen appears in another spot on the canvas, on East 10th Street, his cutout theater strapped to his back. In a companion painting, the pigeons come home.

Last year, he gave up the coop and the birds because of safety concerns.

“But once it was gone,” his daughter said, “he developed a flock of wild pigeons that he fed on the roof.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.