Jim Dine
American, born 1935
Dine moved to New York in 1959 and soon became a pioneer creator of 'Happenings' together with Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Whitman. He exhibited at the Judson Gallery, New York, in 1958 and 1959, and his first solo show took place at the Reuben Gallery, New York, in 1960.
Dine is closely associated with the development of Pop Art in the early 1960s. Frequently he affixed everyday objects, such as tools, rope, shoes, neckties, and other articles of clothing, and even a bathroom sink, to his canvases. Characteristically, these objects were Dine's personal possessions. This autobiographical content was evident in Dine's early works and appeared as well in subsequent recurrent themes and images, such as the Palettes, Hearts (homage to his wife, Nancy), and Bathrobe Self-Portraits.
Jim Dine first used the image of a man's bathrobe, with the man airbrushed out of it, to create a self-portrait in 1964. Working from that same ad clipped out of The New York Times, he has repeated the theme of himself as an unseen figure in a robe ever since. "The ad shows a robe," said Dine," it somehow looked like me, and I thought I'd make that a symbol for me."
In 1976 Dine produced a series of large-scale paintings and original prints of "invisible men" in monumental bathrobes. The works reflect his new attention to drawing and painterly techniques to achieve a quieter, more romantic and sensual effect. Dine has noted that "the robes have become much more mysterious than they used to be and that's because I understand them more." Dine has also made a number of three-dimensional works and environments, and is well-known for his drawings and graphic prints. He has written and illustrated several books of poetry.
In 1965, Dine was a guest lecturer at Yale University, New Haven, and artist-in-residence at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. He was a visiting artist at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1967. From 1967 to 1971, he and his family lived in London.
Dine has been given solo shows in museums in Europe and the United States. In 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a major retrospective of his work, and in 1978 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented a retrospective of his etchings. Dine lives in New York and Vermont.
Quote:
"I have come to terms with a lot of things, because, when all's said and done, there's really very little one can do about a lot of things. You just accept them. The point is you just have to keep on working and you just have to keep on living."
Select Museum Collections:
Guggenheim Museum, New York
The British Museum, London
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO
Baltimore Museum of Art, MD
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Born in 1935 at Cincinnati, Ohio. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and at the Boston School of Fine and Applied Arts in Boston, Massachusetts from 1953 to 1957. In 1957 he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Ohio University, Athens. He moved to New York in 1959. He staged his first Happenings with Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow at the Judson Gallery, New York. He had his first one- man exhibition at the Reuben Gallery, New York. Between 1960 and 1965 he had various guest professorships, among others at Yale University, New Haven, and Oberlin College, Ohio. He was represented at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and at the documents "4" in Kassel in 1968.
From the early 1970s Dine's oil paintings, prints (perhaps his most successful work, usually sensitive and simple depictions of tools, robes, etc.) and drawings became increasingly figurative. In 1957 he received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Ohio University. After graduation, he moved to New York City and became involved with Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein whose work moved away from abstract expressionism toward pop art.
Dine incorporated images of everyday objects in his art, but he diverged from the coldness and impersonal nature of pop art by making works that fused personal passions and everyday experiences. His repeated use of familiar and personally significant objects, such as a robe, hands, tools, and hearts, is a signature of his art. In his early work, Dine created mostly assemblages in which he attached actual objects to his painted canvases. From 1959 to 1960, Dine also was a pioneer of happenings, works of art that took the form of theatrical events or demonstrations.
In 1967 Dine and his family moved to London, England, where he devoted his energies to printmaking and drawing. Dine's attention turned to sculptural work in the early 1980s when he created sculptures based on the sculpture Venus de Milo.
His recent art uses imagery borrowed from ancient Greek, Egyptian, and African objects. In his paintings, drawings, sculptures, graphics, collages and assemblages he combined different techniques with handwritten texts and words and set real everyday objects against undefined backgrounds. The objects were both commonplace and personal, both poetic and ironic, reflecting his feelings about life. His constantly varied bathrobe, transparent to the gaze of the world, was a kind of metaphor for a self-portrait.
Person TypeIndividual
