Jim Dine

Jim Dine is an American artist. Dine's work includes painting, drawing, printmaking (in many forms including lithographs, etchings, gravure, intaglio, woodcuts, letterpress and linocuts), sculpture and photography; his early works encompassed assemblage and happenings, while in recent years his poetry output, both in publications and readings, has increased.

Dine has been associated with many art movements including Neo-Dada (use of collage and found objects), Abstract Expressionism (the gestural nature of his painting), and Pop Art (affixing everyday objects including tools, rope, articles of clothing and even a bathroom sink) to his canvases, yet he has avoided such classifications. At the core of his art, regardless of the medium of the specific work, lies an intense autobiographical reflection, a relentless exploration and criticism of self through a number of personal motifs including: the heart, the bathrobe, tools, antique sculpture, and the character of Pinocchio (among flora, skulls, birds and figurative self-portraits). Dine's approach is all-encompassing: "Dine's art has a stream of consciousness quality to its evolution, and is based on all aspects of his life-what he is reading, objects he comes upon in souvenir shops around the world, a serious study of art from every time and place that he understands as being useful to his own practice."

Dine has had more than 300 solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1970), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1984-85), Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan (2011) and Museum Folkwang, Essen (2015-16). His work is in permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Dine's distinctions include nomination to Academy of Arts and Letters in New York (1980), Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003), the British Museum Medal (2015) following his donation of 234 prints to the museum in 2014, membership of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (2017), and Chevalier de l'Ordre de la Légion d'Honneur (2018).

In 1958 Dine moved to New York, where he taught at the Rhodes School. In the same year he founded the Judson Gallery at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village with Claes Oldenburg and Marcus Ratliff, eventually meeting Allan Kaprow and Bob Whitman: together they became pioneers of happenings and performances, including Dine's The Smiling Workman of 1959. Dine's first exhibition was at the Reuben Gallery, where he also staged the elaborate performance Car Crash (1960), which he describes as "a cacophony of sounds and words spoken by a great white Venus with animal grunts and howls by me." Another important early work was The House (1960), an environment incorporating found objects and street debris, installed at the Judson Gallery.

Dine continued to include everyday items (including personal possessions) in his work, which linked him to Pop Art-an affinity strengthened by his inclusion in the influential 1962 exhibition "New Painting of Common Objects" at the Pasadena Art Museum, curated by Walter Hopps and later cited as the first institutional survey of American Pop Art, including works by Robert Dowd, Joe Goode, Phillip Hefferton, Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud and Andy Warhol. Dine has, however, consistently distanced himself from Pop Art: "I'm not a Pop artist. I'm not part of the movement because I'm too subjective. Pop is concerned with exteriors. I'm concerned with interiors. When I use objects, I see them as a vocabulary of feelings. […] What I try to do in my work is explore myself in physical terms-to explain something in terms of my own sensibilities."

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024