Jim Dine was an American painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and poet who emerged during the Pop art period as an innovative creator of works that combine the painted canvas with ordinary objects of daily life. His persistent themes included those of personal identity, memory, and the body.
Background
Jim Dine was born on June 16, 1935, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents were second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe and practicing Jews, an identity which influenced his artistic career. He later claimed he was "raised in a family of ironmongers and the tools were always around me." His family owned a hardware store, where he gained a deep interest in the power of ordinary objects. He was particularly fascinated by the "metaphorical" or "mythic" quality of the tools of iron-working; they would inspire his works of the early 1960s, where he attached tools to canvases creating combinations of found object and pictorial image. Dine's mother died when he was 12 years old, and as a result, as he says, "I took care of myself."
Education
Jim Dine attended Walnut Hills High School before going to the University of Cincinnati. From 1953, Dine attended evening classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where he studied with Paul Chidlaw, a well-known Abstract Expressionist painter. This was a style Dine would eventually reject, although his painterly training would impact his later work. He attended Ohio University, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1957.
It was in New York that Dine became involved with other important artists, including Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, and John Cage. Together, they staged "Happenings", chaotic performances that took place around the city (but mostly downtown, away from the areas traditionally associated with art museums and galleries). One of the aims of the "Happening" was to break from the ubiquitous Abstract Expressionist style, as championed by the art world.
Dine met Oldenburg soon after arriving in New York, and the pair became good friends. Dine recalls that they were introduced by a friend who had an art space in the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. Their conversations led to the founding of Judson Gallery, which Dine and several friends opened in a Greenwich Village basement in 1959. The short-lived gallery showed important experimental work as an antidote to the supremacy of abstract expressionism on the Upper East Side before closing in 1961.
In 1962, Walter Hopps asked Dine to provide work for his ground-breaking show, "New Paintings of Common Objects." Generally credited with being the first exhibition of Pop art in the United States, Dine's paintings were shown alongside works by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha. This exhibition secured Dine's reputation and his place in a new art movement, however, Dine never saw himself as a Pop artist. Instead, he thought of himself as continuing the legacy of artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
By the mid-1960s, Dine was well-known on an international scale. In 1966, Robert Fraser staged an exhibition of Dine's work at his gallery in London, but police raided the exhibition and twenty of Dine's works were seized and confiscated; Fraser was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. The court eventually determined that Dine's drawings weren't "obscene" but they were "indecent", labeling them "crudely offensive and disgusting."
Fraser was heavily fined for exhibiting them. The next year, Dine made the decision to move to London with his wife and three young sons, where Fraser continued to represent him and he befriended artists such as R.B. Kitaj. Although Dine only lived in London for four years, his love of the city endured throughout his life, and he gifted 234 prints to the British Museum.
Returning to America in 1971, Dine chose to focus on his drawing, making an effort to hone his technique and achieve a quieter, more nuanced style. A talented draftsman, he completed many self-portraits and portraits of his wife Nancy. During these years, he also developed a series of visual motifs which would crop up again and again in his works, including hearts, bath robes, and painters' palettes.
In the 1980s Dine also began to experiment with sculpture as a medium. In particular, he created a series of large-scale heart shaped sculptures for a range of different outdoor locations. Many of his sculptures made use of saws and blow-torches to create his works in an almost heavy-handed style reminiscent of the techniques of workmen, connecting these three-dimensional works to his lifelong fascination with workers and their tools.
In contrast to his earlier conceptual and Pop-style painting, much of Dine's latest production has been photographic. Dine contends that photography held a power he hadn't found in other media. Dine has also developed new autobiographical iconography, pulling from his childhood to explore the character Pinocchio and a lifelong fascination with birds. Dine continues to travel extensively, often creating temporary studios in other cities when he's working on particular projects or preparing for exhibitions.
Dine is inspired by the power of simple images to be both familiar and symbolic. His repetitions of tools, bathrobes, or hearts are easily understood by the viewer, while also suggesting deeper layers of meaning. He often works with subjects and images from his childhood, giving his work both a sense of innocence and shared nostalgia.
As Conceptual art was emerging, Dine's use of iconic forms and repeated symbols attempted to understand how images create meaning. By singling out simple shapes and objects, and depicting them over and over, Dine suggests that they are important subjects for artistic study.
Building on Marcel Duchamp's readymade sculptures, these ordinary objects take on a new, important, meaning solely because they were chosen by the artist and repeatedly studied. Isolating them and framing them in a gallery or museum space, Dine declares them worthy subjects to be celebrated in art, transforming them into something significant. Dine's work in this conceptual vein transforms Duchamp's skeptical gesture into part of a sincere investigation on how the artistic process elevates the ordinary.
Undergoing psychoanalysis in 1962, Dine was very interested in his own mentality, exploring the realms of memories and identity.
Quotations:
“I grew up with tools. I came from a family of people who sold tools, and I’ve always been enchanted by these objects made by anonymous hands.”
Membership
In 1983, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994.
Personality
Being dyslexic, he found reading difficult, but found poetry easier than novels. He has consequently been a lover of poetry, and a poet himself, ever since.
Interests
Artists
Edward Hopper
Connections
In 1957 Jim married Nancy Minto, and in 1958 the couple moved to New York. In 2005, Dine married Diana Michener, who had been his partner since the early 1990s. The couple lives in Walla Walla, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains in Washington, where Dine maintains several studios. They also have a home in the West Village in New York.