Tag: jim dine

Jim Dine

Jim Dine, Eight Pieces from the “Robe” Series

Jim Dine had a great love for hs everyday objects, the things in which he lived and worked. Throughout his career Jim Dine incorporated common objects into his work that were meaningful in his own life–such as tools, bathrobes, and hearts. Through repetition over time, these objects take on meaning for the viewer as well as the artist. By creating a work that is based on his own favorite bathrobe, he is creating a very intimate self portrait of himself. In essence, who he is as a person and as an artist.

On guggenheim.org, Dine’s work is interpreted thusly, “Dine also began to address his identity and physicality through images of thickly painted palettes (or actual palettes affixed to canvases) and oversize color charts, which suggest the basic artifacts of his profession and the presence of the artist. Such references to the self became more direct in 1964 in a series of assemblages featuring images of men’s suits and in another series based on an illustration of a bathrobe that Dine saw in a newspaper advertisement.”

Jim Dine

Tool Series: Etchings by Jim Dine

Jim Dine’s work has been the subject of major surveys and retrospectives in venues spanning the globe, and he is represented in museum collections worldwide. While others have often associated his work with the Pop Art movement of the mid-20th century, his fascination with popular imagery and everyday objects has always carried a more personal component.

Dine has extensively explored particular themes in a variety of media throughout his career, such as the universal symbol of the heart and images of tools. These themes have acquired the status of personal iconography and he claims them as part of his vocabulary or his “glossary of terms.”

Jim Dine believes that tools provide a ‘link with our past, the human past, the hand’. They feature in many of his works, and can be seen as a symbol of artistic creation. There is also an autobiographical resonance, as Dine’s family owned a hardware store in Cincinnati.

Jim Dine

Jim Dine, The “Pinocchio Paintings”

Forty years ago, Jim Dine acquired an effigy of Pinocchio that evoked in him some of the emotion he felt upon seeing the Walt Disney film as a child. The figure of the marionette that becomes a boy did not turn up in Dine’s own work until more than 30 years later, and in those paintings and drawings it was a stand-in for the artist himself, communicating some of Dine’s own youthful terror.