Jim Dine

Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents were second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe and practicing Jews, an identity which influenced his artistic career. 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.

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 BFA in 1957. In the same year, he married Nancy Minto, and in 1958 the couple moved to New York.

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. One of the aims of the “Happening” was to break from the ubiquitous Abstract Expressionist style, as championed by the art world.

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.

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.

Jim Dine’s legacy extends to multiple styles and artistic media. His main influence can be found in the emergence of performance art, which sprung up following the Happenings in New York. These influenced movements such as Fluxus and Neo-Dada, with artists such as Joseph Beuys and Yoko Ono building on the avant-garde ideas expressed in these early New York Happenings.