Artists & Works

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO
PRINTMAKING

Jim Dine was known in the sixties as a participant in Happenings, but he had a classical art education from Ohio University and a true gift for freehand rendering. He made his debut in New York galleries in 1962, the same year as Pop artists Robert Indiana, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg. Although Dine did not consider himself a Pop artist, his success was rapid after his debut, and he soon was established as a lecturer, artist-in-residence, and visiting artist at many universities. He began to have major museum exhibitions of his work in the 1970s and these have continued, growing in size and renown ever since. Dine had written and illustrated several books of poetry.

Many of Dine’s sixties works appropriated mundane objects such as tools, sinks and other fixtures, and weathered pieces of wood. Late, he incorporated these works as painterly objects and in his printmaking. The use of tools in Dine’s work is more autobiographical than a reference to mass culture: both his father and grandfather owned hardware stores. Most of Dine’s imagery comes from autobiography and poetic reflection. Dine is as well-known for his drawings and prints as for his paintings; this print is a beautiful example of his tool series.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Henry Allen, The Washington Post, 3/21/04
"While presenting his evidence for the aesthetic significance of the tools, Dine also gets an essence you feel in your gut. He shows not only what the tools look like but also their psychic heft. Dine has compared them to bones or phallic symbols. That's how we learned to think in the 20th century, even to the point of psychoanalyzing our tool chests. However, there are also times when a hammer is just a hammer. Dine has said: 'The state of wanting to draw something, for me . . . is a way to capture it, and that's a primary emotion for me.'
Most of the work here derives from the years he spent in Vermont starting in the early '70s, drawing tools and committing the apostasy of doing old-fashioned figure drawing, nude after nude, line after line, day after day. Good God, would he next profane modernism by acting like a 19th-century student in an atelier, drawing from Greek statuary? Answer: yes, and the profanation accounts for about half the show."