Jim Dine

Born in 1935, Jim Dine grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio.  In his youth he spent time in his grandfather’s hardware store and attended various art schools before receiving his BFA from Ohio University in 1957.  In 1959 he moved to New York City and began showing his art at various galleries around the city. He was closely linked with the beginning of the Happenings movement and performed his famous Car Crash in New York in 1960. From there he moved away from performance and became more closely involved with the Pop Art movement.  Dine used many everyday items to create his art, attaching tools, rope, household appliances, and other objects that had some personal significance. 

The two pieces shown in A New Realist Supplement are among Dine’s earliest works, dating back to his time at Ohio University and lent to the exhibit by David Hostetler, one of Dine’s teachers.  In later years, Dine returned to the theme of self-portraits, first through the well-known bathrobe paintings (1964-present) and then through drawings of his face in the mirror (Albertina Museum).

In line with Pop Art’s focus on simple, well-known items rather than abstractions, Jim Dine wrote, “My paintings are involved with “objects”... the most effective picture of them to be not a transformation by abstraction or romantic distortion, but a straight smack right there attitude” (Dine, 1962)_. Dine’s pioneering role in Pop Art was his distortion of scale.  When he made his artwork, he allowed the everyday objects he used to speak for themselves, and show their energy.

-Maddie Palermo and RZ