Skip to main contentBiographyPainter, printmaker, and poet Jim Dine (born 1935) has distinguished himself from his contemporaries by his insistence on personal, often autobiographical, imagery. Unlike other Pop artists who derived their subjects from advertisements, newspapers, and magazines, Dine has gravitated toward everyday objects and familiar symbols such as tools, hearts, articles of clothing, and, more recently, the human figure, all of which he tends to represent in series.
Dine’s roots are in the Midwest, and his fascination with tools dates to time spent in his grandfather’s hardware store. A native of Cincinnati, he took classes at the Cincinnati Art Academy during high school. Between 1953 and 1955, he studied at the University of Cincinnati and spent the fall of 1955 at the Boston Museum School, before earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Ohio University, Athens, in 1957. He moved to New York City in 1958 and soon after staged Happenings, a form of multi-media performance art, with fellow artists Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow. During this time, the 1960s, he experimented with objects attached to canvases.
In 1962 he met and began to work with Tatyana Grosman, founder of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, New York. Under her guidance, Dine became an outstanding and prolific printmaker in a variety of processes, claiming he hit his stride in 1971. ULAE, as it is commonly known, collaborates directly with artists, providing technical assistance, facilities, and equipment and publishing the results. Beginning in 1957, the press sparked a revival of fine art printmaking in the United States.
Wishing to absent himself from the frenetic New York art world, Dine spent the years 1967 to 1971 in London, and, upon his return, he settled in Putney, Vermont. At the age of fifty, in 1985, he moved back to New York and began to travel extensively. In 1983, he commented, “I like the stimulation of different places, different people, different environments—it’s my constant need to observe.” [1] He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1964 and 1987 and Documenta IV at Kassel, Germany, in 1968. Over the years he has been an artist-in-residence at Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio; Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire; Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York; and Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
By 1975, Dine rejected Pop Art, stating: “I have never been a pop artist. I was of an age where my peers and I found nothing unusual in using everyday objects instead of paint. Some of these people glorified these objects as an exercise in gigantism. I used them as metaphors and receptacles for my marginal thoughts and feelings. Frankly, many times it is more efficacious to manipulate objects (real ones) than to paint them. … So-called Pop Art never interested me.” [2] Continuing today to work in series, Dine has focused his considerable talent as a draughtsman on such subjects as self-portraiture, plants, and the Venus de Milo.
Notes:
[1] Dine, quoted in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York: Abrams, Inc., 1985), 48.
[2] Letter dated April 9, 1975, quoted in Jim Dine (Bordeaux, France: Centres d’Arts Plastiques Contemporains de Bordeaux, 1975), unpaginated, in Marco Livingstone, Jim Dine: The Alchemy of Images (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), 15.
Jim Dine
born 1935
Dine’s roots are in the Midwest, and his fascination with tools dates to time spent in his grandfather’s hardware store. A native of Cincinnati, he took classes at the Cincinnati Art Academy during high school. Between 1953 and 1955, he studied at the University of Cincinnati and spent the fall of 1955 at the Boston Museum School, before earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Ohio University, Athens, in 1957. He moved to New York City in 1958 and soon after staged Happenings, a form of multi-media performance art, with fellow artists Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow. During this time, the 1960s, he experimented with objects attached to canvases.
In 1962 he met and began to work with Tatyana Grosman, founder of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, New York. Under her guidance, Dine became an outstanding and prolific printmaker in a variety of processes, claiming he hit his stride in 1971. ULAE, as it is commonly known, collaborates directly with artists, providing technical assistance, facilities, and equipment and publishing the results. Beginning in 1957, the press sparked a revival of fine art printmaking in the United States.
Wishing to absent himself from the frenetic New York art world, Dine spent the years 1967 to 1971 in London, and, upon his return, he settled in Putney, Vermont. At the age of fifty, in 1985, he moved back to New York and began to travel extensively. In 1983, he commented, “I like the stimulation of different places, different people, different environments—it’s my constant need to observe.” [1] He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1964 and 1987 and Documenta IV at Kassel, Germany, in 1968. Over the years he has been an artist-in-residence at Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio; Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire; Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York; and Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
By 1975, Dine rejected Pop Art, stating: “I have never been a pop artist. I was of an age where my peers and I found nothing unusual in using everyday objects instead of paint. Some of these people glorified these objects as an exercise in gigantism. I used them as metaphors and receptacles for my marginal thoughts and feelings. Frankly, many times it is more efficacious to manipulate objects (real ones) than to paint them. … So-called Pop Art never interested me.” [2] Continuing today to work in series, Dine has focused his considerable talent as a draughtsman on such subjects as self-portraiture, plants, and the Venus de Milo.
Notes:
[1] Dine, quoted in Constance W. Glenn, Jim Dine Drawings (New York: Abrams, Inc., 1985), 48.
[2] Letter dated April 9, 1975, quoted in Jim Dine (Bordeaux, France: Centres d’Arts Plastiques Contemporains de Bordeaux, 1975), unpaginated, in Marco Livingstone, Jim Dine: The Alchemy of Images (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), 15.
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