Biography
Jim Dine is a US-American artist and a main representative of Pop Art.
Jim Dine grew up in the surroundings of his parents’ household goods store in bourgeois circumstances. From 1953 to 1958 he studied at the University of Cincinnati, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston and at Ohio State University (Columbus), Ohio, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. In 1959 he moves to New York. Together with Claes Oldenburg, Marc Ratliff and Tom Wesselmann, he founded the Judson Gallery in the Judson Memorial Church, where he exhibited and held his first happenings with his friends. Between 1960 and 1965 he held various guest professorships, including at Oberlin College, Ohio and Yale University, New Haven. In 1966 he worked in London with Eduardo Paolozzi. Jim Dine was one of the many artists who belonged to the circle of friends and acquaintances of the art collector and patron Theodor Ahrenberg.
He counts himself among the genre-overarching artists. In addition to painting, graphic art and sculpture, from the 1960s he also devoted himself to poetry and from the 1990s to photography, designing stage sets and theatre costumes. The artist is generally assigned to the pop scene because in the late 1950s, together with Claes Oldenburg and others, he established a new way of looking at things that tore everyday objects out of their context and gave them an aura of their own. Shortly afterwards he turned away from the distancing cool objectivity of Pop Art and found a metaphorical level and a more emotional warmth in his art, which followed the Abstract Expressionists from the outset.
Dine worked in artistic phases that were defined by specific, recurring subjects. From the mid-1960s onwards, his continuous motif was the bathrobe; he saw himself in it, abstracting here the various facets of his own personality. In the 1980s Dine turned to classical figurative art. After extensive studies of classical sculpture, he created a series of figurative sculptures inspired by the ancient “Venus of Milo”. Another well-known cycle was his Hearts, which contain both self-reflections and fundamental questions about being human.
Dine lives and works in New York at the Rhodes School.