Jim Dine

Jim Dine – Gallery founder, action artist and guest professor

Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati in the US American state of Ohio on 16 June 1935 into a lower middle-class background in which art hardly played a role. He lost his mother at the age of twelve, and lived henceforth with his grandparents, helping out regularly in their toolshop. Jim Dine was convinced from an early age that art was his calling, and during high school he attended the art academy in his town in the evenings. He continued his studies later at the art schools in Boston and Ohio and was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ohio in 1957. Following his marriage to Nancy Minto, Jim Dine moved to New York in 1959 and founded the Judson Gallery there with Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg and Marc Ratliff. There he held his first exhibitions and organised much-visited happenings with his artist friends. At the beginning of the 1960s, Dine took on guest professorships, among them at Oberlin College in Ohio and the famous Yale University in Connecticut.

The view in the mirror as an impulse to art

Describing himself as a follower of C. G. Jung, art has a lot to do with psychology for Jim Dine. The artist wishes to critically question the meaning of being human and prefers to start with himself. This already begins with the daily glance in the mirror, which for Jim Dine is a source of inspiration and constant food for thought: The perception of one’s own image stimulates reflection, a confrontation with one’s own self. Numerous self portraits have been created for this reason over the years, in which the artist explores himself from ever different angles and with very different emphases. He is constantly in a lively dialogue with his own biography which is manifoldly reflected in Jim Dine’s pictures. Vanity is completely alien to the painter; those who line up the self portraits – as the Albertina in Vienna recently did in an exhibition – receive an unpretentious testimony of human decay, inner-psychic struggles and also the hidden abysses. 

A world of bathrobes, hearts and Pinocchio

When Jim Dine finds a motif that fascinates him, he remains faithful to it, almost to the point of obsession: In 1964, it was the advertising campaign for a bathrobe in the New York Times that Dine could not let go of. He equated the garment with himself, working it in ever new images in which he abstracted various facets of his personality. The artist remained faithful to this principle even when he occasionally changed his subject. From the bathrobe it moved to tools such as hammers, brushes and pliers, and of course hearts – to this day, Dine is associated with hearts, even though he himself considers this phase long since closed and is only too happy to detach himself from it, even in the consciousness of his audience. An important cipher for the artist is the figure of Pinocchio which he had once marvelled at wide-eyed in the cinema as a child, and sees it as an ultimate symbol of becoming human. A log, brought to life by the artist’s inspiration – a little of Pinocchio’s magic is in every work by Jim Dine.