Jim Dine II - robes

This is the second of three consecutive posts on pop artist Jim Dine - for biographical notes on Dine see Part I below.
Over his career Jim Dine has produced many series of works focused on certain subject matter, tools, bathrobes and hearts amongst them. Dine began painting bathrobes in 1964; though some were titled or subtitled Self-Portrait. The bathrobe became a motif in his repertoire which he has returned to on many occasions, in prints as well as paintings. Though he claimed never to wear a bathrobe, nonetheless it is an article of collective faith that these are all, in a way, self-portraits.
Pictorially, Dine finds the motif convenient because, absent a human within protruding head and limbs, it neatly fits the rectangular limits of the supports he uses, be they paper, stretched canvas, or wood panel. Relatively flat as well, the bathrobe is an armature for the entire unfolding spectacle of his painterly and graphic invention, a design with which he has become increasingly familiar and adept, incrementally shedding its descriptive function until it stands alone as the thing itself, indivisible.

 1975 Black and White Bathrobe (lithograph)

 1983 Cooper Street Robe (woodcut)

 1984 The Robe Following Her

 1986 Atheism (litho)

 1988 Olympic Robe

 1992 Bill Clinton Robe

 1993 Yellow Robe (watercolours, woodcut)

 1995 Very Picante

 1996 Grey Sitting with Me

 2005 Black Ink Robe (lithograph)

 2006 Black Storm of Charcoal

 2007 July on the Palouse (woodcut)

 2007 Sonny Terry

 2008 A Sea of Blood

 2009 Green Rain

 Colored Dots (litho)

Jim Dine - pop artist

Jim Dine is a graphic artist, painter and sculptor associated with pop art. In the first of three posts on his work I am taking a general overview of his output. The next two feature 'dressing gowns' (robes) and 'hearts' respectively.
Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He studied at the University of Cincinnati, the Boston Museum School, and in 1957 received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Ohio University. After graduation, he moved to New York City and became involved with a circle of artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein, all of whose work moved away from abstract expressionism toward pop art.
Like other pop artists, Dine incorporated images of everyday objects in his art, but he diverged from the coldness and impersonal nature of pop art by making works that fused personal passions and everyday experiences. His repeated use of familiar and personally significant objects, such as a robe, hands, tools, and hearts, are signature icons in his art. In his early work, Dine created mostly assemblages in which he attached actual objects to his painted canvases, as in Shoes Walking on My Brain (1960). From 1959 to 1960, Dine also was a pioneer of happenings, works of art that took the form of theatrical events or demonstrations.
In 1967 Dine and his family moved to London, England, where he devoted his energies to printmaking and drawing. When he returned to the United States in 1971, he concentrated on figure drawing. Dine is considered among the most accomplished draftsmen of his generation, and is known for his series of self-portraits and portraits of his wife, Nancy. Dine's attention turned to sculptural work in the early 1980s when he created sculptures based on the ancient sculpture Venus de Milo. His recent art uses imagery borrowed from ancient Greek, Egyptian, and African objects.

 1960 Car Crash #4

 1960 Crash

 1962 Scissors

 1962 Toothbrush and Tumbler

 1966 Toolbox

 1966 Toolbox (2)

 1968 Hose Lamp from 

The Picture of Dorian Gray (lithograph)

 1973 Nutcracker

 1973 Untitled (graphite)

 1976 Paris Smiles in the Darkness

 1976 The Skier

 1978 Strelitzia

 1980 Tree (The Kimono)

 

 1984 Red Grease (charcoal, pastel, oilstick)

 1993 Woman on Fire in Vienna (etching)

 1994 For Athena

 1999 Bird of Paradise

 2004 Big Winter Breathing (lithograph)

 2005 Amayllis IV

 2007 Blue Taco

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning (1904 – 1997) was born in Rotterdam, Holland. He went to the United States in 1926 and settled briefly in Hoboken, New Jersey and worked as a house painter before moving to New York in 1927, where he met Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and John Graham. He took various commercial-art and odd jobs until 1935, when he was employed in the mural and easel divisions of the WPA Federal Art Project. Thereafter he painted full-time. In the late 1930s his abstract, as well as figurative work was primarily influenced by the Cubism and Surrealism of Pablo Picasso, and by Gorky, with whom he shared a studio.
In 1938 de Kooning started his first series of Women, which would become a major recurrent theme. During the 1940s he participated in group shows with other artists who would form the New York School and become known as Abstract Expressionists. De Kooning’s first solo show, which took place at the Egan Gallery, New York, in 1948, established his reputation as a major artist; it included a number of the allover black-and-white abstractions he had initiated in 1946. The Women series of the early 1950s was followed by abstract urban landscapes, Parkways, rural landscapes, and, in the 1960s, a new group of Women.
In 1968 de Kooning visited the Netherlands for the first time since 1926 for the opening of his retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In Rome in 1969 he executed his first sculptures – figures modeled in clay and later cast in bronze – and in 1970-71 he began a series of life-size figures. In 1974 the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, organized a show of de Kooning’s drawings and sculpture that traveled throughout the United States, and in 1978 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, mounted an exhibition of his recent work. In 1979 de Kooning and Eduardo Chillida received the Andrew W. Mellon Prize, which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. De Kooning settled in the Springs, East Hampton, Long Island, in 1963. He was honoured with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1997. He died in 1997 on Long Island.

 1942-44 The Wave

 1947 Valentine

 1948 Black Friday

 1948 Painting

 1950 Black and White Abstraction

 1950 Excavation

 1950 Untitled

 1950-52 Woman I

 1953 Woman VI

 1955 Composition

 1956 Saturday Night

 1959 Merritt Parkway

 1960 A Tree in Naples

 1965 Untitled

 1977 East Hampton #4

 1977 Untitled XIX

 1978 Untitled

 1981 Pirate (Untitled II)

 1982 Untitled V

 1985 Rider (Untitled VII)