Jim Dine (American, b.1935) is an artist affiliated with the Pop Art movement of the early 1960s, though his work draws significantly from Abstract Expressionism and Dada assemblage and collage techniques. The artist prefers to emphasize the hands-on, gestural, and expressive in his work, rather than the mechanical and impersonal characteristics of Pop Art. Dine graduated from Ohio University in 1957, before pursuing his artistic career in New York.
He gained public recognition for his work on five Happenings in the early 1960s, performing alongside Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow at the Judson and Reuben Galleries. Dine returned to painting, however, creating mixed-media works and assemblages. He often affixed personal items, such as his own clothing, shoes, and tools, to his canvases. The artist also began undergoing psychoanalysis in 1962, stirring a strong interest in his own memories and the construction of identity, leading him to create works with series of repeating objects possessing particular significance to him, such as hearts, palettes, and robes. Dine is known for his ability to combine the iconic and the personal in ways that evoke the expressive role of the artist as individual. He works in several media, ranging from painting, drawing, and mixed media to sculpture, photography, book illustration, and printmaking.
His work can be found in public collections throughout the world including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.
The artist lives and works in New York and Vermont.