ART CITIES:Paris-Jim Dine
Pioneer of the happening and associated with the Pop Art Movement, Jim Dine, has always followed a unique path. He experiments extensively with different techniques, working with wood, lithography, photography, metal, stone and paint. The tool and the creative process are just as important as the finished work. The artist explores the themes of the self, the body and memory, drawing on a personal iconography made up of hearts, veins, skulls, Pinocchio and tools.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Centre Pompidou Archive
The exhibition “Jim Dine Paris Reconnaissance. The Artist’s Gift To The Centre Pompidou” features 28 paintings and sculptures produced between 1961 and 2016, that the artist donated to the Museum. The donation is being exhibited in its entirety and includes Dine’s very earliest works through which he established his visual vocabulary and highly original themes. Tools play a very significant role and give his work a specific dimension combining his personal history with the search for an identity that he has never abandoned. Dine believes that tools provide a “Link with our past, the human past, the hand”. They feature in many of his works and can be seen as symbol of artistic creation. There is also an autobiographical resonance, as Dine’s family owned a hardware store in Cincinnati. There are themes which are recurrent in his work such as hearts, bathrobes and other everyday items from his life. These can be observed in the artworks on display. Dine is an impassioned and restless man who still travels the world from his birthplace America where he lives sporadically and to Europe and France, where he now plans to spend most of his time. The artworks on display are a gift which as the artist said he wanted to “Pay back a cultural and personal debt to France” for the many years he spent in Paris. Jim Dine studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and at Ohio University. He moved to New York City in 1958, and there he became part of a group of artists who initiated Happenings, an early form of performance art. His early work consists primarily of images on canvas to which three-dimensional objects (e.g., articles of clothing, garden tools) are attached. His Shoes Walking on My Brain (1960), for example, is a childlike painting of a face with a pair of leather shoes fixed to the forehead. His reputation was secured during the 1960s by his wittily incongruous painted images of tools, clothes, and other utilitarian and household objects. He is particularly associated with the bathrobe and the stylized heart. The subject of Dine’s work of the 1970s remained commonplace objects, but he showed a growing preoccupation with graphic media. His exploitation of nuances of line and texture is especially evident in his images of flowers and portraits of his wife done in the late 1970s. In contrast to his earlier conceptual and Pop-style painting, much of Dine’s latest production has been photographic. Dine contends that photography held a power he hadn’t found in other media. Dine has also developed new autobiographical iconography, pulling from his childhood to explore the character Pinocchio and a lifelong fascination with birds.
Info: Curator: Bernard Blistène, Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris, Duration: 13/2-23/4/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-21:00, Thu11:00-23:00, www.centrepompidou.fr
