Jim Dine


Jim Dine is an American visual artist. Dine's work includes painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.

Education

Dine's first formal training took the form of night courses at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, in which he enrolled in 1952 at the age of 16, while attending Walnut Hills High School. In 1954, while still attending evening courses, Dine was inspired by a copy of Paul J. Sachs' Modern Prints and Drawings, particularly by the German Expressionist woodcuts it reproduced, including work by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Max Beckmann —"I was shocked by them" — and began creating woodcuts in the basement of his maternal grandparents, with whom he was then living.
After high school, Dine enrolled at the University of Cincinnati. Under printmaking teacher Donald Roberts Dine experimented in lithography, etching, intaglio, dry paint and woodcuts. At Roberts' suggestion, Dine subsequently studied for six months with Ture Bengtz at the School of Fine Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, before returning to Ohio University where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1957.

Career

In 1958 Dine moved to New York, where he taught at the Rhodes School. In the same year he founded the Judson Gallery at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village with Claes Oldenburg and Marcus Ratliff, eventually meeting Allan Kaprow and Bob Whitman: together they became pioneers of happenings and performances, including Dine's The Smiling Workman of 1959. Dine's first exhibition was at the Reuben Gallery, where he also staged the elaborate performance Car Crash, which he describes as "a cacophony of sounds and words spoken by a great white Venus with animal grunts and howls by me." Another important early work was The House, an environment incorporating found objects and street debris, installed at the Judson Gallery.
Dine continued to include everyday items in his work, which linked him to Pop Art—an affinity strengthened by his inclusion in the influential 1962 exhibition "New Painting of Common Objects" at the Pasadena Art Museum, curated by Walter Hopps and later cited as the first institutional survey of American Pop Art, including works by Robert Dowd, Joe Goode, Phillip Hefferton, Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, and Andy Warhol.

Selected teaching positions