Jim Dine

American, b. 1935

BiographyJim Dine studied art at the Cincinnati Arts Academy (1951-53), and later at the Boston Museum School and at Ohio University. He moved to New York in 1958, where his first involvement with the art world occurred during the Happenings staged by Allan Kaprow (b. 1927)in 1959-60. During the same period, Dine also created assemblages of found materials, and developed his distinctive formal approach to the depiction and interpretation of common images and objects in paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture. Clothing and domestic objects (a tie, a bathrobe, a toothbrush), the painter's tools, and other household implements were elevated to almost iconic stature. Dine repeated selected themes over and over, often in a variety of media; through repetition the motif became detached from its normal public context and identified with the artist and his personal iconography. The central themes of Dine's art have remained fairly consistent, but technical experimentation and changes in expressive intent have resulted in dramatic stylistic transformations throughout his career.