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Black and White Robe

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© Jim Dine/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York


Black and White Robe

1975
lithograph
36 in. x 24 in. (91.44 cm x 60.96 cm)
Corporate Rental Fund, 1986.25

Jim Dine
American, born 1935

Among Pop artists, Jim Dine stands out for the personal, handmade quality of his imagery. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1935, Dine was a senior in high school when he began to take night classes at the Cincinnati Art Academy. Study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Ohio University at Athens soon followed, and in 1957 the artist received his BFA degree from Ohio University. Shortly afterward, he moved to New York City, where he met Allan Kaprow (b. 1927) and became one of the early collaborators in Kaprow's Happenings. During this period, Dine became fascinated with what was to become classic Pop subject matter. Shirts, neckties, and other consumer goods began to find their way into his work and were sometimes literally affixed to his canvases. Dine was fond of drawing and painting such everyday objects, and he developed a distinct approach to representing them: in contrast to the prevailing Pop aesthetic that sought to replicate the look of mass-market advertising, Dine adopted a sketchy style that emphasized the artist's hand and materials.

By the mid-1960s Dine had gained recognition as an important figure in the Pop Art movement. He held a number of teaching positions including guest lecturer at Yale University and artist-in-residence at Oberlin College in Ohio. In 1970 Dine was given his first major retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Since that time, Dine has continued to work with many of his early signature themes, but he has frequently experimented with technique and media. In addition to his drawings and paintings, the artist is also a highly regarded etcher and lithographer.

Black and White Robe is a striking lithographic rendition of what is perhaps Dine's most recurrent motif, the bathrobe. Executed in gray lithographic crayon on a black ground, the simple outline of the robe, sleeves akimbo, confronts the viewer as if animated by a potent invisible presence. The sense of personal power is further suggested by the large scale of the design; cut off at the elbows, the robe transcends the dimensions of the paper. Somber colors suggest seriousness and interiority, belying the subject's origin in the superficial imagery of everyday fashion. As with many Pop subjects, the robe is ostensibly an artifact of American banality; however, transformed through Dine's art, it becomes invested with personal significance and expressive force.

For many years, the bathrobe has served Dine as a kind of self-portrait. After seeing an image of a bathrobe in an advertisement in 1964, he visualized himself wearing the garment. He began to make paintings and assemblages incorporating the bathrobe, and soon it became his personal trademark. A symbol of comfort and familiarity, the robe was an unpretentious artistic statement that stood in contrast to the histrionic self-indulgence that many Pop artists saw in the work of their immediate predecessors, the Abstract Expressionists. While the Currier's Black and White Robe does suggest the artist's strength and depth of character, it does so without resorting to the anguished gestures and cosmic mythology of the New York School. Over the years, Dine has recast the bathrobe in many different formats and media, using it to convey a variety of moods and feelings.

The Currier lithograph is number twelve of an edition of sixty made by the artist in 1975. It was purchased by the Museum in 1986.

VSD

REFERENCES

A. Kurlander and M. E. Wiseman. "Jim Dine: Charcoal Self-Portrait in a Cement Garden." http://www.oberlin.edu/allenart/collection/dine_jim.html. Accessed December 6, 2004.

Marco Livingston. "Interview between Jim Dine and Marco Livingston at the Artist's Studio in New York, July 1986." In Rise Up, Solitude!: Prints 1985-86. New York: Pace Prints, 1986.


Exhibition
1999 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Contemporary Prints And Paintings, 1963-1975, From The Permanent Collection." July 9 - Oct. 4.

2005 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, "Faces & Figures: Two Centuries of Portraiture." Jan. 28 - March 3.


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