Jim Dine

Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Opening Exhibition, 1993-1994
Oslo, Henie Onstad Art Center, Sal Haaken, 2003, p. 77, illustrated in colour

Along with Rauschenberg and Johns, Jim Dine was one of the pre-eminent figures in late 1950s American painting. As such his obsession with a range of signs provided the basis for a virtuoso painterly investigation, which was ultimately to provide the bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

Jim Dine’s most iconic and celebrated works are of his hearts and robes, even though they only constitute two of the many images that he adopted in his artistic career. These two symbols instantly announce his identity on their every appearance, no matter in how many different variations or mediums they appear. This habit of working in series and producing numerous and continuous variations on particular subjects was common practice for Dine, who was transfixed by the emotional and psychological content of objects. The search for a personal iconography was linked in Dine’s mind with a desire to create and define his own identity. As he explained in 1966 "When I use objects…I see them as a vocabulary of feelings….my work is very autobiographical" (Jim Dine in John Green, "All Right Jim Dine, Talk!", World Journal Tribune, Sunday Magazine, November 20, 1966, p. 34).

This now classic image of the robe first appeared in Jim Dine’s work in 1964 when he saw a photographic advertisement for a man’s bathrobe in The New York Times. This photograph pictured a man wearing a bathrobe, but whose features had been airbrushed out, allowing him like the audience it was created for, to imagine himself inside that robe. Borrowing this image as his source, Dine began to create a series of robe paintings, which were a clever disguise for his own self-portraits. He had recently gone through a difficult period of psychological instability and a troubled sense of identity and this manner of depicting himself greatly fulfilled his requirements. He even later admitted that had been actively looking for an image as a means to establish himself: "Who’s to say I wasn’t searching for that robe? I was certainly searching for a means to make a self-portrait" (Jim Dine in Marco Livingstone, Jim Dine, The Alchemy of Images, New York, p. 191).

Dine consistently returned to and re-employed this robe motif in his paintings, because he felt that once he had found an image and made it his own he saw no reason to get rid of it. However as he became more psychologically aware and comfortable with himself as an artist in the 1980’s, the face behind the robes altered. In July 1986 he explained "My attitude to the image has changed. In the beginning I did it as a stand-in for the self. But as I became more familiar with it, it became like everything else, more neutral. It started out being a bathrobe, and it ended up being a bathrobe: just that" (Jim Dine in Ibid., p. 198).

The Jewel, executed in 1992, during this more mature and settled period in Dine’s artistic career, echoes these exact sentiments. Here the viewer sees a voluptuous multi-coloured bathrobe that almost fills the entire picture plane. The brightly painted surface radiates with primary colours and the image is executed with such energetic gestures and fleeting abstract markings that it appears to be on the point of losing its identity as a representation. Here in its striking and vibrant use of colour and its confident proud pose, The Jewel celebrates Dine’s successful assertion as a highly accomplished artist who has found his place in the world.