Jim Dine

Acquired as a gift from the artist by the present owner

“I always have to find some theme, some tangible subject matter besides the paint itself. Otherwise I would have been an abstract artist. There are times when I would have loved to have been one, I mean a nonobjective artist, so-called, but I always have to find something to hang the paint on. I have tried painting without objects, painting without subject matter except the paint. It comes to nothing because it is nothing. It doesn’t interest me. I’m not a minimal person, hardly an abstract person. I need that hook...something to hang my landscape on. Something.” – Jim Dine in Jim Dine: Five Themes, exh. catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1984), p. 11

Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, occupies a coveted place in the oeuvre of Jim Dine, an artist closely associated with the Pop Art movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Over the course of his seven-decade career, Dine has developed a unique visual language through the repetition of particular subjects, including tools, robes, hearts, trees, and gates. In the early 1980s, Dine first began exploring the subject of the Venus de Milo, an important example of classical Greek sculpture widely believed to represent Aphrodite, the Greek equivalent to Venus. The present work, like all of Dine’s expressionistic interpretations of the subject, depicts the ancient muse without a head, bringing her iconic bare torso into focus. Reflecting on this dominant motif within his creative output, Dine once explained, "I have this need to connect with the past in my way, and also I'm devoted to the ideal of woman, as a figure of enchantment...When I went to the art supply store...and got a Venus de Milo figure...I was not responding to it as an object of Pop Art, or popular culture. I saw it as a timeless classical figure which held the memory of its magnificence...But then I knocked the head off of it and made it mine."