Gabbia Bongiorno - Agnellini Arte Moderna

Jim Dine
Life as
an Artist*
Claude Lorent
* This text was written for the exhibition Jim Dine held at the Guy
Pieters Gallery at Knokke-Heist (Belgium) in 2008.
In choosing to mount an exhibition composed exclusively
of works produced in the years 2007-08,
it might be thought that only the artist’s most
recent concerns are being taken into account.
However, although the paintings and sculptures
provide an accurate description of a precise
moment in the American artist’s creativity, they
are nonetheless indissociable from his development
since the 1970s, even since the early moments of his
pictorial career in the 1960s, after he had distinguished
himself in pioneering performances and the first Happenings
staged with Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow and
the musician John Cage. The 1960s are described as
Dine’s pop years, as he was involved in the renewal of
American art at that time through the return to figuration,
a measure that flew in the face of the dominant
abstract painting, particularly Abstract Expressionism, to
use the terms coined by the critic Robert Coats at The
New Yorker. Dine was, therefore, one of the artists who
destabilised the values that were then current and solidly
established, by introducing direct action into artistic
practice and imposing new pictorial motifs taken from
daily life. Although he turned away from painting for
nearly three years to focus on other forms of expression,
it remained the basis of his oeuvre as, from the
moment he took up his brush again – and freely broke
with the avant-garde advances of the moment to which
he would never return – he resumed using the same
type of motifs and has never since given them up.
Today they are more topical than ever. Since that time
Jim Dine has forged his own path, far removed from the
fashions and influences of the moment.
Of his own will, Dine fairly quickly turned his back on
his role as a leading light in the Pop Art sphere, the
trend that literally revolutionised the American scene
before being welcomed by Europe like a breath of fresh
air and liberating force. That is how the history of twentieth-century
art classifies the movement but it would
make a monumental mistake if Pop Art were considered
as anything more than a moment: a powerful and
influential one, to be sure, one that left its mark, but a
moment circumscribed in time nonetheless. Yet, even
when Dine was an exponent of this trend and exhibited
with other proponents of the genre who rapidly became
its international points of reference, he was already following
a personal path, one that had imposed itself on
him since a very young age: as a boy he used to rummage
around in his grandfather’s workshop where his
favourite playthings were the tools and instruments his
granddad used. The subjects of his painting were not
distinct from either his environment or, above all, the
things he was fond of. Nor, so to speak, has he changed
anything since, so much so that his current works – hearts
31