Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection
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Jim Dine, Big Red Wrench in a Landscape, 1973
color lithograph
30 x 22 in.
Promised Gift
Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1935. He served as a bridge between Pop Art and a new generation of figurative expressionism, and continues to refine his technical virtuosity in paintings, sculptures, drawings, and graphics. From 1953 to 1955 he studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Boston Museum School, and in 1957 he received his B.F.A. from the University of Ohio. after a year of graduate work, he moved to New York in 1958. He taught at various schools in the New York area through 1961. In 1959 he exhibited with Claes Oldenburg at the Judson Gallery, his first New York show. During the early years in New YOrk, his work combined real and painted objects, evolving from the theater pieces he made for the Judson Gallery "happenings." These expressionist assemblages reinterpreted Action Painting by presenting objects not as symbols but as real, contingent presences. In 1964 Dine was included in the Venice Biennale. He began his "Robe" series in 1966, when he moved to London to distance himself from the Pop Art scene. In 1970 he moved to Vermont, and during the 1070s he taught at several New England institutions. In 1980 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gave him his first retrospective in 1970, when he was thirty-five, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, held a print retrospective in 1978. A touring exhibition of his drawings began ten years later. Dine developed a love of tools at his family's hardware store, and they have remained a favorite subject throughout his career, along with hearts, palettes, and robes. In recent years he has added skulls, trees, gates, and the torso of Venus to his lexicon of images, and his work has been marked by a heightened sense of drama and sensual gestural surfaces.