In Jim Dines artwork with robes, why does he paint robes?
JIM DINE: Biography I Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He grew up in what he regards as the beautiful landscape of the Midwest, a tone and time to which he returns constantly. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Boston Museum School and received his BFA from Ohio University in 1957. Dine, renowned for his wit and creativity as a Pop and Happenings artist, has a restless, searching intellect that leads him to challenge himself constantly. Over four decades, Dine has produced more than three thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, as well as performance works, stage and book designs, poetry, and even music. His art has been the subject of numerous individual and group shows and is in the permanent collections of museums around the world. Dine’s earliest art – Happenings and an incipient form of pop art – emerged against the backdrop of abstract expressionism and action painting in the late 1950s. Objects, most importantly household tools, began
Dine paints robes as the male counterpart of his feminine icon of of Venus – a maternal figure, symbol of fertility. The robes represented male icons – this is clear from the ‘masculine’ stance – hands on hips and arms akimbo and the proportions the garments. No body is shown within the robes. In a monography on Jim Dine by Marco Livingstone, the writer says that there is nothing simplistic about the robe image, but that it is produced by Dine in a “conscious effort to realize an identity, both personal and existential.” See http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/200… Here is another explanation” he first used the image of a man’s bathrobe, with the man airbrushed out of it, to create a self-portrait in 1964. Working from an ad clipped out of the NY Times, he has repeated the theme of himself as an unseen figure in a robe ever since.
