Jim Dine is an American Painter, Printmaker, Sculptor, Poet, Conceptual and Performance Artist. Born in 1935 and produced strong graphic imagery using bold colours and were often connected to Pop art. Although his strong graphic style, bright colours, and straightforward, popular imagery have often been connected to Pop art, Dine resisted this connection. He saw his work as an extension of Robert Rauschenberg's or Jasper Johns' Neo-Dada art, questioning the power of iconic symbols, rather than a more simplistic celebration of them.
"I would have been quite pleased to have been a pop artist; I was very involved with pop art and with those guys. But let's face it, I wasn't one. I used some popular imagery, objects more than anything else. But I wasn't glorifying consumerism, nothing like that."
The bright colours and clear linear style are typical of the Pop art movement with which Dine's work was associated at this time. Andy Warhol's silkscreen canvases multiplied popular culture icons into grids, transforming soup cans and Marilyn Monroe into nearly abstract components; similarly, Dine repeats his bathrobe
Dine is inspired by the power of familiarity of simple images, his repetitions of tools, bathrobes, or hearts are easily understood by the anyone, while also suggesting deeper layers of meaning. He often works with subjects and images from his childhood which give a sense of innocence to his work.
This painting is one of several in which Dine takes everyday objects and imbues them with meaning. Dine believed that the objects that comprised his everyday life and his visual world had a distinct power, rooted in their ability to be immediately recognizable. He consequently chose a series of personal objects in order to create self-portraits, here, representing himself through a depiction of his favourite bathrobe. A commonplace, but strangely intimate item, a bathrobe is worn close to the skin, usually in private moments. He would use the bathrobe imagery frequently in years to come, a repetition already anticipated in this double portrait.
Jim Dine is an American Painter, Printmaker, Sculptor, Poet, Conceptual and Performance Artist. Born in 1935 and produced strong graphic imagery using bold colours and were often connected to Pop art. Although his strong graphic style, bright colours, and straightforward, popular imagery have often been connected to Pop art, Dine resisted this connection. He saw his work as an extension of Robert Rauschenberg's or Jasper Johns' Neo-Dada art, questioning the power of iconic symbols, rather than a more simplistic celebration of them.
"I would have been quite pleased to have been a pop artist; I was very involved with pop art and with those guys. But let's face it, I wasn't one. I used some popular imagery, objects more than anything else. But I wasn't glorifying consumerism, nothing like that."
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