From Publishers Weekly
Best known for his paintings, drawings and prints of hearts, tools, scissors, gates, robes, hair and skulls, Dine elevates ordinary objects into recurring multifaceted symbols. Yet his range is considerably broader, as this adventurous monograph reveals with the aid of 55 color plates and 70 black-and-whites. Cincinnati-born Dine burst on the New York art scene in 1959 as an environmental sculptor. Car Crash (1960), a performance piece, created a potent metaphor for danger and the omnipresent specter of death. Straw Heart (1966), a delicate, resonating sculpture, preceded his famous series of heart paintings. Dine's tree pictures of the early 1980s, reflecting his move to Vermont, evoke sensuous, spidery forms exuding an eerie allure. His recent mystical oils are crammed with a multitude of images, ranging from flowers to a bodhisattva (enlightened being). Feinberg, a curator at the Cincinnati Museum of Art, skillfully charts the twists and turns of Dine's career. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The first book ever to integrate Jim Dine's diverse accomplishments into one coherent chronological narrative.

The youngest of a handful of brash upstarts (soon to be labeled Pop artists) who stole the art world's spotlight from the Abstract Expressionists in the late 1950s and early '60s, Dine has been a restlessly creative force in the art world. Insatiable for new experiences, he has refused to limit himself to any one place or any one way of making art, though he has been surprisingly faithful to certain subjects, including his famous hearts, tools, bathrobes, and Venuses.

Born and raised in Cincinnati, Dine has lived in New York, London, and Vermont and has spent extended periods working in numerous other cities, from Paris and Munich to Key West, Los Angeles, and Walla Walla, Washington. His aesthetic progress has been equally peripatetic, taking him from his early Pop painting and performance art to experimentation with sculpture and print-making. At age 65, he remains as feisty and as fearless as ever.

Dine's works are found in major collections worldwide, including the Stedelijk Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pompidou Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and National Gallery of Art.

About the Modern Masters series:

With infomative, enjoyable texts and over 100 illustrations—approximately 48 in full color—this innovative series offers a fresh look at the most creative and influential artists of the postwar era. The authors are highly respected art historians and critics chosen for their ability to think clearly and write well. Each handsomely designed volume presents athorough survey of the artist's life and work, as well as statements by the artist, an illustrated chapter on technique, a chronology, lists of exhibitions and public collections, an annotated bibliography, and an index. Every art lover, from the casual museumgoer to the serious student, teacher, critic, or curator, will be eager to collect these Modern Masters. And with such a low price, they can afford to collect them all.

Other Details: 115 or more illustrations, approximately 48 in full color 128 pages 8 1/2 x 8 1/2" Published 1995

everyday objects that have personal or cultural meaning for him. This process began in his earliest days, when he gathered junk from the streets around the Judson Church in Greenwich Village in order to create an environment for a Happening brimming with life. It continues now with his adaptations of a kitschy plastic souvenir statue of the Venus de Milo and a nineteenth-century porcelain figurine of an ape and cat.

Dine's art is characterized by the investment of multiple layers of meaning in the objects he depicts. He projects part of his psyche, his emotional inner being, onto these objects, so that each one becomes a container that he fills and then uses as an instrument of communication with the viewer. Dine takes a paintbrush—whether it is a depiction of a paintbrush or the real tool itself—and isolates it from its functional context, letting it hang in midair. Or he empties a man's robe, so that it floats bodiless in atmospheric color. He turns these images into repositories of his own emotional state, but at the same time viewers are seduced into projecting their own feelings onto the subject.

Occasionally there is humor in Dine's work, but more often it communicates pathos, sexual rapture, or joyous beauty. Never is there irony, cynicism, or a distant intellectual stance. Because the artist is never cool or disengaged, the viewer is never left feeling out in the cold. We are all forced, when viewing a work of art by Jim Dine, into a position of psychic projection and emotional involvement. Universally recognized forms, such as a heart, are transformed from being commonplace or even trite to being highly personal. The mundane is reinvented and thus reinvested with meaning. Although Dine has painted, drawn, and sculpted hundreds of hearts, robes, tools, skulls, and Venuses, no two have ever been alike. For example, the most basic contour of the heart-its bulging, breastlike curves-has remained constant, but its symbolic value has been newly investigated again and again. Each shape is merely a template, a starting point for the artist's never-ending invention.

Praise for the Modern Masters series:

"Each author has thoroughly done his or her homework, knows the historical, critical and personal contexts intimately, and writes extraordinarily well." -Artnews

Author Biography: Jean E. Feinberg—previously curator at Wave Hill in New York—is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Cincinnati Art Museum and co-author of a catalogue raisonne of Dine's prints, 1977-85.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly