About the Artist
B. 1935 Jim Dine graduated with a BFA from the University of Ohio in 1958 and moved to New York the following year. Almost immediately, he met Allan Kaprow, and by 1960 had staged a number of happenings, among them the influential Car Crash. He also began painting and drawing tools, articles of clothing, and household objects as surrogates for himself. Success came quickly, and by 1962 Dine had been included in the Pasadena Museum of Art's influential New Paintings of Common Objects, had joined the prestigious Martha Jackson Gallery, and had been featured in a Life Magazine article profiling 100 influential young American men and women. That same year Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg introduced him to Tatyana Grosman, and the two felt an immediate rapport.
Completed in 1962, Dine's first prints depicted tools and domestic items rendered in a loose fashion that reflects his affinity with the gestures of the abstract expressionists. The 1962 lithograph Eleven Part Self-Portrait (Red Pony), which was printed from two stones, was the first of many featuring an image of the artist’s bathrobe as an autobiographical surrogate. In 1975, Dine began publishing his own prints and since then has returned occasionally to work at ULAE.
