102: JIM DINE, The Soft Ground < Prints & Multiples, 13 May 2025 < Auctions

Prints & Multiples

13 May 2025

Prints & Multiples

102

Jim Dine b.1935
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The Soft Ground

2014
woodcut, softground etching and drypoint in colors on two sheets of Hahnemuhle Warm White image: 13⅛ h × 20⅛ w in (33 × 51 cm) sheet: 18⅜ h × 24¼ w in (47 × 62 cm)

estimate: $6,000–8,000

result: $5,940

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Signed, dated and numbered to lower edge ‘2/14 Jim Dine 2014’. This work is number 2 from the edition of 14 published by Alan Cristea Gallery, London.
provenance: Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, Los Angeles | Private Collection

This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.

The robes have become much more mysterious than they used to be, and that’s because I understand them more. What’s funny is that I don’t own a bathrobe. I don’t wear one. I don’t walk around in one. I never see bathrobes around me, nor do I see people wearing them. I don’t have a bathrobe to paint from. What I use is what I’ve used from the very beginning—a newspaper ad which I clipped out of the New York Times back in 1963. The ad shows a robe with the man airbrushed out of it. Well, it somehow looked like me, and I thought I’d make that a symbol for me. Those early robes were just about autobiography through objects.

Jim Dine

Jim Dine b. 1935

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For nearly six decades, American artist Jim Dine has evoked the power of symbolism, familiarity, and the search for self through a variety of mediums. A seeming critique on modern society, Dine places personal possessions and regular objects at the focal point of his prints, drawings, paintings, and sculptures. His evolving imagery includes reoccurring themes such as heart shapes, bathrobes, tools, and the human body for which he is best known.

Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. His grandfather owned a hardware store where he worked throughout his youth later influencing his interest in ordinary objects. “I grew up with tools…I’ve always been enchanted by these objects made by anonymous hands,” he has stated. From 1953-1957 Dine studied poetry at the University of Cincinnati and later the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. After receiving his BFA from the Ohio University in Athens, GA, he moved to New York in 1958.

Dine began participating in stage performances, later known as “Happenings”, alongside artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, and John Cage. The performances helped to launch his career and his first solo exhibition was held in New York at the Reuben Gallery in 1960. While frequently associated with Pop Art that developed at this time, the artist does not identify with a specific movement. In 1966 he remarked, "Pop is concerned with exteriors…I'm concerned with interiors." He continued to develop his body of work expanding upon his iconic themes with series of flowers, trees, and the Venus di Milo.

His work has been exhibited internationally and been the focus of major retrospectives at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art (1970), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1999), and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (2004). Dine’s work is included in prestigious collections around the world including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Spain, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.

Jim Dine lives and works between New York, Paris, and Walla Walla, WA.

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