JIM DINE
Zein Robe
2014
Lithograph over relief with hand painting
54 x 37 in.
Edition of 11
Pencil signed and numbered

About This Work:

Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He studied at the University of Cincinnati, the Boston Museum School, and in 1957 he received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Ohio University.
After graduation, he moved to New York City and became involved with a circle of artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein, all of whose work moved away from Abstract Expressionism toward Pop art.

In 1962 Dine’s work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud and many more, in the historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Norton Simon Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first “Pop Art” exhibitions in America.
These artists started a movement which shocked America and the art world. The Pop Art movement fundamentally altered the nature of modern art.

Often associated with the Pop art movement, Jim Dine features everyday objects and imagery in his paintings, drawings, and prints. His works focuses on certain subject matter, bathrobes and hearts amongst them. However, unlike many Pop artists, he focuses on the autobiographical and emotive connotations of his motifs.

Dine began painting bathrobes in 1964; some of them were titled or subtitled “self-portrait”. The bathrobe became a motif in his repertoire which he has returned to on many occasions, in prints as well as paintings. Though he claimed never to wear a bathrobe, nonetheless these are all, in a way, portraits and self-portraits.

Zein Robe illustrates the enduring importance of the bathrobe motif in Dine’s work, a motif that he has been using over the years in countless printed works to depict mostly himself, but also his wife and people around him.
This subject came to him as source of inspiration after coming across an image of a man’s dressing gown in a newspaper advertisement.

This lithograph depicts a belted robe that features casual, painterly strokes, hand painted in deep reds and oranges. This robe, once again, represents the alias of a person. This robe faces us, with the invisible hands over the hips, affirming Zein’s presence and personality.
But who is Zein?

After a 1984 trip to The Glyptothek in Munich, Jim Dine was inspired to create a series of figurative drawings based on Greek and Roman antiquities, the so-called Glyptotek Drawings. This project required a lot of technical work, a process that would ultimately end in the production of heliogravure prints. When elaborating the Glyptotek Drawings, Kurt Zein, a master printer in Vienna, was fundamental in the production of this project.

An accomplished printmaker, Dine remains one the most famous American artists of today. His work is part of numerous public collections all over the world. He still lives and works in New York City.