Jim Dine, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris

Jim Dine, City of Glass
Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris
6 juin - 24 juillet 2015

JIM DINE

City of Glass #1, 2014

Bronze, verre, acier inoxydable, objets trouvés, peinture laquée, 155 x 150 x 128 cm

Courtesy Jim Dine et Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris

Pionnier du happening et compagnon du Pop Art, grand expérimentateur de techniques, l’artiste américain JIM DINE a choisi Paris pour fêter ses 80 ans avec une installation inédite : City of Glass à la galerie Daniel Templon.

City of Glass réunit un ensemble de sculptures associant bronze, verre, peinture et outils. Chacune de ces ‘Ville de verre’ se déploie sur un socle-établi, à mi-chemin entre l’atelier d’artiste et le cabinet secret de l’alchimiste.

Poète autant que peintre et sculpteur, Jim Dine explique : «  Tout ce que j’ai fait, tout ce que je continue à faire, a seulement à voir avec le feu. J’ai passé les soixante dernières années à entretenir la flamme pour être sûr qu’elle ne disparaisse pas ».

Cette exposition anniversaire jubilatoire, qui dévoile le résultat de deux ans et demi de travail, célèbre la puissance créatrice d’une artiste singulier.

Ici, l’outil et le processus sont aussi cruciaux que l’œuvre achevée. Jim Dine bouleverse les règles et pousse les techniques à leurs limites. Il a lui-même fondu les outils en torsion qui composent les Cities of Glass, incluant quelques rares objets trouvés. Pour la toute première fois, l’artiste utilise le verre, soufflé, afin de ‘sculpter la lumière’. Une série de grands dessins d’outils fait écho à ces installations.

Jim Dine a exposé dans les plus grandes institutions internationales depuis les années 1970. Récemment, il a exposé ses sculptures au J. Paul Getty Museum à Los Angeles (2008) et à l’Ohio University (2011) et ses dessins au Morgan Library & Museum à New York (2011). Le Cincinnati Art Museum a célébré son fameux Pinocchio en 2012. Le Museum Folkwang Essen (Allemagne) consacrera en octobre 2015 une grande rétrospective à son œuvre graphique.

Jim Dine est représenté dans plus de 70 collections publiques à travers le monde, dont celle du Metropolitan Museum of Art de New York, du Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou à Paris, de la Tate Collection à Londres.

Il s’agit de sa huitième exposition à la Galerie Daniel Templon.

Galerie Daniel Templon
30 rue Beaubourg, Paris
www.templon.com

Starting from Scratch: The Art of Etching from Dürer to Dine, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Starting from Scratch: The Art of Etching from Dürer to Dine
Philadelphia Museum of Art 
Through August 11, 2013

The exhibition Starting from Scratch: The Art of Etching from Dürer to Dine showcases some of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s finest etchings and includes major acquisitions and masterworks, many on display at the Museum for the first time. The exhibition spans five centuries and features prints by major artists—from Rembrandt and Goya to Brice Marden and Kara Walker—that illustrate the many ways artists have embraced this medium to create original and inventive work.

The development of etching is traced from its first use in metal workshops in fifteenth-century Germany to its application by contemporary American artists. Multimedia and interactive elements demonstrate the characteristics of various etching techniques and offer insight into the artist’s process.

Six works by Rembrandt showcase the innovations he brought to the use of the technique, and include Christ Crucified between Two Thieves (The Three Crosses) (1653-55), an important recent acquisition by the Museum. The great French artist Jacques Callot, a seminal figure in the history of etching, is represented by The Siege of Breda (1627), a grand battle map and landscape that is on view at the Museum for the first time.

Rare first edition prints from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s portfolio Imaginary Prisons (about 1749) illustrate the effects of combining several techniques to create haunting images of mysterious architecture. Other virtuoso displays of technique are presented in Francisco Goya’s series The Proverbs (Los Proverbios) (1819-23), which showcases his revolutionary use of aquatint in imagery that ranges from whimsical to satirical. A series of dark expressionistic images of World War I by Otto Dix exploits the corrosive qualities of the medium to communicate violence and decay.

Etchings by James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Camille Pissarro demonstrate subtle qualities of light and atmosphere. A sense of nineteenth-century Parisian life is captured in prints by Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, who shared a mutual interest in experimental etching. Works on display include Edgar Degas’ Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery (1879–80), an etching that he continually reworked and reprinted, creating more than twenty variations of the image.

EDGAR DEGAS

Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery, 1879-80

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, French, 1834 - 1917. Etching, soft-ground etching, aquatint, and drypoint, Plate: 11 7/8 x 4 15/16 inches (30.2 x 12.5 cm) Sheet: 14 3/16 x 8 3/16 inches (36 x 20.8 cm). 

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the John D. McIlhenny Fund, 1941.

Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Noted artists have often used etching to explore variations on a theme. Featured in the exhibition are four prints from Pablo Picasso’s Vollard Suite (1930-37), in which the artist repeatedly explores themes of attraction and voyeurism through allegories of the mythological Minotaur, the artist’s alter ego. John Marin’s multiple abstract studies of New York’s Woolworth Building from 1913 show his fascination with what was at the time the world’s tallest building. Several versions of the famous skyscraper are on view from the Museum’s master set of Marin prints, the most complete collection in the world. A selection from the Museum’s unparalleled collection of Edward Hopper prints illustrates the development of the artist’s distinctive style.

Jim Dine's Braid (1972), Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain Series, Zen Study 5 (1990), and a print from Kara Walker's 2010 series An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters trace the medium's enduring legacy through to the present day.

Curators: James R. Wehn, Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; and Shelley R. Langdale, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings.

Philadelphia Museum of Art 
Muriel and Phillip Berman Gallery
Museum's website: www.philamuseum.org

Jim Dine, Aldo et moi, BnF, Paris

Jim Dine : Aldo et moi
Estampes gravées et imprimées avec Aldo Crommelynck
BnF, Paris
24 avril - 17 juin 2007

JIM DINE, artiste américain de renommée internationale, a fait don à la Bibliothèque nationale de France d’une centaine d’estampes élaborées et imprimées à Paris depuis 1976 dans l’atelier d’Aldo Crommelynck, l’un des plus grands maîtres imprimeurs contemporains. Une exposition présentée sur le site Richelieu de la BnF rend hommage à cette féconde collaboration.

Peintre, sculpteur, photographe, graveur prolifique et inventif depuis quarante ans, Jim Dine vient travailler pour la première fois en 1976 chez Aldo Crommelynck et grave quatre planches sur le thème de la tour Eiffel, dont Paris Smiles in Darkness. Il retournera ensuite régulièrement dans son atelier. Une connivence et une amitié exceptionnelles se nouent durant vingt années de création à quatre mains. C’est le fruit de cette collaboration - 126 planches gravées, dont 41 contenues dans deux livres illustrés – qui est offert par Jim Dine au département des Estampes et de la photographie de la Bibliothèque nationale de France.

L’exposition proposée par la BnF est conçue comme un hommage du graveur à son imprimeur.

ALDO CROMMELYNCK est reconnu comme l’un des plus grands graveurs et imprimeurs du XXe siècle. Imprimeur de Picasso, il a également collaboré à l’oeuvre gravé d’artistes éminents tels Braque, Giacometti, Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Sam Szafran ou Donald Sultan. Le Grand Prix national des Métiers d’art a récompensé son travail en 1989. Il a mis fin à ses activités à la fin des années 90.

L’exposition permet au visiteur de découvrir quarante-cinq estampes choisies pour la diversité de leur thème et de leur technique.

Sont notamment présentées quinze des vingt-cinq planches de la série "Nancy Outside in July", portraits de la première femme de Jim Dine gravés entre 1977 et 1981. Le visage est saisi dans la multiplicité de ses expressions, parfois envahi de fleurs ou dissimulé sous les couches de peinture. Véritable recherche pour saisir les traits d’un être aimé, à partir des sentiments, des humeurs et de l’écoulement des jours, cette série de Jim Dine représente un des temps forts de l’exposition. La collaboration du peintre et du maître imprimeur se révèle ici à travers les couleurs chatoyantes et la puissance de la gamme des noirs, rendue grâce à des techniques d’aquatinte et de taille-douce infiniment variées.

Citons encore le quadriptyque "Quartet", réalisé en 1986 à partir de tableaux anonymes du XIXe siècle, des coeurs, figure emblématique de Jim Dine, parmi lesquels "A Heart on the rue de Grenelle" et "The Heart called Paris Spring", ou bien encore quatre planches autour de Vénus, dont "Black and White Cubist Venus", véritable clin d’oeil à la sculpture grecque antique.

Des livres sont également exposés : "Mabel" (1977), dans lequel douze portraits féminins illustrent un texte de Robert Creeley, poète américain mort en 2005 et "The Temple of Flora" (1984), suite de 29 planches inspirées d’un traité de botanique de R.J.Thornton datant de 1807, dans lesquelles Jim Dine met en oeuvre la totalité des techniques de gravure en taille-douce à l’aide d’outils aussi originaux que des clous, des aiguilles, des brosses métalliques actionnées par une perceuse électrique ou des pièces à main de chirurgien-dentiste, témoignant ainsi de son approche parfois iconoclaste de la gravure.

Commissaire de l'exposition : Marie-Cécile Miessner, conservateur en chef, département des Estampes et de la photographie, BnF

Le Musée des Beaux-arts de Caen expose, du 16 mars au 11 juin 2007, l’Odyssée de Jim Dine : un choix d’estampes, 1985-2006

Bibliothèque nationale de France 
Site Richelieu, Crypte - 58, rue de Richelieu - 75002 Paris
www.bnf.fr

Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969, Guggenheim Museum, New York City

Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969 

Guggenheim Museum, New York 

February 12 - May 16, 1999 

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969, the first major survey on the earlywork of this important American artist. The exhibition traces Jim Dine's multi-faceted exploration of personal identity through more than 100 works, including photographs of his environment and performance pieces. During the first ten years of his career, Jim Dine seized on the idea of self-exposure to forge new territory for the possibilities of expression. In doing so, he created a formidable visual language of corporeal motifs that tested the conventions of representation and perception. 

The exhibition encompasses many of the major mixed-media works Jim Dine created between 1959 and 1969, the same time-frame that traces the trajectory of the increasing use of popular imagery in American art. Though Dine's signature motifs of clothing, tools, painter's palettes, and hearts dovetailed with the familiar images of Pop art, his use of such commonplace objects was deeply personal, derived from his interior world of memories rather than from Pop art's preoccupation with the conceits of mass culture. Dine's work is thus marked by a deep sense of introspection and an abiding interest in the act of painting as a means of unveiling the self.

By bringing together works from Jim Dine's various series, the exhibition provides a striking view of the magnitude of Dine's early achievements and their formidable contribution to the succeeding generation of artists concerned with the politics of the body. The exhibition investigates how Jim Dine developed his personal iconography by drawing on the vernacular of children's art and the carnivalesque to foster a sense of profound psychological resonance in his works.

Jim Dine arrived in New York from Ohio in 1958 and quickly established himself in the avant-garde art scene. In 1959, along with several other artists, Dine began showing his work at the newly established Judson Gallery located in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. It was there in 1960 that Dine created the first of his interiors, The House, as part of "Ray-Gun," a two-person exhibition with Claes Oldenburg that also featured the latter's environment The Street. During the course of the show Dine performed his first theatrical piece, The Smiling Workman, as part of "Ray Gun Spex," three evenings devoted to individual theatrical pieces by Dine, Oldenburg, and several other artists. The notoriety that followed this showcase did much to validate this burgeoning art form. Jim Dine's association with Judson and the Reuben Gallery provided him with the opportunity to create other performance pieces and, in the course of one year, Jim Dine created three other theatrical pieces, Vaudeville, Car Crash, and A Shining Bed, which added to his growing renown as one of the brightest new stars of his generation. It was during this time that Dine created such totemic works as Green Suit (1959), Untitled (Winged Victory) (1959), and Bedspring (1960), assemblages that incorporate discarded clothing, bedsprings, and other trash salvaged from the city's streets.

Choosing to immerse himself in painting, Jim Dine quickly gave up creating performance art. By the end of 1961, he had completed a series of childlike, collage-style paintings, many of which incorporated quotidian objects and their written equivalents on the canvas. In works such as Teeth (1960-61), Hair (1961), Coat (1961), and Pearls (1961), Jim Dine conjoined the explosive quality of abstraction with the peculiarities of real life. Like his Green Suit, these works and others that followed are imbued with an eccentric quality that evokes the freakish quality of nature. Jim Dine's deep-seated personal phobias, along with the burden of fame, forced him to seek comfort in the isolation of his studio, and he withdrew from the social scene of the New York art world. By 1962, he was immersed in psychoanalysis, an experience that would inform his subsequent work. His series of Tool paintings, made over the course of one month, were bound up with the artist's vivid memories spent working in his family's hardware stores in Ohio and Kentucky. In his next series, based on his own childhood recollections and the wallpaper and objects of his children's rooms, items such as mirrored medicine cabinets, toiletries, and metal fixtures involve the viewer physically in his remembrances.

In the final years represented by this exhibition, references to the artist himself become even more direct, as in his 1963 canvases featuring painter's palettes and his 1964 group of self-portraits inspired by men's suits; these were later followed by works based on the image of an uninhabited bathrobe, which he first saw in a newspaper advertisement. In 1965, Jim Dine began making three-dimensional bronze and aluminum casts of familiar objects, continuing his trajectory from using junk to employing store-bought items to finally making his own objects. Jim Dine seized on the processes of duplication, repetition, elongation, and enlargement to create a series of hybrid realities in his sculptures of body parts, clothing, furniture, tools, and passageways. His sculptures became increasingly large and his interest in manipulating the space of the viewer became more pronounced. This tendency is evident in his two monumental pieces incorporating images of a heart and hand, from his series of works entitled Nancy and I at Ithaca (1966-69). By 1967, Jim Dine finally had the emotional stability to leave his studio in New York and move to London. In the year that followed he did no painting, instead throwing himself into printmaking, drawing, and writing. Memory was still Jim Dine's driving force, and when he returned to the canvas to create Name Paintings (1968-69), he began to use its surface as a vast journal for his recollections. Jim Dine's concerns during this decade are summed up in Colour of the Month of August (1969), in which bold strokes of paint are juxtaposed with the names of the colors scrawled on the canvas. This piece is a culmination of Jim Dine's work from the period and of the uniquely personal visual language that he created to reference the self.

Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969 has been co-curated by Germano Celant, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and Clare Bell, Associate Curator for Prints and Drawings at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Publication: A fully-illustrated catalogue, published by the Guggenheim Museum and distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., will accompany the exhibition. It is the first catalogue to document the early years of Jim Dine's career and includes rare documentary photographs. In addition to essays by Mr. Celant and Ms. Bell, the book provides an interview with the artist charting his initial development. The catalogue also includes rarely published materials on each of Jim Dine's theatrical pieces, as well as an essay by Julia Blaut on Jim Dine's performances and environments. A chronology of Jim Dine's career from 1959 to 1969 and selected bibliography are also included.

The exhibition will travel to The Cincinnati Art Museum, where it will be on display from October 22, 1999, to January 9, 2000.

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1071 Fifth Avenue (at 88th Street), New York City

www.guggenheim.org