Jim Dine Livres

“Inspired by a semi-autobiographical book by the mid-20th century German printmaker HAP Grieshaber, I have used his idea to create a story of fifty years as a printmaker. The book includes interviews with my printers and memories of my life around the prints I made at that time. I have made over a thousand prints so far and I am not done yet. There are “key” images illustrated, and the text attempts to marry the technical with my emotional feeling for the mediums, etching, lithography, woodcut and silkscreen. I have included recipes for variations on intaglio and some stories of my friendships with these gifted artisans who have produced this work.” Jim Dine

Jim Dine began as one of the first-generation Pop artists in the 1960s, and went on to become widely admired in the 1970s for his prodigious drawing and printmaking activities. For the last several years he has developed and worked with a particular fascination for Carlo Collodi's popular tale of a wooden boy who becomes real, and who has served as a sort of muse for Dine, the inspiration for numerous drawings, photographs, paintings, artist's books and sculptures. "When I was six years old my mother took me to see the Disney Pinocchio film," Dine "it has haunted my heart forever! Geppetto and the author, Carlo Collodi, gave the boy the chance to come to consciousness and therefore join us in this Vale of Tears. His poor burned feet, his misguided judgment, his constant lying, his temporary donkey ears... It all adds up to make the sum of him." This volume, Steidl's third volume to stem from Dine's Pinocchio series, features works that exploit and improvise on the allegory, satire and wit of this classic tale.

This book of 85 drawings by Jim Dine illustrates the range and mastery of the artist's draftsmanship over more than four decades. The variety and breadth of the selection shows the intense way Dine observes the world around him and the excitement with which he records it on paper. Dine has said that his ability to draw is both a privilege and the result of hard physical training, compelling him to move inexorably forward to capture the next idea or the next psychological insight in drawings that are extraordinarily human. The selection includes early tool pencil drawings and collages, as well as powerful portrait and figure studies in a variety of media. Also included are large painterly pastels executed with a bravura that places them somewhere between painting and drawing. Dine sees his paintings and drawings as essentially conceived and developed in the same way--requiring the same amount of time, emotion and physicality of medium. The only difference, in the end, is that the drawings are on paper.

„Hallo, ich heiße Jimmy“, sagte eine Krähe zum kleinen Jim Dine in seiner Einleitung, „aber dies erschreckte mich, und zugleich ... verstand ich.“ Die Begegnung mit dem Vogel nahm der Junge in einer Mischung aus Angst, Faszination und tiefer Einsicht in sein Unbewußtes wahr. nnDer Künstler übersetzte die Erinnerung daran in eine Serie faszinierender Schwarzweiß-Fotografien. Sind sie symbolisch, tiefgründig, mystisch oder einfach Fotos von geliebten Tieren? Ein gewöhnlicher Vogel erscheint dem Betrachter als mythologische Figur, als mittelalterlicher Hofnarr oder als seltsamer Bote einer verborgenen Welt. Jim Dine spricht zu den Vögeln, und sie antworten ihm, denn sie sind ihm freundschaftlich verbunden.

Jim Dine, originally linked with Pop art, has developed into one of the most remarkable draftsmen and preeminent artists of our time.

In 2007 the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California asked Jim Dine to make a work in response to a part of their antiquities collection at the "Villa." Dine carved three large scale wood sculputes, painting them with very bright colors in the ancient Hellenistic way, and surrounded them with a long poem attached to the wall. The entire process was documented for this book with photographs by Diana Michener, Gerhard Steidl and Jim Dine.

"The winter in L.A. that year was kind of a 'grey July.' Diana and I lived at 234 Entrada Drive in January and February of 2001. These photographs are a memoir of what our eyes saw in our garden and when we walked to the Pacific Ocean. We also rode] into the Santa Monica Mountains on our bicycles, crossing Sunset Boulevard just where it goes into Pacific Palisades. We did this every day, winding our way through more L.A. suburbia till we reached the fire trail into the mountains (where wilder animals than us live). We hardly ever saw a neighbor to make up stories about. Our landlady was called Denise de Graf. She was ever vigilant about our comings and goings. I also think we lived just to the north of the late Christopher Isherwood's house but maybe I dreamt that. That winter all we thought about was our work and getting back to Paris."

This book is literally Jim Dine’s letter to his “troops,” a confessional address to the people he has collaborated with, to his friends and family. Consisting of a long fluid poem and 18 color linocut portraits of those closest to Dine, the book explores his emotions and thoughts including childhood memories, reflections on his present artistic practice (“This week I painted, painted, painted the possibility of permanent silence”), as well as more philosophical musings (“Earth gives birth to time and heaven in a jealous parliament”). This new Steidl book is an adaption with revised design and typography of Dine’s original My Letter to the Troops of 2016, a limited edition of 40 featuring linocuts hand-printed on Arches vellum from the blocks at Atelier Michael Woolworth in Paris.

When I was born, I came home to my grandfather_s house. His name was Morris Cohen. He was my mother_s father. I lived with him for three years until my parents built a small little house and we moved away. But from the time I was born until he died when I was nineteen, I either spoke to him or saw him every day. He owned a hardware store that catered to plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, contractors. It was an early version of a contractors_ supply store. It was called The Save Supply Company. He was a very large man, and he felt he could do anything with his hands. He made tables, he fixed automobiles, he was an electrician, and he was lousy at all of it. But through sheer force of will, he forged ahead. Jim Dine