LONDON.- The British Museum announced a very generous gift by the American artist Jim Dine, who turns 80 this year, to the Prints and Drawings collection. A monument to his achievements as a printmaker of the first rank, this gift of over 200 prints in single sheets, portfolios and illustrated books transforms the British Museum’s holdings of one of America’s most significant artists. The gift is made by Jim Dine in honour of Alan Cristea, the London print dealer and publisher who has championed his prints since the 1970s. From Tuesday 3 March until mid-June this year a display from this gift is being presented in the Michelangelo end of the Prints and Drawings gallery (Room 90).

This collection of prints was the single-largest gift made to the Prints and Drawings department in 2014. Covering Dine’s career from the 1960s to the present-day, this magnificent addition to the American print collection at the British Museum consolidates an earlier gift of sixteen prints made by the artist in 1999.

A particular focus of Dine’s gift is the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when his persistent imagery emerged, notably the bathrobes, tools, hearts and paintbrushes. These motifs began as stand-ins for the artist, what he called an ‘autobiography through objects’, and gave him the licence to do what he wanted with them, in different variations and improvisations. The solitary standing robe served as a metaphor for the artist himself, its hands on hips conveying a strong masculine stance. Often monumental, being almost life-size in scale, the bathrobes express emotional intensity and mood through colour, either singly or by contrasting tones, as well as through texture and technique. The same outline might evoke a night portrait or the artist’s identification with landscape. Dine’s natural abilities as a draughtsman are combined with his technical dexterity as a printmaker. The Woodcut Bathrobe was inspired by the example of Edvard Munch; each of the sections of the woodblock was cut out and separately inked in a different colour before being reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle for printing.

Dine’s father and grandfather ran a hardware shop in Cincinnati, Ohio in the heart of America’s MidWest, where the artist was born in 1935 and brought up. The tools that appear in his work are heavily imbued with a personal and emotional resonance. ‘When I use objects, I see them as a vocabulary of feelings’, he declared in 1970. Often depicted life-size, his tools – wrenches, pliers, bolt cutters, saws – can be read as potent male symbols, erect and upright. Through Dine’s mastery of the etched line the tools possess an extraordinary presence. The paintbrush, perhaps the artist’s most obvious tool, became the subject for some of Dine’s most exquisite etchings, where the brushes are endowed with twitching, sprouting hair, such as in his celebrated 1972-3 series of etchings, Five Paintbrushes. The same plate underwent transformative changes as more hairy paintbrushes were added, textures introduced and the plate itself reduced in size to create what Dine called his ‘first example of a serial image, building on a plate … and changing it in states, like Picasso’.

From 1967 to 1971 Dine lived and worked in London. A peripatetic artist and a compulsive printmaker, he has sought out print workshops all over the world. Many of his prints were made with Petersburg Press in London and New York as well as with Atelier Crommelynck in Paris and New York. The gift also includes later work, including self-portraits and his most recent portfolio, A History of Communism, from lithographic stones