VIENNA.- The Albertina is showing 60 of Jim Dine’s fascinating self-portraits, a representative selection from the 80-year-old artist’s generous donation to the museum that presents him in a great number of his many facets. This group of works makes possible an independent, intense, and surprising dialogue with the artist and his output. Here, Dine’s diverse experiments with a wide range of techniques and materials address themes including youth and old age, intimacy and extroversion, and seriality, and creativity on paper. And not insignificantly, these selfportraits open up new insights into a supposedly familiar oeuvre.
Due to the way in which his work has been widely interpreted, Jim Dine ranks alongside figures such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as one of the celebrated stars of American pop art. Upon his arrival in New York in 1958, Dine quickly became part of the city’s innovative and dynamic art scene. His output at that time, which can be superficially defined as objectrelated, led to the artist’s being counted among the originators of America’s 1960s pop art alongside figures like Andy Warhol, Wayne Thiebaud, and Roy Lichtenstein—a categorisation that initially concealed his output’s subjective aspects.
The figurative motifs from back then, such as bathrobes, hearts, tools, and boots, can be interpreted above all as placeholders for his own self, as a “vocabulary of his feelings”, as Dine himself has put it. Dealing with his own self is a theme that runs throughout Dine’s comprehensive and multifaceted oeuvre. Even as a child, the artist (born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935) developed a special fascination for the mirror. And it was the mirror that went on to become the foundation of an intense preoccupation with the self-portrait as a constantly recurring motif. This genre began appearing in his output during the 1970s, and to this day, it remains a highly significant element of his oeuvre, functioning as a motif of artistic selfreflection. Dine has always been interested in the subjective, the innermost. And there is hardly any point at which he does not have a self-portrait in progress. The self-portrait, with himself as the model, affords the artist complete freedom and independence from others— and thus the ability to fully devote himself to his main concern, which is to create a good artwork while at the same time giving space to his own self-understanding.
Again and again, Dine’s self-portraits manifest new descriptions of the invariant core of Dine the human being: his character, his steadfastness and determinedness, his intransigent seriousness … all this with monomaniacal exclusivity.
Each individual work bears witness to the immediacy with which the American artist studies his own facial features—which is also the source of the credibility and emotional authenticity in these self-portraits. Each and every one is the immediate result of a seemingly one-time encounter in the mirror. The artist works to bring out his face anew in every picture –an effort of untiring consistency that makes his self-portraits so powerful.
It was just recently that Dine produced his latest work, a lithograph entitled Me In Apetlon, at the lithography studio Chavanne in Burgenland. This self-portrait is yet another expression of the passion and enthusiasm that Jim Dine devotes to techniques used to produce printed graphics, via which and in which he has created numerous central works—not least taking highly innovative approaches to traditional techniques. In doing so, the artist always also stresses the great significance of his collaboration with the printers in question—not only as the antithesis of solitary studio work, but also as a process that involves creative exchange and productive execution.
Jim Dine refers to himself as “a painter who draws,” and he is justifiably convinced that he cannot be lumped into any artistic styles or -isms. Free and unconventional use of the possibilities offered by painting, drawing, and printed graphics, as well as ongoing concentration on his own person as his content and motif, characterise the deeply individual dimension of his art. Dine’s monumental self-portraits play a fundamental role here, since they illustrate the artist’s unwavering introspection as well as his calm, concentrated creativity.
The basis for this exhibition is provided by the generous gift that Jim Dine made to the Albertina last year. His gift encompassed over 230 self-portraits done between the 1950s and today in the most varied techniques: drawings, printed graphics, and photographs. This bundle of works is part of Jim Dine’s “archive”, as calls it, which he has distributed and continues to distribute among various museums.
