"Pop is concerned with exteriors. I'm concerned with interiors. When I use objects, I see them as a vocabulary of feelings.", Jim Dine
Jim Dine (born June 16, 1935) is an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, and poet, and one of the central figures of postwar American art. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he attended the Cincinnati Art Academy as a high-school student, then the University of Cincinnati, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Ohio University, where he completed his BFA in 1957. He moved to New York in 1958 and quickly became one of the small group of artists, alongside Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, and others, who staged the early Happenings at the Judson Gallery and the Reuben Gallery, helping to invent the form of performance art that defined the avant-garde of the early 1960s.
His inclusion in the 1962 Pasadena Art Museum exhibition New Painting of Common Objects placed him at the founding of American Pop Art, but his own work has consistently insisted on a more interior, autobiographical reading of the everyday object than the Pop label suggests. The recurring motifs of his career, bathrobes, tools, hearts, Pinocchio, and the self-portrait, have been worked across more than six decades of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and stage design. He lives and works in Walla Walla, Washington, and Paris, and his work is held in essentially every major museum of postwar American art, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.