Little Blue Pinocchio

Jim Dine is one of the best-known artists in the U.S. Born and educated in Ohio, he came to art world attention in the late 1950s as a protege of Allen Kaprow (as Hung Liu would be later in the 1980s) and Claes Oldenburg and the very new Happenings. Dine was included in “New Painting of Common Objects” in 1962, one of the very first newly named Pop Art exhibitions. Artists in that exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum included Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud. Although Dine’s work would evolve with subject matter including repetitions of tools, hearts, bathrobes, and images of Pinocchio, Dine resists the connection to Pop Art, and feels more closely allied with the neo-Dadaists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Those artists pose more questions about everyday symbols than glorifying them as would be the case with Pop Art. Success continued for Dine through the 1980s, and his work is now in the collections of the British Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.