During the 1950s and 1960s, Jim Dine was named the most affectionate pop art master alongside American pop art pioneers Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. In his most recognized and collected series “The Hearts,” Dine created heart-themed paintings and sculptures that quickly took the world by storm.

Born in the State of Ohio in 1935, Dine studied art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After moving to New York in 1950, Jim Dine co-created “Happenings” between 1959 and 1960 with Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Whitman, which is a type of improvisational, freestyle performance art that combines music, drama, and other visual elements. Dine has since risen to prominence as he set off on a journey of creation lasting over half a century. In 1962, Dine collaborated with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Wayne Thiebaud on a joint exhibition titled “New Painting of Common Objects” at the Norton Simon Museum. This exhibition was often regarded by modern art critics as the first pop art exhibition in the United States, which is why Dine is often accredited as a pop artist.

However, distinct from other pop artists, Dine placed a greater emphasis on internal expressions. His paintings feature recurrent images that are hand-painted with bright colors and bold outlines in an art style some scholars described as an integration of strong Neo-expressionism. Dine often chose themes that are deeply connected to his personal life experiences with symbolic significance. In his artwork, hearts represent beautiful things and his wife, bathrobes imply the artist himself, and Pinocchio serves as an analogy of the transformative art creation process that turns stone into gold. In 1966, the police seized Dine’s London exhibition for publicly displaying obscene images. Although a subsequent clarification was made about the gallery not meeting required standards, the traditional art environment in London inspired Dine to challenge its conservative social perceptions. This is what led him to move to London in the following year.

Dine believed that the tools and processes of creation are as equally important as the finished artworks. The replacement of creative materials in paintings, prints, photography, wood engraving, and copper carving played a pivotal role in the first half of the artist’s creative career. Over the past thirty years, Dine not only continued to express art through painting, but also created outstanding print collections that are widely praised by the academic community. The artist donated 234 prints to the British Museum in 2015 and launched a new exhibition in Paris in 2020. In displaying large paintings and sculptures to the public, this exhibition also demonstrated Dine’s never ending creativity.

In this spring audition, the painting Cadmium Red Medium features Dine’s signature hearts theme in a delicate size. The artist applied compact, rich layers of paint to form textures. The image is dominated by brown hues with a contrast between bright red and azure to highlight different visual dimensions and depth, instilling vibrant energy into the hearts in the painting. As one of the artist’s most popular themes, the “hearts” are the core of all his creations. By giving a unique view to styles and endowing ordinary “hearts” with complex and infinite possibilities, Dine is undoubtedly a Romanticism painter in this contemporary era.