Valerie Fletcher: When Jim Dine left his native Cincinnati in 1958 to go to New York and become an artist, he did not yet realize that his family’s business would have an impact on his art. His family had a hardware store in Cincinnati. Jim Dine, when he first began working as an artist, was primarily a painter. And as his subject, he often took ordinary objects from everyday life. This put him in the circle of the emerging Pop Artists Movement, which is a reaction against abstraction and very refined sense of aesthetics; Rather, they wanted to return art to a common appeal from ordinary life to ordinary people. Andy Warhol for example was painting soup cans and Brillo boxes. Lichtenstein was depicting comics or images related to comic books. Jim Dine was painting, for example a series of canvases on a man’s tie, a four-foot high tie in peach for example.

As time went on, he moved to Vermont and lived on a farm with his family, and as time went further on in the 70s and 80s, he became caught up equally in the idea that a subject of art could be art. Indeed many artists in the 1980s were addressing the history of art as their motif in their own works. And so in The History of Black Bronze, the sculpture here by Jim Dine in 1983, he is presenting a tabletop array of motifs. One of them is the Venus de Milo, one of the great icons of classical Greco-Roman sculpture and one of the great attractions in Musée du Louvre in Paris. Another one is a Pharaonic head of one of the pharaohs from ancient Egypt. Then there are two heads, possibly female but indeterminate, that had merged together in a very expressionist style, this possibly an evocation of the works of Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss sculptor who worked in Paris, and indeed Giacometti made a sculpture called The Surrealist Table with objects that he thought were of interest in 1933. Then on Jim Dine’s table, there is an upraised hand that is probably a reference to the hand sculptures done as kind of anguished motifs by Auguste Rodin in the 1890s. And then there are a couple of hammers and a pry bar. These tools indeed relate to Jim Dine’s own art because he had been doing paintings and sculptures of tools, hammers, shovels, pickaxes, and screwdrivers, and painters’ brushes. And so together here in this one tabletop array, he has put together his love of the history of art dating back to ancient Greece and Rome. Right up through the present time, through the surrealism of Giacometti and the expressionism of Rodin to his own art, which is using ordinary objects from everyday life as a pretext for creating works of art.