Jim Dine (The Alchemy of Images)

In fewer than four decades, Jim Dine has produced more than 3,500 works in an astonishing range of media -- above all in painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, but with occasional excursions into performance, stage design, book design, poetry, and even music -- using a variety of approaches and imagery. Illustrated with over three hundred exceptional examples, this is the most comprehensive survey of this important artist's oeuvre. From Dine's early Happenings in the late 1950s to his most recent paintings, Marco Livingstone has documented and analyzed the evolution of both work and artist by exploring and discussing several themes in great detail. The discussion of these themes, ordered chronologically, presents a tightly woven account of the artist's development: his reaction to abstract expressionism and action painting of the late 1950s and early 1960s; the central role of objects used both as constituent elements of assemblages and sculptures and as a fund of images; the various art-making techniques and "hands-on" quality of his art; his profound vocabulary of images as well as his signature motifs; and his return to direct observation and life drawing, supplementing representations of the human body in the form of fragments, clothing, and tools. Integrated into Livingstone's text are short essays by Dine himself, giving insight into his personal history and his relation to visual material.