July 05, 2004
Jim Dine, Drawing Master
More from the National Gallery of Art (it's seeming like a DC vacation is in order): a retrospective of Jim Dine's drawings. Drawing is definitely back in style. After the lean minimalist years, the Whitney Biennial featured several drawings and now the National Gallery focuses on drawing. A review in ArtNet by Tyler Green (who appears to dislike Dine and not be too fond of drawing in general) sums the situation up clearly: "No doubt drawing is ubiquitous these days. Many artists are embracing making work with their hands and not with their Duchampian cortex. " Yes!!! A return to craft. I, for one, am ready to celebrate!
From the exhibition overview:
"Dine's regard for the work of earlier artists--Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, among others--deepened when he lived abroad between 1967 and 1971. At the same time, he distanced himself from emerging movements such as minimalism, with its emphasis on simple geometric forms. When Dine returned to the United States in 1971 he began to draw regularly, and by 1974 he had embarked on a self-styled course in life drawing. For an artist so steeped in the avant-garde, it was a dramatic, if not defiant, shift."
"Drawing is not an exercise.
Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and going nowhere.
Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey.
For me to succeed in drawing, I must go fast and arrive somewhere.
The quest is to keep the thing alive..."
--Jim Dine, 2003
image: Tree (The Kimono), 1980 by Jim Dine
