A nomad amongst calli and skyscrapers

Published: 2009 - April/May, Cultural and Artistic Paths

A restless and nomadic artist, Jim Dine (1935) - the most European protagonist of American Pop Art - lives in an existential condition that fluctuates between the two Atlantic coasts. Nevertheless, He once wrote, during the years of Pop Art that he was not completely at home in New York “because he wanted to paint”. His present working residences are in Connecticut and the countryside of the South of France. But his preferred locations, according to his declarations, are without doubt New York and Venice. The first city configures in his birth as an artist, in the second he found his most congenial creative references. His consecration into the international art scene, at only twenty nine, resulted following the Venice Biennale in 1964. He wanted to live for long periods in the lagoon city - to see Giovanni Bellini every day, he declared - setting up a memorable anthological exhibition in 1988 at the International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro. The work of Jim Dine has therefore all the evidence of a doubly inspired source: on one side the great Venetian painting, in particular his beloved Bellini, and on the other side the form of the uninhibited American “Popular Imagery”. It is however exactly from this interweaving; this “cèliniano” journey between the two coasts of the ocean, between New York and Venice, that one of the more interesting figures of international art in our time was born.