Themes in Progress

MIDDLE AGE is often the period when an artist re-evaluates past accomplishments and seeks new directions. The struggle to master the means of expression gives way to an examination of the ends to which those means are being used and the nagging feeling that time is beginning to run out while there is still much to do.

Jim Dine, at the age of 41, can look back on almost two decades of creativity and success as an artist. Shortly after his arrival in New York in 1959, fresh from the University of Cinncinnati and the Boston Museum School, he met and was influenced by Claes Oldenburg, Jaspar Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. During the 1960s he became a major figure in the movement back to realism that formed in reaction to abstract expressionism.

Dine's works during these years are theatrical and iconoclastic. Paintings like Black Bathroom #2, in which a china sink is hung on a painted canvas, and An Animal, done with oil paint and fur, challenge traditional notions of what a painting is. Underlying the deliberate crudeness and banality of many of the works of this period is a keen sensitivity to and enjoyment of the sensuous feel of paint and the manipulation of brush and pencil. This sensitivity takes the form of subtle relationships between line, tone and texture in his graphic works.

THE EXHIBITION of etchings and lithographs by Dine, currently at M.I.T.'s Hayden Gallery, displays works from the 1970s, after Dine had left New York to teach at Oberlin and then lived in Europe for several years. Without trying to analyze step-by-step developments in Dine's graphic art during the past six years, the exhibition does a good job of showing major themes and trends.

Tools occupy a special place in Dine's gallery of symbols, and several prints of paintbrushes, hammers, scissors and other assorted household implements, lovingly described by the artist, are displayed. The son and grandson of hardware store owners, Dine spent long hours "daydreaming amongst objects of affection." His wrenches and tinsnips and an autobiographical series of bathrobes are not the public icons of Pop art but personal, private emblems imbued with witty, sly personalities. "I'm concerned with interiors when I use objects," Dine has said, "I see them as a vocabulary of feelings..." Dine often reworks a plate, taking the print through several states, as in an etching of a paintbrush done in 1970 which Dine reworks two years later, transforming the brush's short straight bristles into a thick beard of long, electrically charged tendrils.

As DINE HAS concentrated more and more on traditional draughtsmanship in recent years, gradually abandoning the addition of real objects to his paintings, he has also become increasingly willing to deal with the human figure directly rather than through the metaphor of tools or the substitution of an article of clothing, such as a pair of boots or a bathrobe, for the person. 8 Sheets for an Undefined Novel, a suite of etchings done in 1976 of single figures in black ink on soft gray paper, are among the most beautiful works in the show. The seated and half-length figures, part human, part mannequin, in these large prints are lost in private, unidentifiable thoughts. They are mysterious, often disturbing and erotic images, rich in psychological overtones. To several of the partly nude female figures Dine has added genitals painted in watercolor so that they glow like jewels.

These works are clearly themes in progress. The human figure has haunted artists to the present day, including many wedded to an abstract mode of expression. Dine's heroes are Cezanne and de Kooning. He has set himself high standards; it will be interesting to watch in the next few years how he meets their challenge.