Putney Winter Heart #8 (Skier)
Dine, Jim, American painter, sculptor, born 1935
1971-1972
oil on canvas with shoes, mittens, rocks, glove, shirt, nail, rope and tin foil collage
F. V. du Pont Acquisition Fund, 2001

Jim Dine's work can be identified by the emergence, disappearance and reemergence of a handful of specific themes. Tools, Robes, Palettes, Trees, Gates and Hearts have dominated his thematic output for nearly four decades. Putney Winter Heart #8 (Skier), a recent acquisition to the Museum's Permanent Collection, is a monumental and playful example of the artist's use of the Heart motif. The Heart first made its appearance as a major theme in Dine's work in 1965 when he incorporated it in stage sets designed for a San Francisco production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The symbol of the heart, commonplace and universally recognizable, is for Dine an iconic emblem which evokes a host of associations He has returned to this subject matter often, using it as the backdrop for what he describes as symbolic self portraits. Combined with found objects, Dine's Hearts are self referential, embodying his personal impressions, emotions and reminiscences.

Putney Winter Heart #8 (Skier) was created shortly after Dine moved to a small farm in Putney, Vermont, in the spring of 1971. Working out of doors during the summer months, he built a small studio, heavily insulated against the cold, for the winter. At that time he decided to create a group of paintings six-feet square around the Heart motif, of which this is one. He intended the series to embody his personal reactions to life in Vermont. In this work he painted a large-scale abstract heart with an expressive use of bold color with broad gestural strokes and drips of paint. Dine then attached actual objects from the real world - a pair of shoes, socks, shirt, rope, paint encrusted workman's gloves and a commercially produced red mitten in which an image of a skier is woven. The work is autobiographical, embodying Dine's physical sensations and emotional responses to southern Vermont - the crispness of cold air, the warmth of sun on his face, the clarity of blue skies, snow on the hilly Vermont landscape, the joy of leisure activities such as hiking and skiing, working on the farm and painting in the studio. Putney Winter Heart #8 (Skier) is an intensely personal work, an assemblage of colors, brushstrokes, and commonplace objects that are at once private, poetic and ironic, a reflection of Dine's feelings about life.

The combination of painted surface and found objects indicates Dine's desire to blur the traditionally drawn boundaries between High Art and real life, a Modernist concern that can be traced back to the early decades of 20th century in the collages of Picasso and Braque. More immediate precursors to Dine's work are the lushly painted surfaces of Abstract Expression created out of internally motivated processes to articulate the self as well as the emblematic flag and target images of Jasper Johns and the found object combines of Robert Rauschenberg. It was Rauschenberg's work, reproduced in the art journals of the late 1950s, that motivated Dine to move from his home state of Ohio to New York in 1958. It was his esthetic link to Johns and Rauschenberg as well as Tom Wesselman and James Rosenquist that connected Dine to the Pop Art Movement of the 1960s, a categorization that makes the artist uncomfortable. Less interested in the objective disengagement, broad social commentary and commercial design orientation of Pop, Dine has always maintained his works are symbols of the self, psychologically charged with personal elements that have a tendency to strike a common chord of recognition in the viewer.