Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969 (Guggenheim Museum Publications)

Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969 accompanies a traveling exhibition that visits the Guggenheim Museum in New York City during the spring of 1999, then heads to the Cincinnati Art Museum in the fall. A Cincinnati native, Dine moved to New York in the late 1950s and quickly became part of the roiling art scene there, which included contemporaries like Claes Oldenburg and Red Grooms. Dine's oeuvre includes paintings, sculpture, and performance. The images in the book are full of vivid color and objects--tools, hearts, and domestic interiors--repeated thematically, and they cover all three areas of his work. One performance still, From Vaudeville Collage (1960), shows Dine disguised in a costume and a painted face performing alongside an ensemble cast of leafy vegetables. Summer Tools (1962) is a three-paneled painting with splotches of rainbow colors and a hammer, rope, screwdriver, and other hand tools attached to the top. Dine's flair for the theatrical is on full view in both of these pieces. In addition to the color plates, the book includes essays by Germano Celant, Clare Bell, and Julia Blant, as well as an interview with Dine. A great opportunity to look at works by one of the premier assemblage artists of the 1960s. --Jennifer Cohen

248 pages; 156 images