Manhattan Rare Book Company

“What motivated you to begin the series of Bathrobes pictures?"

"Well, I had been seeing a psychiatrist for two, maybe two and a half years. I was focusing on myself, obviously, and I’d been trying to make a self-portrait besides just looking in the mirror. I thought there must be some other way to make a self-portrait […]. One Sunday, in the New York Times, I saw this ad for bathrobes and it was a bathrobe with nobody in it. It looked like me. It looked like my physique. So I thought, if I use this, I really can make a miraculous self-portrait. And it was a found object, you could say. And that’s how it began… When I saw the bathrobe… It looked like I was truly in it. And therefore I felt I was destined to use it."

- Jim Dine, Interview with Clare Bell, from “Jim Dine: Walking Memory”

LARGE, ICONIC ROBE PAINTING BY LEGENDARY AMERICAN ARTIST JIM DINE.

“The key element that secured Dine’s following among aspiring artists in the swinging ’60s was his autobiographical, diaristic approach to making art. The objects he chose to represent were either linked to his past or locked into his current interests. The tools he depicted were an echo of a childhood spent in his father’s hardware store in Cincinnati, the heart was a valentine for his wife, and the bathrobe became a representation of self, constantly re-invented and re-imagined in paintings, prints and drawings.

“Although he claimed never to have worn one, Dine first embraced the heroic form of the vacated robe as a subject in 1964 and gave his paintings and prints titles that often referred to himself, such as “Double Isometric Self-Portrait”. Without the human body to give the garment a point of specificity or individuality, the robe became an everyman as much as a self-portrait.” (Ted Snell, “Here’s looking at: Jim Dine’s The Mighty Robe”, The Conversation, 2017).

Signed and Dated (bottom center), 1980. Oil, charcoal and chalk on paper, in two parts. Each Sheet: 46½ by 29½ in. (118.1 by 74.9 cm.), hinged at upper corners of the reverse to the backing board. Overall Framed (under plexiglass): 48½ by 62½ in. (123.2 by 158.8 cm.)

The top, left, and bottom edges of each sheet are deckled. With several artist's staple marks. A few small tears at extreme edges (as visible), likely from previous mounting/framing. Faint abrasion and minor loss to the pigment in the lower left corner of the left sheet, visible upon close inspection.

Price: $68,000 .