Poet Singing the Flowering Sheets by Jim Dine

In 2007 the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California asked Jim Dine to make a work in response to a part of their antiquities collection at the "Villa".

Dine carved three large scale wood sculputes, painting them with very bright colors in the ancient Hellenistic way, and surrounded them with a long poem attached to the wall. The entire process was documented for this book with photographs by Diana Michener, Gerhard Steidl and Jim Dine.

Jim Dine, an American painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and poet who emerged during the Pop art period as an innovative creator of works that combine the painted canvas with ordinary objects of daily life. His persistent themes included those of personal identity, memory, and the body.

The subject of Dine’s work of the 1970s remained commonplace objects, but he showed a growing preoccupation with graphic media. His exploitation of nuances of line and texture is especially evident in his images of flowers and portraits of his wife done in the late 1970s.