Gray Palette

Jim Dine

1963 · Watercolor, gouache, ink, acrylic, metallic paint and torn and pasted papers on tracing paper · Modern and Contemporary Art

Between 1961 and 1964 Dine made a series of works that used the shape of the artist’s palette both as a backdrop for other imagery and as a surrogate self-portrait. Here he playfully subverts the notion of the palette as the site where a painter mixes colors, rendering it not in bright hues—with the exception of a single, marginal flash of red—but largely in black, white and gray. To the thin, rather brittle surface of a sheet of tracing paper, Dine adhered torn and abraded scraps of wove paper. Their presence suggests the accrual of dried, unused pigment on the palette while simultaneously providing surfaces implicitly awaiting paint.

Artist

Jim Dine

Date

1963

Medium

Watercolor, gouache, ink, acrylic, metallic paint and torn and pasted papers on tracing paper

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Gift of Stanley Posthorn, 2004