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| New York, 6 Avenue |
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| New York, 6 Avenue |
Jim Dine is a contemporary
American visual artist who was born in 1935. Jim Dine has had numerous gallery and museum
exhibitions, including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Museum of Modern Art.
In the early 1960s Dine produced pop art with
items from everyday life. These provided commercial as well as critical
success, but left Dine unsatisfied. Since the late 1980s, the artist has sketched and studied Greek and Roman
sculpture, and the form of the Venus de Milo has become one of his favorite
themes, depicted in a variety of media.
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| New York, 6 Avenue |
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| Cleveland |
These are three of Jim Dine's
sculptures collectively entitled "Looking Toward The Avenue"
installed in 1989 in the small plaza on the east side of Sixth Avenue at west
53rd and 54th Streets in Manhattan. The verdigris bronze statues emerge from a water pool. These
sculptures are based on Venus de Milo, a
masterpiece from the 2nd century BC.
Another Venus, the largest of all of Dine's sculptures, is installed above
the entrance to Cleveland's new, 22-story Carl B. Stokes Court House.
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| Venus de Milo. Paris, Louvre Museum |
These statues were inspired
by the Venus de Milo, a masterpiece of
the 2nd century BC. The Venus de Milo
was sculpted by the artist Alexandros of Antioch as a depiction of the Greek goddess of love,
Aphrodite and is the most famous
sculpture and, after the Mona Lisa, the most famous work of art in the world. It is currently on permanent display at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The statue was discovered in 1820 on
Milos island in Greece , when farmers dug up stones for their houses. Originally
she was painted and adorned with accents, such as ear rings and a bracelet,
intended to give her a more life like appearance. In her left hand she held an
apple, the symbol of Milos, and her right arm was across her torso. The golden
apple is also the symbol of her being “the fairest of the goddesses.”
The statue was found in two
large pieces (the upper torso and the lower draped legs) along with several
fragments. A farmer tried to hide the
statue in his stone house, but Turkish officials later seized it. The French
naval officer realized its importance
and made arrangements to purchase it from Turkey. The statue was taken to
France by boat and after repair work, was offered to Louis the XVIII. He
presented it to the Louvre museum where it can still be seen.
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| Salvador Dali, Venus with drawers |
Venus de Milo image is reproduced in advertisements, on
covers of CDs, even as saltshakers. But she
has also inspired artists such as Cézanne, Dali and Magritte.
Spanish artist Salvador Dali used a statue
as a model for ‘Venus de Milo with drawers’ .As a child,
Dali's first sculpture was a clay copy of the Venus de Milo. For 1936 Surrealist object, Dali cuts six
drawers into Venus, transforming the Greek goddess into a piece of living
furniture, a visual pun on the phrase "chest" of drawers, also known
as a bureau. The drawers are a metaphor for the way Freudian psychoanalysis
opens the hidden areas of the unconscious.
Dalí said: “The only difference between the immortal Greece and
contemporary times is Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, purely
platonic at the Greece epoch, nowadays is full of secret drawers that only the
psychoanalysis is capable to open”.
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