Greek and Roman Musings: Jim Dine’s Drawings of Ancient Sculpture
by Vincent Katz

Munich's Glyptothek is a cherished site of pilgrimage for art-lovers, a treasure-trove of early Western sculptural masterpieces spanning nearly a millennium of Greek and Roman endeavor. King Ludwig I (1786-1868), who acquired many of the museum's works during a trip to Italy in 1804 and in succeeding years through emissaries, commissioned architect Leo von Klenze to build a palace for them.  Begun in 1816, the building opened in 1830, with a name coined by the King himself: Glyptothek, or museum of carving.
Jim Dine made his first visit to the Glyptothek museum in Munich in 1985 quite by chance. “I had been meaning to go to the Alte Pinakothek, to see the old paintings, when I saw it," Dine recalls. "I couldn’t believe it, because they’d done such a great job of re-modeling the Glyptothek, of re-building it after the War. It had been completely demolished, the roof and everything.”
         Dine's first Glyptothek drawings were done during regular visiting hours, by sitting on a canvas chair provided by the museum and drawing directly from the works on view.  Finding himself unable to work under public scrutiny, Dine withdrew to Venice, where, armed with photographs and newspaper clippings, he created in 1987 and 1988 The Glyptothek Drawings, a single work composed of 40 small drawings on drafting paper, tissue paper and Mylar, from which he made an artist’s book of 40 intaglio prints of the images. “They were then shown at the Albertina in Vienna,” Dine recounts, “and a dealer from Munich saw them and told Klaus Vierneisel, the director of the Glyptothek. He invited me back, saying, ‘You can do whatever you want in the museum!’” Vierneisel already had a sophisticated program of showing contemporary art at the Glyptothek in relation to its collection of ancient masterpieces, including a show of drawings by Joseph Beuys and an intervention by Roni Horn in the museum’s courtyard.
“Vierneisel said, ‘You can come in any time,’” Dine continues. “So, I said, ‘Okay, I’ll come in about four in the morning.’ I’d set my alarm clock, come in at four. I had my easel and my stuff in a closet, I had a piece of plastic I’d put on the floor, and I’d work until about nine. There was one guard who played chess with himself, I never saw him. Otherwise, nothing. It was a little spooky, pitch black. This guy would put on one or two lights for me. Then, I would draw as intensely as I could, to get this thing down. Around nine, the guards would start to come in, and I didn’t want them to see what I’d done. I didn’t want to have to explain it. I’d stop. I’d take the drawing to the hotel, and the next day I’d bring another clean piece of paper. I did the same thing every day for a week, maybe eight days. It was such a pleasure to be able to meditate on the work of a colleague, who is nameless. Some guy with a chisel did these things.”
Drawing has always been central to Dine’s work, but the period in the mid 1970s, when he devoted himself to drawing the human figure, can be seen as a cardinal point in his career, a hinge which moved him from one plane of work into another, not necessarily higher, just at a different angle to the world.  To move from the living figure to the figure in stone or metal is again a planar shift. Before going to the Glyptothek, Dine had said, “…there are two kinds of drawings, drawings of people and drawings from photographs. In those from photographs, I’m not interested in the likeness. I’m interested in getting something… expressive. In the portraits of people, I’m interested in getting the portrait likeness.”
In drawing the sculptures at the Glyptothek, Dine put himself in the tradition of Western art that looks back to its masterpieces as models of composition and technique, but relying on his graphic mannerisms, Dine does not so much pay homage to the past as get beyond it. Beginning from these stationary, nameless models, created by artists unknown to us today, he gets a sense of a person and a work of art that is distinct from the model.
When you look for a long time at the drawings Dine did in the Glyptothek, interesting things start to happen. Closely examining the two drawings of the Barberini Faun, for example, you suddenly feel that you are looking at the body, which is what the sculptor was getting you to do, too, but here you are looking at the drawing through the sculpture to the body. Dine, ignoring the sculpture while looking straight at it, gets you closer to the body—through his constant modulations of tone and temperament, the rips and shreddings of paper, the variation of hard-edge line he uses on the right inside thigh, combined with loose, washy painting over the belly, delicate pencil marks, and the ever-present footprints, in this case in the upper left corner of the drawing with the whole torso and head visible. The other Faun drawing, with the upper torso cut off, is more of a straight-on shot of the crotch area, extensively worked in charcoal. Thickened areas of black charcoal take on lives of their own. The Faun of the original sculpture is sleeping naked, a probably drunken satyr, whose spread availability, complete nakedness, and rough countenance are calculated to trigger feelings of animal lust. There is no hint of the perfection of the human form here. The satyr’s hanging arm is full of blood, its veins popping. It is a Hellenistic masterpiece, distinct from the lofty perfection of archaic kouroi and possessing a baroque excess distinguishing it from Roman sculpture. Dine’s drawing, like his drawing of his former wife, Nancy, (Portrait of Nancy (Nude), 1987), remains sexy, while drawing attention to its worked artistry.
         One should be wary of over-emphasizing the role of subject matter in Dine's Glyptothek drawings.  The modernity of his works distances them from particular stories of mythical or historical figures portrayed in the sculptures. The distancing factor is great between a contemporary viewer and an historical figure such as the Roman emperor Trajan. Add to that the complexities of imperial portraiture, in which it was incumbent on artists to create images that reflected the way supreme rulers wished to be depicted, and the real person is as removed as a mythological subject, such as the Trojan archer Paris from the classical Greek temple to Aphaia on the island of Aegina—or a type, such as the Hellenistic faun that came to light during the reign of Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini, 1623-1644).
Dine’s drawings do have a lot to do, however, with the original artworks. Apart from facts of idealizing or genericizing, there are the more pressing questions of the artist’s motivations and actions when faced with these ancient works of art. He speaks of his “dialogue” with the antique, a funny phrase, since it implies that he talks to the antique, as well as its talking to him.  While I’m drawing I don’t ever think about where the sculptures were done... A lot of the things I draw from are Roman copies of Greek sculptures... I don’t want to draw these things as dead objects, as stone. I want to observe them carefully, and then I want to put life into them and make them vigorous and physical....”
       The scalar relations Dine creates between the subject and the paper edges are instructive. Dine has long been interested in what could be called “Colossalism.” Among his early achievements in painting was a series of subjects painted large: a man’s tie, a bathrobe, sections of hair and skin. Of the hundreds of objects in the Glyptothek, Dine chose certain ones to draw. He may have been attracted by the colossalism of the head of Titus, but he modulated this in his drawing, bringing the deified emperor back to human scale. Some of the figures in the sculptures are approximately life-size, but others are smaller; Dine’s drawings play with our expectations or lack of them. The late 4th century BCE Tanagra figures are in reality quite small, as is the dancing figure that forms the subject for Red Dancers on the Western Shore, and yet the latter are some of the most imposing of Dine’s Greek and Roman drawings.
The selection for the present exhibition allows us to observe a mini-history of Dine’s treatments of classical subjects, and the different technical approaches he has employed, ranging from charcoal and pencil to thickly brushed acrylic, along with physical interventions of rubbing, scraping and sanding. The earliest in the group (Large Drawing of a Small Statue, 1978) is not Greek or Roman but Egyptian. The next (Study for the Venus in Black and Gray, 1983) comes from the archetypal Greek depiction of female beauty, the Venus de Milo. However, the drawing is not of the original or a picture of the original but of one of Dine’s own sculptural permutations of the subject. In the drawing of the Venus, the dialogue between drawing and sculpture is stressed by scratches on the drawing’s surface and a tear that traverses more than a third of the sheet.
With Red Dancers on the Western Shore, 1986, Dine is moving into Glyptothek territory. These four large drawings were made from a small figure in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Dine’s vision of them is as someone who has seen them up close, has entered into the scale of the sculpture, and therefore sees it as life-size, not as a tiny object in a large vitrine. Once on the level of the sculpture, his imagination sees its motion and transcribes that, making a four-part image whose intense red ground matches the fast-paced gestures of the charcoal drawing. He sees the thrusting energy of the figure and takes it at face value, feeling no need to define it: it could be a dancer or a murder, or both. Study for Europe, 1987, is of a Neapolitan mosaic. These four pieces are pre-Glyptothek, but they show a desire for what the Glyptothek provides. As Dine said in 1979, “I’m looking more at ancient art now, because I’m trying to understand sculpture.”
       In Der Glyptothek is a series of seventeen drawings produced by Dine in 1989. He began several of them at the museum in Munich and continued to work on them at his studio in London, while others of the drawings were made wholly in London, using Glyptothek sculptures as subjects. Of the seventeen drawings, eleven are in the present exhibition:
Sleeping Satyr (Barberini Faun); Sleeping Satyr (Barberini Faun); Homer and Socrates; Panthe; Colossal Portrait of the Emperor Titus; Portrait Bust of the Emperor Trajan; Palmette from the Parthenon; Trojan Archer (Paris); Twisted Torso of a Youth (Ilioneus); Tanagra Figures; and Aged Silenus with Wineskin.

continued