American artist Jim Dine was born in 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio to second-generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In 1948, Dine began to take art classes at the studio of local artist Vincent Taylor, and in high school, he attended evening classes at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He studied at night at the Cincinnati Art Academy during his senior year of high school and then attended the University of Cincinnati, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Ohio University, Athens, from which he received his B.F.A. in 1957. Dine moved to New York in 1959.

In 1962 Dine’s work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historic and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, at the Norton Simon Museum. This exhibition is considered to be one of the first “Pop Art” exhibitions in America. The Pop-Abstract Expressionist divide had lasting effects for Dine. Like many of his colleagues, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg. Jim Dine did not separate himself completely from Abstract Expressionism. Instead, he blended an expressive and human style with recognizable and often personal objects. He was able to incorporate the basic philosophies of both movements into his work. In a 1963 interview, “What is Pop Art,” Dine explained his position:
“I don’t believe there was a sharp break and this [Pop Art] is replacing Abstract Expressionism. Pop art is only one facet of my work. More than popular images I’m interested in personal images…I tie myself to Abstract Expressionism like fathers and sons.”

His work appears in major collections across the United States and abroad, and he has been honored with several prizes and admissions to prestigious art societies, such as the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters, New York, and the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin. Over the last four decades, Dine has produced more than three thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, as well as performance works, stage and book designs, poetry, and even music. His art has been the subject of numerous individual and group shows and is in the permanent collections of museums around the world.
Jim Dine Hearts is one of the most beloved themes, central to the artist’s historical body of work.
While hearts are universally recognizable, within contemporary art history, Jim Dine has laid undisputed claim to the shape, suggesting boundless possibilities endowed with complex meaning.
Together with other everyday forms, including bathrobes and tools, Dine’s work is often placed within the realm of Pop Art. The subjects of his work are invested with rich personal significance through the artist’s tactile brushwork. A self-described romantic artist, Dine has embraced the heart as a template through which he can explore relationships of color, texture, and composition. Dine’s dynamic repetition of a condensed visual vocabulary has redefined the once-common heart as a personal symbol for the artist.