Art: Poet of the Personal

Some of my best friends are my walking shoes tucked away in the corner of my foolish pocket of felt objects . . , —Jim Dine

There was a pair of old loafers, worn within a day of falling apart and mounted as casually as if their owner had just stepped out of them. And a green suit, stiff with splattered paint and age, its trousers nothing but ribbons. And bathroom sinks, garden tools, paint brushes, and the names of hundreds of people crammed onto one giant autograph book of a canvas. Last week, when Manhattan's Whitney Museum opened a retrospective exhibition of Jim Dine, 34, it was obvious that Dine's "pocket of felt objects" had spilled many times out of his poetry into his art.

From the worn-out loafers to the signatures of his friends, the show offers an unusually personal view of an artist. Dine never really belonged to Pop art, though he has often been identified with it. He rode the same swift wave to success as Oldenburg, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Wesselmann, shared their conviction that the vocabulary of abstract expressionism was all but exhausted, and gave the object a primary place in his painting. But where Pop's lifeblood was popular imagery, Dine used objects that had figured in his own experience. Where Pop was social, analytical, sometimes bitterly satirical, Dine is emotional, personal and autobiographical. "In some way or another, it's all about my landscape," he says. "I'm really only interested in being a biographer of myself."

Dream of Hardware. His love of objects, Dine figures, goes back to his boyhood in Cincinnati, where he worked after school in his father's hardware store. "I was completely bored by the selling," he recalls, "but in my boredom I found that daydreaming amongst objects of affection was very nice. Commercial paint-color charts were real jewel lists for me." After majoring in painting at Ohio University in Athens, he set off for New York in 1959. Happenings were what was happening, and Dine was soon in the thick of them. "Happenings were good because they got rid of a lot of ideas that could not be used in painting," he says now.

Next he began picking up objects and juxtaposing them with the painted canvas. His use of the object can be seen as something of a contemporary parallel to the 19th century American still-life painters Peto and Harnett, who in their trompe-ľoeil arrangements of everydayobjects anticipated many of the same concerns that preoccupied the new realists of the 1960s. One Dine's most successful "combines" is a 1962 work in which an actual lawnmower is mounted in front of the canvas. Green paint clings to the blades like bits of fresh-cut grass, while the handle guides the eye into a surprising explosion of color suggesting a summery landscape.