Four Hearts 1969

Jim Dine made this print, Four Hearts, and it looks like he built it up with layers of color and texture, so it’s hard to know exactly when. I just love the dominant red and pink palette against the blues, purples and greens. It must have been quite a journey to create this. I can imagine him starting with the hearts, maybe, and then feeling like they needed some friends, so he added all those colorful pebble-like shapes around them. You can almost see Dine thinking about the colors, like how one color makes another one pop, how they play off each other. That lower left heart, for example, it’s like he outlined it in yellow, giving it a little extra zing. And the way those pebble shapes are smudged and textured, that’s not an accident. The physicality of it all communicates feeling, intention, meaning. Artists are always talking to each other, even across time. Dine probably had a peek at what the other artists were doing and took it as a starting point. This piece is full of ambiguity and uncertainty, which means we can all bring our own interpretations to the table.