Ancien Régime

Modern adherents to the classical world are now, as they always have been, disparate in their devotions. There is no single way to know and to possess the antique, for there is nothing simple or immutable about the past. Aby Warburg made the point in relation to Rembrandt:

We must not demand of antiquity that it should answer the question at pistol point whether it is classically serene or demoniacally frenzied, as if there were only these alternatives. It really depends on the subjective make-up of the late-born rather than on the objective character of the classical heritage whether we feel that it arouses us to passionate action or induces the calm of serene wisdom. Every age has the renaissance of antiquity it deserves.

As does every man. At all stages of life, for all manner of reasons, artists have appealed to the ancients, fastening the exigencies of a moment to a particularized antique: the mature Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, an image of untamable, chthonic passions; the young Faulkner’s faun, an emblem of perfection, paralysis, frigidity. Painters, sculptors and architects have forged more familiar and pragmatic pacts with the antique, casting Orpheus as David, making philosophers into evangelists and heroes into martyrs. Before the decline of the academy, aspiring young artists were disciplined to draw from plaster casts of doubtful credibility, generations from the originals and even more abstracted from the body. The need to study the monuments of classical art and to become familiar with the canons of idealized nature brought students from everywhere to Rome.

Jim Dine’s Drawing from the Glyptothek is an extension of the academic tradition, one that he found alive and well in 1984, when he stumbled into the Glyptothek in Munich. Shyly, discreetly, he plotted his own progress through the collection and into the past, perched on his stool between the staring marbles and the implacable gazes of the cleaners. This initial plunge led him to a concentrated program of work in the museum and in his studio, resulting in 40 drawings, most made on translucent materials to be turned into gravure prints and a portfolio, then to be organized into a single, luminous work, Glyptotek Drawings (1987-1988). Dine envisioned this piece as his own ‘glyptotek’, “a narrative about learning from the Ancient World.” He did not limit himself to the holdings in Munich, but worked intermittently at home from photographs and reproductions of sculptures in other collections. Dine’s narrative is the antithesis of disinterested scholarship. Autobiographical, faithful only to itself, the work is a compilation of personal seduction and surrender to certain periods and functions of Greek and Roman art.

This impression is intensified by comparing it with three subsequent phases of Dine’s engagement: In der Glyptothek (1989), Seven Views of the Hermaphrodite (1990) and Recent Drawings (1991-1992). Two of those series result from a self-imposed regime of one drawing per day. Such was the making of the hermaphrodite, Dine shifting daily in the orbit of a single sculpture, in an analogous process of enchantment and transformation. But for the 17 drawings of 1989, artificial urgency yielded mixed results. Ideally suited to Dine’s spontaneity are the Dionysians: the languid faun and the hilara—the drunken old woman. There are times, though, when the objects are stolid and resistant, even to a forceful reworking in the studio—his scarring and layering of surfaces, the fluid addition of colour. These are familiar techniques, powerful and exciting when they match the power of Dine’s first, emotional response. In Hunting Hound (1989), the surest profile of the object has been teased with animation along the ribs and tendons, around the eye, and by the dissolution of the paws where they should actually adhere to the base. The cruel gap between thigh and hock is awash in blue, a vaporous illusion, itself held in check by two patches of solid blue, bits of collage that affirm the surface of the sheet.

If Dine were merely a translator, his phrasing alone would give pleasure. Elegantly, he proposes erasure for patination; abrasion for decay. At its best his alchemy transforms the sheet, not the sculpture whose integral values are confirmed. Dine combines an expressionist’s vitalizing techniques with cool, spare strokes that remind us of the metal or the stone. He builds that tension into every drawing, the simplest and sweetest being Head of a Roman Woman (1992), where the image of soft hair and sagging skin, an effusion of charcoal and watercolour, is brought to order by the firm delineation of a sculpted cheek. Her more elaborate counterpart is the Roman Head from Glyptotek in Copenhagen (1991): Pompey the Great, drawn from a photograph of an early imperial copy of a late republican portrait, executed in acrylic, chalk, enamel and charcoal on handmade pulp paper. The sheet alone is of such texture and dimension that it appears as a thick covering of ash. From its depths glows a portentous Orwellian vision.

No grim visage dominates the ‘glyptotek’, the artist’s musée imaginaire which gently insists on a return visit. In 1989, Dine made a monumental drawing of the Tanagra figurines, but in the earlier versions, the small terracottas make more sense as compact and saucy personalities. Genre, anecdote, domestic details, ancestral heads, skirmishes in battle, votive offerings and the sensual gaze: on a very human scale, these are fragments of a private ancient world. Dine’s selections are eccentric and intriguing, from a Hellenistic boy strangling a goose to the 5th-century figure of the lyric poet, Anacreon. Their effigies are drawn by a mature artist who still finds his authorities in the heart: sometimes passionate, sometimes arbitrary, attentive always to the small matter, the light dancing on a surface that postpones the extinguishing of the flame. ♦

Martha Langford is Border Crossings’s Contributing Editor from Montreal.

“Jim Dine: Drawing from the Glyptothek” The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts July 14 to September 11, 1994.