Jim Dine
Window Brain, 1959
Mixed media
58 x 30 x 4.5 inches
Collection of Miles and Shirley Fiterman

In 1958 the young painter Jim Dine moved from his native Ohio to New York to pursue a career as an artist. He made Window Brain during his first year in the city, using a folding card table as his canvas, adding paint, scraps of wood, rags, and a warped wooden dowel. The work's energy and sense of spontaneity link it to the action paintings of Abstract Expressionism, but Window Brain is a hybrid of painting and sculpture, and thus closer in spirit to the often-anarchistic "Happenings" and mixed-media experiments of Dine's contemporaries, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow.