Artist Jim Dine (American, b. 1935)
Title The Crash #4
Series Car Crash
Date 1960
Medium Lithograph on paper
Dimensions Image: 20 1/8 × 17 3/16 in. (51.1 × 43.7 cm)
Sheet: 29 3/4 × 22 in. (75.6 × 55.9 cm)
Credit Line Museum purchase with funds from Burton and Suzanne Borgelt in honor of Linda Watson, and the estate of Herman B Wells via the Joseph Granville and Anna Bernice Wells Memorial Fund, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 2019.58
About this Work
The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art has a complete set of five prints (EMA 2019.55-2019.59) in Jim Dine's The Crash. The artist’s first published series, it relates to his Happening, The Car Crash (1960). An autobiographical performance, it referenced two automobile accidents involving the artist: one that killed a friend and another that injured Dine’s wife. In the piece, the artist (dressed in silver clothing and flashlight headdress) drew and erased anthropomorphic car shapes on a blackboard while grunting and crying out unintelligibly amid various car noises.
The jumbled lines and off-kilter compositions of the prints recall the influence of Abstract Expressionism, as well as the chaos and sounds of a traffic accident as recreated in the performance. The words “CRASH, SMACK, and CRACK,” the symbol of the Red Cross, and fingerprint marks intensify the effect. By sharing his terror with the viewer, Dine experienced a kind of emotional exorcism. He also saw the imagery as a "metaphor for sex, for the sexual act, the crashing together of bodies."
