Self-Portraits in Empty Robes

By ROBERT HUGHES

Jim Dine has often rendered ordinary objects--a coat, a zipper, neckties, hats--with a wry and knowing line. He has whimsically strung C-clamps and wrenches, hammers and saws, along the edges of his paint-splashed canvases. His works are partly autobiographical, since he was entranced as a child by the tools in his father's hardware store in Cincinnati. But unlike most of the artists clustered under the umbrella of Pop art, Dine claimed issue from the expressionist tradition. "My work is the opposite to cool," he once remarked.

In his new show at Manhattan's Pace Gallery (through Feb. 12), Dine once again deals with a commonplace object--a bathrobe, which he has painted over and over again with the persistence of Monet inspecting a lily pond. But the mood has changed. At 41, Dine has become a more somber painter, and a more ambitious one.

Garden Shears. The robe is not a completely new motif for Dine. It goes back to 1964, when he saw an ad illustrating one in the New York Times. "There was nobody in the bathrobe," he later remarked, "but when I saw it, it looked like me. I thought I was in it." It became, in effect, a kind of self-portrait without the self, with the slightly eerie aspect of a snake's shucked skin. The bathrobe in Dine's new paintings confronts the eye with a proprietorial air, the folds straight and columnar, the sleeves akimbo. The open V of the lapels gapes like a pair of garden shears. Against the odds, Dine has extracted a quite monumental presence from the floppy, unpromising substance of terry toweling.

The first impression is of peach-fuzz abstract expressionism--big, suave, one-color surfaces. But the sunset colors --mauve, rose, gray and a rich ecclesiastical red--are neatly tuned by Dine's drawing, which gives exactly the right definition to the edge of a sleeve, the correct visual weight to the shadow in a fold. It is beaux-arts drawing applied with a kind of gentle irony to the ma trix of abstract-expressionist style. Dine's older paintings of robes in the '60s were done with acrylic and house paint; they had the "industrial" look common to a lot of Pop art -- clean, flat, unresonant. But, says he, "the robes glow now," thanks to the traditional oil paint.

This is not an easy exhibition to shake. The robes stick in the memory like apparitions, benefiting from the Romantic imagery of cowled monks and stalking mummies to which they allude. As painting, they are the most authoritative images Dine has yet produced. The whimsy of his earlier work has boiled off at last.

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