Working at the end of the Abstract Expressionists’s reign, Proto-Pop artists such as Jim Dine incorporated materials and experiences from everyday life as the basis for the Happenings, performative events that included audience members into the work of art, he participated in with Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg. The actual experience of a car crash generated performances like Car Crash of 1960, which in turn produced a series of drawings that includes Crack, 1964. This drawing captures the energy and momentum of the original event, translated into a performance and transmitted onto paper.
Clothing, and with it, accessories such as the earring featured in another drawing of graphite and watercolor from 1960, are also a mainstay of Jim Dine’s sculptures, paintings and performances. In each of these mediums, Dine incorporated actual articles of clothing from everyday life, like ties and coat buttons, or else, painted facsimiles of bandanas and other items. Earing is related to paintings like Shoe, 1961, in which the titular item is displaced in the center of the support surrounded by white space and labeled with its name beneath the work. Pearls,from the same year, shifts the the medium of the composition from painting to assemblage, and the gender of the accessory from male to female. Dine performed in both men’s and women’s clothing to represent different aspects of his personality. Concurrent with the performances and predating the paintings, Earing is a drawing formative in Dine’s thinking process.
The esteemed gallerist Ileana Sonnabend began collecting work by Dine in 1960 when the two first met. Sonnabend would give the American artist his first exhibition in Europe. The show of his tool paintings would open on March 13, 1963, within a year of opening her Paris gallery.