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Gray Palette

Jim Dine American
1963
Not on view
Between 1961 and 1964 Dine made a series of works that used the shape of the artist’s palette both as a backdrop for other imagery and as a surrogate self-portrait. Here he playfully subverts the notion of the palette as the site where a painter mixes colors, rendering it not in bright hues—with the exception of a single, marginal flash of red—but largely in black, white and gray. To the thin, rather brittle surface of a sheet of tracing paper, Dine adhered torn and abraded scraps of wove paper. Their presence suggests the accrual of dried, unused pigment on the palette while simultaneously providing surfaces implicitly awaiting paint.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Gray Palette
  • Artist: Jim Dine (American, born Cincinnati, Ohio, 1935)
  • Date: 1963
  • Medium: Watercolor, opaque watercolor, silver metallic paint, opaque matte black paint, and collage of torn papers on tracing paper
  • Dimensions: 23 × 23 1/8 in. (58.4 × 58.7 cm)
  • Classification: Drawings
  • Credit Line: Gift of Stanley Posthorn, 2004
  • Object Number: 2004.432.3
  • Rights and Reproduction: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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