Jim Dine: A History of Communism

Softcover | 15.49 x 0.76 x 23.62 cm | 64 pp

Steidl | 2014 | 9783869307916 

This “history” came about because my friends, Sarah Dudley and Ulie Kuhle, litho printers in Berlin, were given about 100 litho stones from a former Socialist art academy in what was the D.D.R. The stones all had images on them drawn by forty years of students under the oppressive regime. I asked them to reactivate the stones and print them on Zerkall Paper 450 g/m².

Most images I chose of the 100 were able to have life breathed into them. We had finally forty-five images. They editioned the lithographs and then sent them to us. I drew and ground and bit copper plates to go over them. I wanted a black view of the image and a sense of Berlin in the East as I knew it when the horrible wall was still up. The etchers who came to work with me every summer over two and a half years have coaxed the exact mood I wanted out of the plates. Jim Dine