In this sculpture entitled "Color Polaroid Lady No. 2" Jim Dine also refers to the Venus of Milo, although the enigmatic title so characteristic of Dine may at first seem to suggest something else.
The first time the figure of the Venus of Milo appears in Jim Dine's work is in one of his still life paintings from 1978. In this still life, the small, commercial plaster reproduction of the Hellenistic sculpture of the Venus of Milo from the Louvre appears as one object among many from the artist's studio, along with, for example, a small skull, glasses or a painting palette.
Several years passed before Dine turned to the Venus again and he appropriated this motif, making it an iconic identifying element of his art. Since 1983, prints, drawings, oil paintings and sculptures of Venus have been produced in manifold variations.
There are few works of art as symbolically and art-historically charged as the Venus of Milo as a symbol of beauty, femininity and fertility, and also as the quintessential example of Hellenistic sculpture. But Dine has worked on this motif, internalised it, destroyed it and put it back together again until it has naturally inserted itself into his genuine canon of motifs, such as the bathrobe or the hearts. Dine has permanently removed the head in his version of Venus and concentrated on her body. The Venus, thus depersonalised, becomes an archetypal symbol of femininity in all its facets. At the same time, he detaches the Venus of Milo from its historical baggage. In this way, Dine succeeds in appropriating this sculpture, which is as famous as the Mona Lisa, for himself, but still preserves it as a universally understood symbol.
The first Venus sculptures were created in 1983 in bronze, the medium that allows a wide range of processing possibilities: starting with the modelled clay, the processing of the bronze casting and the subsequent painting and patination, which makes possible the lively surface structure so characteristic of Dine. Later, he also created wooden and marble sculptures, groupings of Venus in bronze, mounted on chairs, or lying "overturned" on the floor with varying plinths. Small, delicate miniatures or monumental works for public places were created. The range of variations, also in relation to the two-dimensional representations, seems almost infinite in Dine's work and each of them is individual, different and novel.