Jim Dine's poetry collection translated into French for the first time

Jim Dine, known primarily as a painter, sculptor, and photographer, is also a poet—a facet of his work less recognized in France. For the first time, a collection of his poems has been translated into French and published as "Âne dans la mer face à nous" by Steidl. The book features twenty-four watercolors of Pinocchio, a recurring figure in Dine's art, paired with his poems. Dine has long been interested in the visual and readable aspects of text, having written poems on the walls of his Paris apartment in the 1970s and photographed them for gallery exhibitions. In 2010, he created an installation at the Monnaie de Paris for the exhibition "Quand la photographie devient livre," where he displayed fifty-two books made over a year, each containing his poems, alongside handwritten text fragments on museum walls. A comprehensive collection of his decades of writing is expected to be published in the United States in 2014.