EDITH DINES
Reflections.

Oil and mixed-media on masonite, 1952. 875x1203 mm; 34½x47½ inches. Signed in ink, lower left recto, and titled in ink and ink-stamped, verso.

Provenance: Randall E. Clark, Detroit, annotated on the verso; private collection, Chicago.

Exhibited: "Abstract Art is Reality," Detroit Artists Market, Detroit, 1952.

Dines (1924-1995) was an innovative mid-century artist in the Detroit area who utilized rolling pins wrapped with textured rubber forms and inked or applied with oil to roll the pigments on surfaces and create abstract compositions. The current work was exhibited in the 1952 Detroit Artists Market "Abstract Art is Reality" show organized by legendary Futurist collector Lydia Winston Malbin, who along with Hilla Rebay, the co-founder of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (originally the Museum of Non-Objective Art) in New York, had pioneered the exhibition of abstract art in Detroit a decade earlier. Dines married the artist and the pioneer in the American Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist movements Gerome Kamrowski (1914-2004) in 1948 (the couple divorced in 1962), while Kamrowski was a professor of fine art at the University of Michigan. The Ann Arbor News published a photographically illustrated profile of Dines work on July 29, 1954. Dines exhibited in the U.S. and Europe during the 1950s and 1960s.