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'It's in Melbourne, right?' Artist Jim Dine gives $3.5m worth of works to NGV

In one extraordinary gesture, a revered printmaker has transformed the gallery's collection of post-war American art.

US artist Jim Dine has never been to Australia and has only a vague sense of where the National Gallery of Victoria is – "it's in Melbourne, right?" – but he's confident that his extraordinary gift of 249 prints will be well looked after there.

The gift – worth an estimated $3.5 million – spans 45 years of work by the 82-year-old artist, who in the 1960s shared the spotlight with fellow avant-garde ground-breakers Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. It includes a staggering array of etchings, woodcuts and lithographs, from his much-loved studies of hearts and dressing-gowns to beautifully rendered birds and portraits. 

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'It's in Melbourne, right?'

In one extraordinary gesture, artist Jim Dine gives $3.5m worth of works to NGV, enriching gallery's collection of post-war American art.

The gallery will unveil 100 of the works at Saturday's opening of the exhibition Jim Dine: A Life in Print.  

Speaking at his gallery in Paris last month, Dine said: "I have no feeling for Australia. The only thing I know about it is that a great [Jackson] Pollock is there ... That and of course I've read Patrick White. But I've never gone. I'm American but I'm also a European and that's where I'd just as soon be."

The NGV is the only gallery in the southern hemisphere chosen by Dine to receive one of a series of survey collections of selected works from the more than 1200 prints he has created during his lifetime. British Museum curator Stephen Coppel, an Australian with close ties to the NGV, convinced him they would be in safe hands there.  

"He said why don't you give some to them because they don't have much of your work and you know, hands across the sea, blah blah ... they have been impeccable and they are very appreciative, which I don't need because it's self-serving why I gave it, after all .... I want to make sure I know where some things go and I know they will be kept well ... people will see the work for years."

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NGV curator Petra Kayser says Dine "has been thinking about his legacy and placing works that he still had in his studio in public collections". She describes the gift as a "transformative" addition to the NGV's collection of post-war American art.

"These are such large, colourful, textured, complex works, they really compete with paintings in terms of their scale and detail," she says.

For his part, Dine jokes that "there's probably some crap in what I gave them; it depends who looks at it", but in truth, "I'm proud of everything I've made. Otherwise I wouldn't have given it."

Dine was invited to Melbourne for the exhibition opening but says "it's too goddamn far. I've got work to do, I can't spend a whole year on jetlag." 

Besides, at 82, "I just want to keep working and growing. That's all I want to do. There is a sense of desperation when you're in the red zone."

Jim Dine: A Life in Print is at NGV International until October 15.