Four Coats

With lively, layered brushstrokes evoking tweed or plaid, smooth vertical strokes suggesting pinstripes, and four rows of applied buttons, Four Coats ties the abstract vocabulary of pattern to the everyday. Dine recalls that while working as an art teacher in New York in the late 1950s, he would often spend his lunch hour at a men’s clothing store, admiring the folded suits arranged side by side on display tables—not unlike these four joined canvases. His painted recreation of fabrics conjures the bodies that wear them, resisting the self-referentiality and flatness prized in abstract painting throughout the 1950s. Here, Dine’s use of real buttons prefigures the incorporation of bulky and unconventional objects—from tools to a lawn mower—into his later paintings.