Details — Click to read
Original exhibition poster for Jim Dine’s 1973 show at Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen, Scotland, replicating Dine’s 1973 etching Rimbaud, Alchemy on Japanese Paper.
Dine produced numerous portraits of Arthur Rimbaud during the 1970s, perhaps because of the importance of poetry to Dine’s own work. Born 1854 in the rural town of Charleville, France, Arthur Rimbaud ran away to Paris as a teenager, where he befriended the renowned poet Paul Verlaine. Verlaine published Rimbaud’s poetry, and the two entered into a tumultuous relationship, culminating in Verlaine’s imprisonment for shooting Rimbaud in the hand. In 1873, Rimbaud abandoned his literary aspirations for an itinerant lifestyle, enlisting as a soldier in the Dutch Colonial Army only to abscond from Java to Cyprus, finding work as a translator and as a stone quarry supervisor. With intermittent trips home to his parent’s farm in Charleville, Rimbaud then took up residence in Yemen, where he worked at a coffee sorting house. He rose quickly in the ranks, and his talent for languages and shrewd merchant instincts led to a profitable contract exporting beans from Ethiopia. By Rimbaud’s untimely passing at 37, he knew more about coffee than perhaps any European alive.
This poster is not previously owned and has been stored in an archive since its publication.
