Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

This forty-four-plate print series combines elements from Collodi’s Pinocchio story, including some of the scarier scenes, with visual references to Disney’s animation. While incorporating snippets of the text, Dine’s images are not literal interpretations, but rather a mixture of personal memories, associations, and feelings for the characters. The artist describes the fairytale as a psychological drama in which Collodi “gave the boy the chance to come to consciousness and therefore join us in this Vale of Tears. His poor burned feet, his misguided judgement, his constant lying, his temporary donkey ears.… It all adds up to make the sum of him.” The series begins with a title page, six singular prints that act as a kind of visual prologue, a colophon, and then thirty-six “chapters,” which were used to illustrate a translation of Collodi’s text in a publication by Steidl (2006).