Jim Dine: Pinocchio

"Thanks to Carlo Collodi, the real creator of Pinocchio, I have for many years been able to live thru the wooden boy. His ability to hold the metaphor in limitless ways has made my drawings, paintings and sculpture of him richer by far. His poor burned feet, his misguided judgment, his vanity about his large nose, his temporary donkey ears all add up to the real sum of his parts. In the end it is his great heart that holds me. I have carried him on my back like landscape since I was six years old. Sixty-four years is a long time to get to know someone, yet his depth and secrets are endless. This book is for the Boy." Pinocchio has long been a significant motif in Jim Dine's work, and this book is his illustrated version of Collodi's original, dark story. Set far from a traditional fairy-tale world, containing as it does the hard realities of the need for food, shelter and other basic measures of daily life, its allegory, satire and wit are the perfect subject for Dine's graphic drawings.