Gabbia Bongiorno - Agnellini Arte Moderna

and San Francisco, 1969), with eight original stencilled
drawings. In 1971 he produced a run of 80 copies of a
plate titled Rimbaud (silkscreens, lithographs, etchings
and watercolours) and 100 prints of The World dedicated
to the poetess Anne Waldman, the author of Fast
Speaking Woman. The following year he produced
Flaubert Favorites for Edition A (four lithographs on
Japanese paper).
However, he also wished to work with contemporary
writers, like Ron Padgett, with whom he elaborated
the collages and drawings in The Adventures of Mr
and Mrs Jim and Ron (1970, Cape Goliard, London;
Grosman Publishers, New York) in a game of reciprocal
inspiration. Four years earlier he had produced a lithograph
on Japanese paper for Kenneth Koch’s Poem
(Universal Limited Art Edition). The plate inspired the
poet to write “O Scarf of Paradise, Blue Sky is Bread to
the Scarf”.
But his largest undertaking was probably the illustrations
of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, which he subtitled in
a plate as “A piece of wood who laughed and cried like
a child”. The idea came to him as a result of seeing the
Walt Disney film Pinocchio in 1941 as a child, which left
a strong memory. He began by producing the plates
with a heliogravure in 1997, which was followed by different
engraved works, such as Red Enamel Pants
(2000). The work was published in 2006, a portfolio of
36 lithographs plus 5 numbered lithographs in a wooden
box designed by Daniel Clarke. The plates were
made in the Atelier Michael Woolworth in Paris. Fragments
of the text in English are sometimes included in
the sheet. Dine so liked the story of the puppet that he
later made other engravings, one which was Yellow
Enamel (2008).
But he did not stop there: he imitated Geppetto by
sculpting a wooden figure of the little boy whose nose
grew when he lied: in 2006-07 Dine produced a series
of wooden sculptures almost two metres tall of the
puppet in different postures. They were usually
coloured, playing on the contrast between red and yellow,
and sometimes included a fox or cat (Two Thieves.
One Liar, 2006) or with the head attached by a ring and
string to the horizontal bar of a gantry mounted on
wheels (You Worked Hard All Summer, 2006). He also
made smaller versions on a plinth and a monumental
version in Sweden called Walking to Boras (2008). Dine
was so fascinated by Pinocchio that he produced
dozens of interpretations, for example, a series of four
faces in line wearing different expressions and with different
length noses (Four Faces Cut into a Log, 2007).
Maybe Dine thought of him as a figure with two faces,
like Janus: on one side that of Pinocchio and on the
other Geppetto.
1. Jim Dine, Centre d’Arts Plastiques
Contemporains de Bordeaux,
20 May-15 July 1975.
2. “Jim Dine, from my Heart to
my Hand”, interview by Adrian
Dannatt, Flash Art, vol. XXIV,
157 (1991), p. 90.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. 5 June-19 July 1986,
catalogue with a preface
by Anne Dagbert.
6. L’Odysée de Jim Dine,
ed. by Caroline Joubert,
Steildl/Musée des Beaux-arts,
Caen, 16 March-11 June 2007,
p. 91.
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JIM DINE