Pinocchio

Little is known about this highly-finished scene from the story of Pinocchio—why it was created or how it was used. Walt Disney’s 1940 film adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novella Le avventure di Pinocchio was much beloved by Sendak and formative in terms of his early attention to children’s narratives and to illustration and animation more broadly. He discusses the film in his collection of essays Caldecott & Co., with specific reference to its narratological superiority over Collodi’s original. Among the talismans that Sendak curated as references and inspiration on his studio's walls was a cell from the 1940 film (see lot 140), in which Pinocchio looks upon a marionette in a moment of existential introspection. Puppetry played a major role in Sendak’s second career designing theater productions, a highly collaborative field in which he worked with master puppeteer Amy Luckenbach and composer Philip Glass among others, contrasting the more isolated work of an author-illustrator.

As with many of his images, Sendak’s depiction of Geppetto draws directly from an earlier art historical tradition. Here Geppetto is modelled after Vincent van Gogh’s Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate), which van Gogh painted in the same decade that Collodi wrote his Pinocchio. Sendak contextualizes the sorrowing man by adding a distressed, newly-whittled Pinocchio—providing a clear stimulus for Geppetto’s resignation in contrast to the more ambiguous despair of van Gogh’s solitary figure. To heighten the allusion, Sendak writes name “Vincent” in the right-hand corner. A black-and-white cat features in the present work as well; the character of Figaro, Geppetto's cat, was invented for the Disney film and does not appear in Collodi’s text. A black-and-white cat's appearance in this painting underscores that Sendak is specifically responding and contributing to the Disney tradition of Pinocchio as much as any other.