What Was Happening in World History at the Time Walt Disney Was Producing Art
Walt Disney was the greatest creative mind since Leonardo Da Vinci. Here's a closer look at why.
TEXT: Stephen Short
IMAGES: Courtesy of various
Few graphic images are as memorable as the ruby, white, black, iv-fingered, xanthous-booted, white-gloved rodent created by Walt Disney. Icon, logo, corporate identity symbol, and more, Mickey Mouse is arguably the nigh iconic symbol of all-time Continually fresh, unblemished by historic period and fourth dimension, unburdened—mostly—by the baggage of Western history, Mickey's shape is the visual semantic of 20th century existence and beyond.
Yet his creator, Walt Disney, has been a victim of the art earth, in the fashion Leonardo da Vinci might accept become, had the latter lived in the 20th century. Walt Disney gave u.s.a. Pop Art (the saying being that artists are e'er at least a decade ahead of the hoi polloi) generations earlier we slurped on Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup Cans. Disney'due south law-breaking, or at least, one at odds with classical notions of aesthetics, was to reach astonishing commercial success with his art in his own lifetime using technology's new tools, much as Da Vinci had rendered new dimensions in paint. Disney's popularity and Mickey'southward worldwide recognition every bit but a mere cartoon character outweighed any sense of his higher-brow cultural significance and influence. For in the pantheon of high and art, classical art and whatnotart, Disney'due south mass-market "laugh-o-grams" surely belonged firmly at the depths of art's "lowerarchy."
Only other artists saw through the mass media for his true influence. "He'due south such an American symbol," American pop-creative person Roy Lichtenstein said of Mickey Mouse, "and such an anti-art symbol." Which was, and nonetheless is, Disney's argent bullet. Betwixt Kazimir Malevich's infamous Black Foursquare, and Walt Disney's circular rodent, the shape, commerce and cultural iconography of celebrity of the following century was pre-set up before any of us could know it; private, logo and myth, complanate into one. "Mickey Mouse is my favourite actor! Minnie Mouse is my favourite actress! My own favourite personal hero is Walt Disney," said Andy Warhol. Consider these other details almost Walt Disney and his highly artistic, art credentials.
Walt Disney learned from Eadweard Muybridge's 19th century photographs of animals and people in movement. Disney fabricated Photostats from the pages of two of Muybridge'south books from the Kansas City Library in his bid to get phases of activeness for his early on cartoon characters. Walt Disney wanted more than natural-looking movement and, every bit Muybridge said, "worked out tricks that they hadn't done" in the 1920s.
Author John Updike wrote of Mickey's first blithe short Steamboat Willie, that he "entered history equally the most persistent and pervasive figment of American popular culture in this century." He arrived at a time the country needed him nearly—the beginning of the Cracking Depression. Updike later wrote of the lovable rodent, "Mickey'south life as an icon, similar that of Marilyn Monroe, actually got stronger over fourth dimension."
Intellectual circles hailed Walt Disney as an artistic genius in the 1930s. Philadelphia Record art critic Dorothy Grafly said Walt Disney was the creator of "a pure art form" that unified sound and color. The filmmaker had embraced Modernism and that "quite equally much as Picasso, he distorts and renders the unreal."
When Charlie Chaplin released City Lights in 1931, he requested that information technology be accompanied, wherever possible, with a Mickey Mouse cartoon. A cartoon by George Corley, in 1931, shows Chaplin as the Picayune Tramp presenting a flower to Mickey Mouse.
For its exhibition "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" in 1936, the Museum of Modernistic Art in New York invited Walt Disney to testify production art from The 3 Little Wolves, a sequel to the Iii Little Pigs.
The marketing of original Disney fine art dates back to 1938, when San Francisco's Courvoisier Galleries signed a contract to become Disney'due south sole art representative. The gallery'due south statement at the time stated, "There is a ameliorate opportunity to sell these celluloids through the channels provided by the fine art market… and that Mr. Disney's reputation as an creative person of great importance will at the aforementioned time be maintained. This is official recognition that Mr. Disney has actually created a new and distinct creative expression which volition rank his name with the great artists of this age."
For an exhibition of new acquisitions in 1939, New York's Metropolitan Museum showed two evil vultures from Snow White and the Vii Dwarfs. Curator Harry Wehle credited Disney with creating "something that is incontestably fine art and probably the greatest pop fine art of this generation."
When creative person and ladies' man Piet Mondrian lived in London for two years (1938–40), and wasn't dancing in jazz clubs with the likes of Peggy Guggenheim, he sent his brother a series of playful postcards of Snow White (he and his brother saw it in Paris in 1938), written in the spirited persona of the dwarves. In one he wrote: "the landlord has had my room cleaned by Snow White and her little helpers." Mondrian signed the bill of fare, "Sleepy" and called his brother "Sneezy." He also had a record of the soundtrack. Although in later times Mickey has been superimposed onto Mondrian's famous Composition with Yellow, Blueish and Red (1937–42), which was appropriated by Yves Saint Laurent, one could argue that Mondrian'due south famous geometric limerick is like the showtime abstract portrait of Mickey Mouse.
Meanwhile, Salvador Dali thought Walt Disney was the peachy American surrealist. (Walt Disney had been impressed by Dali's collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on Spellbound). As a event, Dali collaborated with Walt Disney on a curt called Destino, based on a Mexican ballad in 1946. He created 22 paintings and 135 storyboards and sketches, from which Walt Disney generated twenty seconds of original animation. Dali worked from nine to five for three months. The ii exchanged letters, sketches and paintings in what turns out to be have been an impactful and meaningful relationship for both. A longer total-feature picture was finally released in 2003, receiving a nomination for All-time Animated Short Film at the University Awards. It contained Dali's trademark melting clocks and nightmarish statues. Xc-five-year-old veteran, John Hench, who worked with Dali on the original project, had been called in to oversee the artistic for the pic's release.
Disney's Fantasia watched like a primer for American audiences on European abstraction and Symbolist modes. 20th century painter Diego Rivera theorised that futurity historians would discover that "Mickey Mouse was ane of the 18-carat heroes of American art in the first half of the 20th century." German refugee painter George Grosz declared Mickey Mouse cartoons to be "fine art in every sense."
When Mickey Mouse started talking to Leopold Stokowski in Fantasia, he went beyond being a drawing character to something more dignified. Merely practically, he had as well been upstaged by Donald, the obstreperous duck, who won an Academy Award in 1943.
In 1942, British political cartoonist David Low, in an article entitled "Leonardo da Disney," characterised Walt Disney "not every bit a draftsman merely every bit an artist who uses his brains, the nearly significant effigy in graphic fine art since Leonardo." That same year, Harvard art historian Robert Field published the monograph The Art of Walt Disney, calling his blitheness "perhaps the nearly potent form of artistic expression e'er devised." Field compared Disney to the Old Masters of Western tradition—da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Degas existence most frequently evoked.
American Pop artists including Lichtenstein, Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Saul Steinberg, and Ray Johnson, loved Mickey Mouse. One of the first bona fide Pop Fine art pictures is Lichtenstein's 1961 oil on canvas Look Mickey , a joyous pastiche of a Disney comic from the period.
"Walt Disney was a great American artist," David Hockney writes. "He might be a bit sentimental merely what he did was quite an accomplishment. Who were the most famous stars of the 1930s and 40s? Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck," he says. "Await at the camels in Adoration of the Magi past Giotto, from the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, painted in the early 14th century. In that location'south Walt Disney."
Da Vinci may have become a code in Dan Brown's novels, but Mickey Mouse was a password for the Allies D-Twenty-four hour period landings in World State of war 2. Notably, the fictional protagonist of Brown's novels, Robert Langdon, wears a Mickey Mouse watch as a reminder "to stay young at heart."
The contemporary influence of Disney and Mickey Mouse may accept much to do with Asia's Takashi Murakami outcome. The Japanese Superflat artist acknowledged his debt to characters like Mickey Mouse in creating his Mr. DOB hybrid drawing character in 1996. Mr. DOB afterwards made his marking on Louis Vuitton accessories, Kanye Due west'southward Good-Morning video, and in Murakami's collaboration with Virgil Abloh in 2018's "Future History" exhibition. It's hard to see Mr. DOB without subliminally channeling the shadow of the mouse. The mouse is likewise a favourite discipline of Korean artist Lee Dongi, who in 1993 created the "pop-fine art" character Atomaus, a combination of Japanese grapheme Atom and Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse. "When I was growing upwards," says Lee, "Atom and Mickey Mouse were always near me. They were ubiquitous and function of my life."
Since the 2010s, the iconic and lasting influence of Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney have been recognised past the global public equally valid and worthy works of art within the art market. "Mickey Mouse is such a universal and powerful icon," says Damien Hirst of the rodent, having sold his work Mickey in 2014 for US$1.5 million. Hirst followed that with Beautiful Mickey in 2015, reimagining Mickey with ane of his iconic spin screen prints, and again follows that with silk-screened prints of Mickey (in blue) and Minnie (in pink) 2016, encrusted with sparkling glitter; like Mondrian's geometry in the round almost lxxx years later.
Andy Warhol'due south highest Mickey auction, Mickey Mouse (myth series), saw his acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, signed and dated 1981, sell for United states$iii.iv million in 2011. Joyce Pensato's Mickey The Doudz (2017) will sell at Christie'south Hong Kong's Modern and Gimmicky Art Evening Sale on July ten, 2020 (est: HK$700,000- HK$1.ii million). At Sotheby's Hong Kong'due south contempo digital Manga sale in May 2020, an original paper collage and pen-on-newspaper Mickey Mouse by Walt Disney sketch, rendered in the 1960s, realized HK$68,750.
And beyond the sales of art from renowned artists, notable brands have decided they desire a cut of the always-profitable Disney pie. Watch brands from Rolex to Gerald Genta and Swatch have been making Mickey Mouse stainless steel automatic chronographs for decades—Swatch collaborated with Damien Hirst on a pair of spotted Mickey and Minnie wristwatches in 2018. Meanwhile, Gucci celebrated 2020, the Yr of the Rat with a collection bearing everything from Mickey adorned bags and hats to bold, repeating Mickey prints on t-shirts and sneakers. A Leonardo Da Vinci moment at a Walt Disney toll.
Source: https://www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/walt-disney-with-art/
Postar um comentário for "What Was Happening in World History at the Time Walt Disney Was Producing Art"