| Show Disney is no Mickey Mouse figure in the thew world of f art I 0 Paul Richard RichardI I Special to The Washington Post i me art historically Spread in inthe the high halls of Washington's art museums is a broad and permanent semi-official semi survey of the I century and its it's got gota a hole in it Someone who really ought to be there is missing They've left Walt Disney out Now that its it's over and I receding every day and steadily becoming just another episode in art history how can you look 1 i back at the century and pretend to see it whole and then completely omit what Disney's drawing did to its visuals Come on that cant can't cantI I be right Though handmade as I drawings had always been Disney's were made with witha a studio-factory studio of his own devising Anyone raised inthis in inI inthis this country or anywhere I else for that matter knows I what they look like They're active and rounded and andI I juvenile and they perform they're wholesome and scary fantastical and eerily transmissible They put into the century a anew anew L new hew mode of depiction that thai t wasn't there when it started i when il t i b but t w was s everywhere closed Walter Elias Disney up in the 1966 1901 grew middle of the country on cities its farms and in its and little unpaved towns a aI j kid I skinny strangely gifted flip-books flip for his J drawing I pals His art looks American I but not entirely D Disney I. I having gotten a serious jolt I L t i t of Europe when he drove ambulances in France in World War I. I Once hed he'd seen Paree young Disney did not go back to the farm Instead he found his way to Hollywood where starting in 1928 with Steamboat Willie he made SnowWhite SnowWhite Snow SnowWhite White and the Seven Dwarfs Pinocchio Fantasia astonishing things Officialdom once cheered 0 him Harvard and Yale gave him honorary doctorates on two successive days in 1938 but today if you go into the art museums you wont won't find him only his reflections Theres There's a Mickey Mouse at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and another at the National Gallery of Art The Hirshhorn's is a constructivist round-eared round square-eyed square steel-and- steel aluminum Geometric Mouse by Claes Oldenburg 1971 The gallery's is an early Roy Lichtenstein oil Look Mickey 1961 in which hes he's fishing with Donald Duck These arent aren't they're there only because pop is unthinkable without him As the pop artists themselves cheerfully acknowledged Lichtenstein donated Look Mickey to the nation Andy Warhol multiplied the mouse an anc anc sprinkled diamond duson duson dus dusl on his Double Mickey a silk scree 1981 that brought a in 2002 Disney's exclusion isn isna a conspiracy Too much o 0 what he made later looks robotic less th thI V I output of an artist than the merchandise of a brand He wasn't Winslow Homer His gag dependence too has worked against him Organized in rows of metal filing cabinets in his studio in California were 15 million gags in classifications and traditional museums being somber institutions do not much like jokes And not even his best work is comfortably collected What would you buy his throwaway sketches eels cels individual frames that other artists painted reels of film a watch But still He deserves more than the video store He should be in the museums for a variety of reasons Here are six SIX 1 Walt Disney made drawing move This is not a trivial accomplishment Artists in the Ice Age caves gave their horses extra legs to indicate them galloping and in Greece and Rome gods were provided with twisting poses and flyings- flyings off of drapery to suggest their godly motions Disney did more than suggest Leonardo would have fallen down in ecstasy if his whirlpools really whirled an animation mation Georges Melies in France Winsor McCay in America but only tentatively Disney l went way beyond them First t he got rid of its jerkiness and then he made it sing t When You Wish Upon a aStar aStar af f Star Whistle While You Work Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf and 1 t colored it Neal Gabler's 2007 biography reports that Disney's studio ground all of its own watercolor pigments installed a spectrophotometer to measure them precisely and kept 1200 distinct colors on its shelves Practically every tool we use today said the great Chuck Jones of Bugs Bunny Porky Pig Wile E. E Coyote and Looney Tunes fame was originated at the Disney studio 2 Disney put his art deep inside our minds Not many artists have that mysterious knack Warhol had it He could go into Safeway scan products and then come out into the daylight with witha cant can't a soup can that you remove from your head Its It's in there irremovable Pluto and Jimmy Cricket and Thumper sit on the same shelf I 3 Disney could hang with the surrealists Sometimes he was one of them Disney shared the creepiness the mining of memory dream and irrational juxtaposition that we attribute to the best of them No wonder Salvador Dali came to work with Disney The night of our meeting wrote the Spaniard who was not easily amazed I spent almost entirely without sleep Disney's most surreal episode is the one in which drunk by accident zooms off into a hallucination of blaring trombones pink elephants of course morphing blobs f r and infinite regressions I 1 have never seen anything to approach it wrote Otis Ferguson in the New Republic and neither have you because there hasn't been anything Another surreal quality of his animation is its animism Both words are rooted in the Latin to make alive to fill with breath and Disney rather spookily breathed bits of his living self into all his dancing toadstools hippos and marching mops This is ancient magic that takes you through fairytales fairy fairytales fairytales tales and Pygmalion way back to the dawn days when spirits dwelt in lin ponds and rocks He insisted that ifa if ifa ifa a tree was bashful it t had to act like it was bashful wrote Ward Kimball one of his animators If it was wasa a villainous tree it had to behave like a villain The waves in the storm scene in Pinocchio arent aren't water they're also monsters I had to get away from them running up the aisle when I 1 was a kid 4 Disney could hang with the animal artists He was one even though he anthropomorphized shamelessly Disney used to mime his art as he called it into being When he wanted his artists to animate a hound Disney would become that hound right before their would imitate eyes He the expressions of the dog and look from one side to the other and raise first one brow and then the other as he tried to figure things out You'd have the feeling of the whole thing Dick Huemer recalled know exactly what he wanted Bambi is as much a person personas as a deer but he sure looks like a deer While creating him the Disney studio brought in all the deer film it could find and shot morein more morein morein in Maine and got a dead deer for its art school 5 Politeness says admit him Disney let us not forget did his artly duty He recognized top quality as museums are supposed to He trained artists by the hundreds since one second of a Disney film required 17 hand-drawn hand stills To blackball the good fellow after all of that seems a little rude 6 Time is on his side Go to any with-it with contemporary art show and you'll see what I mean Lit- Lit up screens are everywhere so are moving ever images well-recorded well sound effects plastic fabrications In serious museums these would not have been admissible when Disney was at his peak but they are now The old rules riles have been broken multimedia's in anything goes All art recalls its precedents Our electrical collaborative shiny noisy 21 century st-century art brings with it a distinctive past just justas as much as painting does The advanced work of our Walt Valt own time is doing Disney a favor legitimizing retrospectively the art he made in his j oJ 1 |
