UNDER WALT'S SPELL
Disney Is No Mickey Mouse Figure in the World of Art

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 11, 2009

Something's been nagging me, art historically.

Spread in the high halls of Washington's art museums is a broad and permanent semiofficial survey of the 20th century, and it's got a hole in it. Someone who really ought to be there is missing. They've left Walt Disney out.

Now that it's over, and receding every day, and steadily becoming just another episode in art history, how can you look 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 can't be right.

Though handmade, as drawings had always been, Disney's were made with a studio-factory of his own devising. Anyone raised in this country, or anywhere else for that matter, knows what they look like. They're active and rounded and juvenile, and they perform; they're wholesome and scary, fantastical, folklorical and eerily transmissible. They put into the century a new mode of depiction that wasn't there when it started but was everywhere when it closed.

Walter Elias Disney (1901-1966) grew up in the middle of the country, on its farms and in its cities and little unpaved towns, a skinny, strangely gifted kid drawing flip-books for his pals. His art looks American, but not entirely, Disney having gotten a serious jolt of Europe when he drove ambulances in France in World War I. Once 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 "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Pinocchio," "Fantasia" -- astonishing things.

Officialdom once cheered him, Harvard and Yale gave him honorary doctorates on two successive days in 1938, but today if you go into the art museums you won't find him, only his reflections.

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 cartoony-constructivist, round-eared, square-eyed, steel-and-aluminum "Geometric Mouse" by Claes Oldenburg, 1971. The gallery's is an early Roy Lichtenstein oil, "Look Mickey," 1961, in which he's fishing with Donald Duck. These aren't Disneys; 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 and sprinkled diamond dust on his "Double Mickey" (1981), a silk screen that brought $113,525 at Sotheby's in 2002.

Disney's exclusion isn't a conspiracy. Too much of what he made, especially later, looks robotic, less the 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 1.5 million gags in 124 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, cels (individual frames) that other artists painted, reels of film, DVDs, 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.

* * *

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-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.

Earlier artists had explored animation -- Georges Méliès in France, Winsor McCay in America -- but only tentatively. Disney went way beyond them. First he got rid of its jerkiness, and then he made it sing ("When You Wish Upon a Star," "Whistle While You Work," "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?") and 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 1,200 distinct colors on its shelves.

"Practically every tool we use today," said the great Chuck Jones, of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote and Looney Tunes fame, "was originated at the Disney studio."

Disney put his art deep inside our minds.

Not many artists have that mysterious knack. Warhol had it. He could go into Safeway, scan 10,000 products and then come out into the daylight with a soup can that you can't remove from your head. It's in there, irremovable. Pluto and Jiminy Cricket and Thumper sit on the same shelf.

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 Dumbo, drunk by accident, zooms off into a hallucination of blaring trombones, pink elephants (of course), morphing blobs and infinite regressions. "I 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 animare ("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 fairy tales and Pygmalion, way back to the dawn days when spirits dwelt in ponds and rocks. "He insisted that if a tree was bashful, it had to act like it was bashful," wrote Ward Kimball, one of his animators. "If it was a villainous tree, it had to behave like a villain."

The waves in the storm scene in "Pinocchio" aren't water, they're also monsters. I had to get away from them, running up the aisle, when I was a kid.

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 eyes. "He would imitate 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. "You'd know exactly what he wanted."

Bambi is as much a person 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 more in Maine, and got a dead deer for its art school. "Rico Lebrun," writes Gabler, "conducted classes in the afternoon to analyze deer anatomy. He had gotten a fresh carcass from a forest ranger, and at each session he would remove another layer of the skin or muscle until he reached the bone -- by which time Eric Larson was the only one of the staff who could tolerate the stench." Thomas Eakins, teaching in Philadelphia, had done the same, with a horse, just as stinkily.

I wouldn't be surprised if lots of green eco-Americans first empathized with animals while watching Disney's films.

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 stills). To blackball the good fellow after all of that seems a little rude.

He put big money into art schools (the one in his studio eventually became California Institute of the Arts). In 1943, he joined the board of the Museum of Modern Art. And, in many disciplines, he sought collaboration with artists of high rank. Some were conductors and composers (Leopold Stokowski, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky) -- for Disney, after all, was a sort of conductor-composer of images. He also turned to writers (Thornton Wilder, Aldous Huxley), painters (Dali, Thomas Hart Benton) and to Charlie Chaplin and Frank Lloyd Wright.

And he stayed loyal to his muse. You can see this in the miniature railway he built around his house. It had a 90-foot tunnel, a 46-foot-high trestle, 2,500 feet of track and a tiny working steam engine just big enough to carry him. Disney rode it often. The setup in his garden was elaborate, nostalgia-soaked, the opposite of grown-up, onrushing and machined, like his art.

Time is on his side.

Go to any with-it contemporary art show, and you'll see what I mean. Lit-up screens are everywhere; so are ever-moving images, well-recorded 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 have been broken, multimedia's in, anything goes.

All art recalls its precedents. Our electrical, collaborative, shiny, noisy 21st-century art brings with it a distinctive past just as much as painting does. The advanced work of our own time is doing Walt Disney a favor, legitimizing retrospectively the art he made in his.

* * *

Paris has already seen a big Walt Disney show. Called "Once Upon a Time," it opened at the Grand Palais in 2006. But Washington's still waiting. Someday there may be a big Disney art exhibit somewhere on the Mall.

I know what it should look like, and sometimes I imagine it. The Paris exhibition was largely filled with Disney's art. This one should be mixed. It shouldn't be only about Disney (he didn't work alone), and it shouldn't be over-serious (he wasn't), and it ought to entertain.

It should include some blobs by Joan Miró and Dali's melting watches, to go with his surrealism, and some dramatic bucking broncos, in bronze by Frederic Remington, to go with Disney's animals, and some ferocious North Atlantic waves crashing on the coast of Maine in oils by Winslow Homer to accompany "Pinocchio's" scary storm at sea.

The pop artists should be there, too (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Takashi Murakami), to evoke what came after him, and so should "Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914), a hand-drawn film by Winsor McCay, to show what came before. It also ought to have a whole gallery of cartoonists, including those who worked with him (Walt Kelly, for example) and those who merely paid him homage (say, the great R. Crumb). To demonstrate that first-rate art can be fabulous and funny, I'd include Red Grooms, and I'd put in Norman Rockwell, too, just for company.

In darkened rooms with comfy seats, there will be screenings of "Fantasia" and "Dumbo" and the "Silly Symphonies." Sequences of Disney cels will be lined up on the walls. Maybe the guards will all wear Disney watches.

I'd include a great Jeff Koons as well. His 1996 "Balloon Dog" would be perfect. That's because it's 10 feet high, polished to a fare-thee-well, toylike and magnificent, inflated, unironic, and completely Disneyesque.

It'd be a helluva show.