Tim Burton — the artist — is now on display

NEW YORK - Director Tim Burton has become a household name thanks to his highly stylized and hugely popular movies such as “Batman” and “Beetlejuice.” While fans may say his films are works of art, few would expect to see Burton’s imagery displayed alongside Monet’s “Water Lilies” and Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” However, from now until April, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is doing just that, with a major career retrospective of Burton’s art and movies.

On display are more than 700 pieces — paintings, sketches and sculptures, including rare concept art — from Burton’s films and abandoned projects. However, this is not an average trip to the museum. The first thing many visitors will see is a 21-foot inflatable statue called “Balloon Boy,” a blue Frankenstein-esque creature with multiple eyes and an oversized head. The entrance to the gallery has the feel of a mad funhouse, or a fun madhouse, as guests walk through the mouth of a demented monster into a hallway inspired by Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

In fact, it was seeing that 2005 film that convinced MoMA’s curators to create this retrospective. “It happened at the moment when Johnny Depp has walked right to the end of the long brick hall. Suddenly, he throws open a door into a psychedelic pop-inspired world of color,” said assistant curator Ron Magliozzi, who dreamed up the exhibit.

Magliozzi and his team conducted an exhaustive search to find the right pieces that best tell Burton’s story as an artist.

“I don’t even know where they found some of that real early stuff,” said Burton, who sat down with a small group of reporters to discuss the retrospective. “That was the first time I’d ever seen stuff since, you know, some stuff since I was a child. So it was, you know, amazing and disturbing.”

Found solace in film early on
Indeed, among the otherwise fantastical collection are some fairly mundane objects from his youth, including old homework assignments. Burton jokes that one paper entitled “Humor in America,” which earned a B-plus, “was a high point.” This early work is a section of the gallery called “Surviving Burbank,” Burton’s hometown.

Slideshow   Tim Burton: A retrospective A collection of movie stills, drawings and other artwork produced by the famed director is on display at the New York Museum of Modern Art. more photos

Burton felt alienated from an early age but he found solace in film, specifically classic monster movies such as “Frankenstein” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

“Those movies kind of helped,” he said. “Feeling like, well you look strange, people think you’re strange, but you’re not.”

Burton said he was not a very verbal child, but he liked to draw. After high school, he enrolled at California Institute of the Arts and was eventually hired to be an animator at the Disney Studios. Though Burton said he grew up on Disney cartoons like everyone else, his real inspiration was stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, who set a new standard for special effects with films like “Jason and the Argonauts.” Burton said Harryhausen “was the one that really, kinda sold the deal for me.”

‘The dark ages’ at Disney
Disney hired Burton in 1979, at a time when the animation department was trying to create a dark movie to win back the kinds of teenage audiences who had flocked to “Star Wars.” Burton’s gothic sensibility seemed a natural fit for Disney’s first PG-rated animated feature “The Black Cauldron.”

“Clearly, ‘Black Cauldron’ was a project that was a real Tim Burton project. It was about this cauldron that produces armies of evil,” Magliozzi said. “It really inspired Tim. I think he produced 350 pieces of concept [art], not a single one of which was used in the film. It was just too weird and too strange.”

Burton calls this period at Disney “the dark ages” and at the time, he was clearly frustrated by the fact that his work was not being used. However, it led to a creative explosion where he blossomed as an artist. This is evidenced by the second part of the exhibit called “Beautifying Burbank.” Here, museumgoers can see Burton’s macabre humor and expressionistic style take shape.

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