[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: November 23, 2009]
I left the crushed reception for the Tim Burton show at MOMA with a greater appreciation of him as an artist, and impressed by the volume as well as the inventiveness of his work. So what's the problem?
I did have a problem. This was a reception for a restricted group of members, and yet the line to access the gallery stretched around a cattle pen arrangement and then down a flight of stairs. It was mobbed. Anyone would think this was a Van Gogh retrospective.
The pretext for the show is somebody's discovery that Burton, in addition to being a feature film director with a pre-history in animated film, is also the author of countless, previously unexhibited, drawings, cartoons, comic strips, and doodles. He seems to have spent his life bent over a sketchbook. The result is a show crowded with works, mainly small scale, some in bright colors, other simply pencilled. Some of his early short animated works are displayed, as well as many models and props. One enters the gallery through a monster's mouth, and this will all be great fun for older children.
I hadn't known Burton was a graphic artist of such skill, albeit of limited range. The curatorial notes stress his singular vision, and he unquestionably has one - a sort of comic nightmare sensibility - and rarely departs from it. One thinks of the proto-surrealist figures in the drawings of Odilon Redon (who was also, it just happens, a terrific painter). Closer to home, one is reminded of cartoonists and illustrators of works for children - of Edward Lear, Edward Gorey, and very much indeed of Theodore "Dr Seuss" Geisel. Burton can be summarized as Geisel gone Goth. I was reminded too of Charles Addams, and countless hugely talented New Yorker cartoonists. I can't judge with any great confidence, based on this first brief exposure, how Burton's work stacks up against the others mentioned, but who even knew such comparisons might be appropriate?
But that's where matters end really. The voluminous output of a pretty decent cartoonist. One could spend a couple of hours examining these drawings, but any discussion of the formal virtues of Burton's work - his sense of color, his feel for pictorial space - would last five minutes. And candidly, MOMA would not be showing this oeuvre if the artist was not a popular movie maker. But the show is enjoyable, so why not set aside these pompous ruminations on aesthetic values and just dig it? Well, precisely because the works are being shown at MOMA, and not, for example, at the Museum of the Moving Image a few blocks away. There is something discordant about MOMA offering a blockbuster showcase for works which are of such lesser interest than the paintings and sculptures spread through the rest of the building.
I went to the atrium and sat in front of an abstract by Helen Frankenthaler, thinking about how hard it is to put into words why a painting which is pure form and color can hold attention indefinitely, while a funny picture of a man with a too-big brain raises a chuckle and is then forgotten. I then started thinking about the one room show of William Blake's engravings and drawings at the Morgan, but the comparison annoyed me and I went home.
Through April 26 at MOMA, and if you don't mind standing in line I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
