Posted: 06/05/2011 12:49:17 PM PDT
Updated: 06/05/2011 12:57:40 PM PDT
By the time Tim Burton turned 10 in 1968, everybody in America was familiar with the phrase "beautiful downtown Burbank." It had been coined by Gary Owens, who used it on the hit series "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In." The town fathers had even found it so catchy that they adopted it and trademarked it.
For the young future filmmaker, Burbank was not so sunny - or, more precisely, the suburban town did not inspire the sunniest of imagination in him. Accompanying the introduction to the coffee-table book "The Art of Tim Burton" (Steeles Publishing), there is a drawing called "Self-Portrait, 1990." Though by then the director was in his 30s, the black-and-white sketch shows a roundish-headed figure with unruly hair with the words "Boy From the Burbank Lagoon."
In the introduction, Leah Gallo, a writer and photographer who worked with the director on "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," tells the familiar story of Burton, who "never felt he belonged in the Southern California suburbia where he was raised. He identified with Universal film monsters more than the people around him."
As we well know, Burton channeled his sense of being an outsider into his creative sensibilities and became one of Hollywood's biggest directors. Now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting a major retrospective of his art. Originally curated by New York City's Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition revolves around the theme of Burbank. It includes
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more than 700 drawings, paintings, photographs, film and video works, storyboards, puppets, concept artworks, maquettes, costumes and cinematic ephemera, including art from a number of unrealized and little-known personal projects.
"About Burbank," says Britt Salvesen, who organized the LACMA exhibit, "I think (Burton's art) has always really honed in on the contrast between the blue skies and the trees and the perfect green lawns and the darkness within.... Finding that dark underside is crucial to his art, and I think that is part of what people identify with."
While the first part of the exhibition is called "Surviving Burbank 1977-1984," it was the city itself that helped give Burton a start. In ninth grade, he won a city contest to create an anti-littering poster, and in high school he placed third in a fire-prevention poster contest. With the encouragement of an art teacher, Burton then began to develop his own style.
"Tim would be the first to tell you that he wasn't haunting LACMA in those years," says Salvesen, "but later came to know a lot more about art history when he studied at CalArts. I think early on his influence was more pop culture."
In that sense, Burton's early drawing style exhibits traces of Mad magazine and Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel). At 17, he submitted a children's book to Walt Disney Productions called "The Giant Zlig," about the adventures of gentle monsters. It was turned down for being too similar to Seuss. Later you can see traces of illustrators and cartoonists like Edward Gorey, Ralph Steadman and Edward Sorel. There are also hints of gothic Victorian and Mexican dia de los muertos art as well as German Expressionism.
After graduating from high school, Burton went on to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where some of his classmates included directors John Lasseter, Brad Bird, John Musker and Henry Selick. After his third year there, he got a job as an animator at Disney, which was impressed with his 11/2-minute short "Stalk of the Celery Monster." Like Seuss, Burton is fond of wordplay. A number of Burton's short films are being shown on flat screens throughout the exhibition, including "Vincent" from 1982 (about a boy who wanted to grow up to be like the actor Vincent Price, who actually narrated it) and "Frankenweenie" (which combined Burton's love for dogs and "Frankenstein").
He worked at Disney for four years, but it was never a good fit. But Paul Reubens was looking for someone to direct "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" and chose Burton after seeing "Frankenweenie."
Burton's career quickly took off. He made "Beetlejuice," "Batman" and "Edward Scissorhands" in a row, and soon critics were using the term "Burtonesque."
You get that as you enter the "Tim Burton" exhibition through a toothy white character with branches for hair. The three-dimensional rendering is based on an unrealized project of Burton's called "Trick or Treat." Toothy creatures populate many of the works. You can draw your own psychological conclusion as to what that represents. What many of the works have in common involves transformation. While a creature in a painting or drawing begins as one thing, it may mutate into another, often something quite sinister.
What's fun, as Salvesen notes, is connecting the dots between an early drawing and a movie that might be made 15 years later. Seeds of, say, "Mars Attacks" can be seen in youthful works as well as later paintings. Films were always an influence, and one of the early documents is a list of some of Burton's favorite horror flicks as a teen. As part of the exhibition, LACMA is screening a retrospective of Burton's own films as well as a series of horror films and creature features that the director endorsed.
Much of the work in the exhibition - perhaps all of it ultimately - is related to his filmmaking. Outside the museum is an original topiary from "Edward Scissorhands," while inside is the costume worn by Johnny Depp as the character. There is also a model of the cookie-making robot, a hand created by Stan Winston Studios and sketches Burton made for the film.
Salvesen says over the years Burton has been able to do more with less with the sketches for his movies.
"The drawings in his early years were in great detail, probably reflecting the training he was getting at Disney and CalArts. Later, as he came to form this incredible team of collaborators that he works with film after film - the fabricators and costume designers - he is able to communicate to them with much more minimal suggestions."
The exhibition, which traveled to London and Toronto from New York before arriving in L.A., has not gone over well with some art critics, who see it mostly as movie memorabilia. (Indeed, Bonhams & Butterfields is coincidentally auctioning off props, drawings and storyboards from Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" on June 26. Items may be seen on the auction house website.)
Some of the works are manufactured by others, although to Burton's specifications, like "Carousel," a suspended flying-saucer object illuminated by black lights and accompanied by music of longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman. And while there are masks and the Penguin's black-wicker pram from "Batman," still most of it is from Burton's hand.
While a painting like "Blue Girl with Wine," showing a woman with bull's-eye breasts, or the objects "Brains With Coiled Feelers" or "Blue Baby With Nails" (both self-explanatory) are amusing, and the large-scale Polaroids like "Blue Girl With a Skull" are striking, often it is smaller items or letters that catch one's eye in the exhibition.
The filmmaker, who is working on a full-length version of "Frankenweenie" and a feature remake of the old TV vampire soap "Dark Shadows" with Depp (who else?), visited LACMA a couple of times as the show was being installed and made some decisions about certain works that were aesthetically important to him.
"That was all really useful for us," says Salvesen. "We wanted to reflect his very unique visual style. It wasn't my intention to make this a uniform museum exhibition. I wanted it to be his world."
Burton did visit the exhibition over the Memorial Day weekend, prompting hundreds of fans to show up at the museum. Many of them dressed in costumes like the bizarre characters of his films and waited in line to meet him and have him sign his book. The filmmaker is expected to return sometime in October, but no date has been set.
Of course, Burton has escaped Burbank. The filmmaker now lives in London with his companion, Helena Bonham Carter, and their two children. The pair famously keep homes next door to each other with a connecting room. And while he may live in England, no doubt the dark musings he had growing up in Burbank are etched forever in his mind. So in one way, what is on display at LACMA can be seen as a triumph of the filmmaker's imagination, rather than of his skills as an animator or painter.
"I think he has a certain nihilism at his core, but it's so counterbalanced by this drive to create," says Salvesen. "I find that interesting about so many artists - and Burton is one of them - that despite a pessimism or apprehension about the human condition they still always create something new in the world."
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