Disney At The Met? A Blockbuster Exhibit Shows The Surprising Highbrow Origins Of Snow White And Cinderella

It’s Disney, but is it art? That was the question posed by The New York Times when the newspaper covered the Metropolitan Museum’s acquisition of a celluloid from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938.

Depicting two vultures eagerly anticipating the demise of Snow White’s evil stepmother, the gouache showed many of the qualities that made Disney’s reputation, including narrative force, psychological insight, graphic dynamism, and a sly sense of humor. The Met’s curator of paintings touted Disney’s oeuvre as “probably… the greatest popular art of this generation”. Although the Times didn’t contradict him, the reporter wryly noted the cel’s awkward placement “between a couple of sylvans, in oil, and a glass cabinet filled with bronze and iron fittings from an Etruscan chariot”.

A major new exhibition at the Met shows how readily the cel could have been displayed in loftier quarters. Building on the premise that Disney was profoundly influenced by the fine and decorative arts of Europe – and that the studio has since followed Walt’s lead – Inspiring Walt Disney shows the mark of periods ranging from Gothic Revival to Rococo on films ranging from Cinderella to Beauty and the Beast.

These artistic precedents were hardly concealed by the Walt Disney Company. (Beauty and the Beast even includes a direct tribute to The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.) What makes the Met exhibit compelling is the curators’ deft observation of Disney’s artistry through well-chosen comparison to historical work. The exhibition reawakens appreciation for a contribution to popular culture so ubiquitous as to be taken for granted.

Some influences have been noted since the movies were first released. For instance, the Met’s famous Unicorn Tapestries clearly provide a template for scenery in Sleeping Beauty. (The exhibition catalogue even documents the origin of Disney’s inspiration, when a studio employee named John Hench excitedly brought reproductions of the Medieval weaving back to Hollywood to share with Walt.) As the exhibition and catalogue illustrate, this imagery was seamlessly mixed with contemporaneous sources including Les Très Riche Heures du duc de Berry.

What is most remarkable is the effortlessness of repurposing and assimilation, resulting in a visual experience that is unmistakably Disney. Remarkable, if not surprising. After all, Disney’s stock in trade has always been appropriation, laying claim to material originating with sources as disparate as the Brothers Grimm and Buster Keaton.

The take-up of these materials becomes disturbing in the corporate context: Wielding copyright as a weapon against other artists’ efforts to follow Walt’s example is inarguably hypocritical and also damaging to the culture he helped create. Perhaps inadvertently, the Met invites this criticism. Like the mirror in Snow White, this exhibition speaks truth to those willing to listen. (Spoiler alert: Walt’s corporate heirs are not the fairest.)  

The criticism invited by Inspiring Walt Disney does not undercut admiration for the artistry, even if admiration for the artistry may intensify criticism by increasing awareness of what could be achieved imaginatively in a world where IP was freely shared. Disney’s interpretation of the Rococo sensibility is especially enchanting. To see a candlestick animated in a cartoon is to recognize the ways in which 18^th century artisans gave life to inanimate objects with swirling embellishment. Those old candlesticks return the favor by revealing Disney’s aesthetic turn into the supernatural, mediated by the technology of his time.

It is telling that Vultures was brought to the Met by the great surrealist art dealer Julian Levy, who represented the work of Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti. Imbued with timeless magic delivered through the latest cinematic sorcery, this greatest of popular art was also avant-garde.

Walt Disney was shrewd enough to avoid making any such claims. In the Times article, he insisted that he knew nothing about art. “I looked up the definition once, but I’ve forgotten what it is,” he told the interviewer. “I’m no art lover!” This disingenuous rhetorical stance could be read as crass commercialism – an all-American appeal to know-nothing isolationism – were it not for the fact that Julian Levy was working on behalf of Disney. Walt’s way of speaking – and especially his claim that other people read complex meanings into his studio’s simple pictures – has more in common with Marcel Duchamp, even anticipating the performative naïvité of Andy Warhol.

From that perspective, the placement of Vultures between some landscape paintings and chariot fittings could not have been more perfect. Puckishly upsetting distinctions between elite and popular culture, Disney helped to inspire art as we know it.