The European Rococo Style That Inspired Walt Disney

The Met’s very good show takes us on a tour of French decorative arts and Disney confections.

I was in New York for a couple of days last week. Christmas there is so festive and pretty. In Midtown, Fifth Avenue glitters with Christmas lights. This year, there’s an Omicron hysteria, but the doomsayers aren’t controlling my life.

I had a good, long visit to the Met. Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts is its latest exhibition. I enjoyed it. Shame on me for taking so long to see Art of Native America, the new iteration of American indigenous art. It’s a stellar presentation that I’ll write about in January, since it’s something everyone should see.

Despite problems with its leadership, the Met’s still the greatest museum in the world, as I’ve said many times in this column. After writing about its Medici show and Alice Neel retrospective, both bloated, unnecessary exhibitions, I was up for the romp that’s Inspiring Walt Disney. Disney (1901–66), the great culture and entertainment entrepreneur, took an animated cartoon studio in the 1920s and made it into an international leisure-industry giant.

Animation, aimed at children and adults smitten by whimsy, was new when Disney and his brother, Roy, started their company in 1923. Both, but especially Walt, loved European travel and were omnivorous seekers of raw material from European art and architecture and European children’s literature, much of it illustrated. The exhibition, done with the great Wallace Collection in London, focuses on Disney’s and his studio’s debt to French Rococo decorative arts, of which the Met owns riches. It shows, I think to everyone’s delight, that pink castles, talking sofas, and a prince turned into a teapot, all Disney confections, started as fragments of Rococo Paris.

Disney, a Kansas City boy, arrived in Paris as an ambulance driver weeks after the 1918 armistice but stayed and learned to love the city. Back home in 1919, Disney started work as a commercial artist. He’d gone to the Kansas City Art Institute before his Paris adventure. In 1923, he moved to Los Angeles, aiming to work in the new field of animation. Born one after another were Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie, and the Three Little Pigs. In 1928, Disney incorporated synchronized sound into his cartoon shorts, and in 1932 he started filming in Technicolor. In 1934, the studio, with Disney as the visionary, started developing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In 1935, Disney went to Europe for a bit of a Grand Tour. He brought back with him over 300 illustrated children’s books, the genre’s canon. He also returned immersed in Rococo style. This new visual vocabulary informed some of his biggest projects and a studio style that had one of its biggest hits in the ’90s, long after Disney died.

Animating the inanimate is at the heart of Rococo style. We can see it in a Sèvres ewer shaped and decorated to evoke splashing water or a church with turrets so attenuated it seems to reach for the heavens. The word rococo comes from the French rocaille, a style of ornamentation drawing on the shapes of rocks and shells formed by constant exposure to water. As a whimsical and witty decorative style, it starts in Paris in the 1720s in reaction to the heaviness of Baroque decoration. For French elites of all stripes, it suggested joie de vivre, a gaiety of spirit and freedom of motion. A Sèvres three-arm wall sconce from the Met collection, made in the 1760s, introduces us to the style. Pink, blue, and green, its subtly burgeoning leaves articulated with gold, it’s as luscious as it is breezy.

Snow White, which opened in 1937, and Pinocchio and Fantasia, premiering in 1940, are more informed by Rococo style than inspired or even influenced. It’s the exhibition’s biggest intellectual problem since Disney and his artists were omnivorous. Some of his artists were European, the studio had a workshop system with many steps involving different people, and the zeitgeist was “do what works” rather than “follow the playbook.” Snow White, the first feature-length animated color movie, had faces and figures that conveyed human emotion, both in expressions and in action compelled by mood. The Disney studio, the show says, struggled to achieve these goals after lots of experimentation in the ’30s, much as French porcelain makers sought the same effects in the 1720s and ’30s. The French didn’t even know how to make porcelain until 1700.

---

The easy interplay of art, dance, and music characterizes Rococo style. Decoration seems to sway. Disney saw this as essential in animated movies. Rococo color is riotous, and so is Technicolor. Light and airy Rococo style makes more room for children at play and young romance than any other aesthetic vocabulary. The exhibition, for all of these moments of suggestion, can’t find precise parallels in any classic Disney films, from Snow White to Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians, the latter two from my childhood.

---

That’s fine with me. Disney’s animated shorts The Clock Store from 1931 and The China Shop from 1934 are the first to animate everyday objects. Clocks, vases, teapots, and plates come alive to Mozart music, and it all has a vibe of German Rococo porcelain; but this seems like a one-off. Albert Hunter, the Disney artist most involved in the shorts, was a Swiss immigrant who knew Swiss and German style from immersion.

The exhibition mixes concept drawings by Disney artists, the famous cels used among the final steps in filming; clips from half a dozen Disney movies; and the best of the Met’s porcelain. In-depth Disney artist profiles take us into the maze of studio craftsmanship and originality. Walt Disney was the entrepreneur, guiding light, and public face of the studio, but the operation was massive. I learned a lot from the look at Mary Blair, who brought a sensitivity to Rococo color, especially pink, to Cinderella.

Released in 1950, Cinderella started with a Rococo aesthetic vision; but, as the film developed, Disney artists found French 18th-century men’s and women’s costumes too complicated to animate, and Disney executives viewed the menswear as too effeminate and, as one called it, “unrelatable” to a modern audience. Disneyland’s castle and its descendants are inspired by Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria and by other French, German, Spanish, and Scottish castles, some Rococo but one, the Alcázar in Segovia, a late medieval building. Sleeping Beauty, released in 1959, owes its look to tapestries from the Cloisters, the Met’s separate museum of medieval art and architecture, and 15th-century illuminated manuscripts.

It’s not until Beauty and the Beast in 1991 that Disney Studios dived into a French 18th-century story. It’s based on a 1756 novel about a handsome but vain and selfish prince turned into an ugly beast as punishment for his shortcomings. To break the spell, he must fall in love and be loved, despite his beastly look. The story unfolds from there, and it’s no spoiler to report the spell’s eventually broken.

Nothing in the Met’s Rococo porcelain collection is quoted in the film. Fragonard’s painting The Swing, from 1768 and in the Wallace Collection in London, is animated in an early version of the film but was ultimately cut. Still, Beauty and the Beast is filled with anthropomorphism, among them the Beast’s servants: Lumière, a candlestick, Cogsworth, a clock, and Mrs. Potts, a teapot. It’s an excuse, in my opinion a middling one, to show the Met’s best things. I’m not sure any of the Disney concept artists looked at the Met’s clocks made by André Charles Boulle in the 1720s, or its Meissonnier-designed candlestick from the 1730s, or its Meissen teapots, but they’re in the show, they look fantastic, and someone at Disney was thinking about such objects. And it’s an exhibition about Disney, so imagination is allowed, as is suspension of disbelief.

Inspiring Walt Disney is a very good exhibition about that certain but elusive thing called “influence.” Clumsy art history proposes a “this looks like that” test in, for instance, comparing Diebenkorn to Matisse or Léger to Picasso. Influence is sometimes a trace or a mood, a palette rather than a whole figure. Influence is a little like the origins of love. It can start with a gesture, a smile, a look, or a quip. Sometimes it’s a philosophy of life, and that’s weighty, or a style quirk, which is the stuff of quick impressions.

The Met show goes beneath the cursory and uninformative “this looks like that” to the spirit undergirding style. Disney and his artists absorbed Rococo style and spirit but filtered Dalí, the Pre-Raphaelites, Gustave Doré, Gothic sculpture, Flemish tapestry, and contemporary film. Where would Lady Tremaine, Cinderella’s nemesis, be without Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca? Early in Inspiring Walt Disney, we see one of the Thorne miniature rooms from the Art Institute of Chicago. These are boxed rooms — I think there are about 70 — at dollhouse scale, expressing slices of decorative style over the centuries. They’re not duplications of existing rooms but expressions of a style at its peak and at its purest, a small-scale Gesamtkunstwerk. Disney loved them. He saw them as 3D concept drawings. They inspired him to give his cartoon figures a rich, complex ambiance. So much of Rococo style involves atmosphere and attitude.

The exhibition teases all of these things out, which is hard to do. It’s a subtle, perceptive treatment of Disney, an entertainment and art giant. “Is it art?” — a question that starts the show — doesn’t need to be asked. Of course what Disney’s studio produced is art. There have been dozens of Disney exhibitions over the years, as early as a Museum of Modern Art show in the ’30s and a Whitney retrospective I saw in the early ’80s. Inspiring Walt Disney is a logical next level, building on Once upon a Time, a 2007 show by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Grand Palais in Paris and still the best art exhibition I’ve ever seen.

The Met show’s great catalogue was entirely written by Wolf Burchard, the museum’s new curator of British decorative arts. It’s good to see the Met producing one-author books. There’s a vogue now for exhibition catalogues with a dozen short essays, which more often than not means that scholars advance a dumb or flimsy proposition and then flee from it after a few pages. Burchard is mightily clever, spinning lots of conjectures into a persuasive whole. The final chapter has subheadings called “Optimism and Reassurance” and “The Pursuit of Happiness.” I’m all for these, and though Disney today is a PC snake in thrall to Communist China, Disney films are nostalgic and lovely to watch. Burchard quotes Kenneth Clark’s 1968 documentary Civilisation at the end of the book. Of Rococo style Clark said:

Serious-minded people used to call it shallow and corrupt, chiefly because it aimed to give pleasure, but the founders of the American Constitution, far from frivolous, thought to make the pursuit of happiness as a proper aim for mankind, and if ever this aim has been given a visual form, it’s in the Rococo.

This is a good way to end a review of an enjoyable show and one so suited to Christmas joy.

***

A Philanthropic Gift to Celebrate

Meanwhile, the Met got some very good news last week. Oscar Tang, a trustee of the Met since 1994, and his wife, Agnes, are giving $125 million to the museum’s proposed modern- and contemporary- art wing. Oscar was president of the board at Phillips Academy when I was the school’s museum director and one of my big donors.

Oscar is a pure philanthropist. Money-seekers tend to use this term to describe a donor who gives money with no questions asked. Who wouldn’t like finding a pot of gold with no tracking device on it? By “pure philanthropist,” I mean a donor with proven passion and commitment who gives where he thinks the need is greatest and gives to solve a genuine, usually long-standing and difficult problem. A pure philanthropist isn’t a pain in the ass about it. If he sees his gift is bungled, he’ll ask pointed, persistent questions. A pure philanthropist tends to be so rich, giving money is his mission.

I’ve never thought the Met needs to collect or even show contemporary art. In Manhattan alone, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney are established, purpose-built heavy hitters, with lots of smaller museums and, of course, hundreds of galleries focusing on art after, say, 1945 or even 1970. Contemporary art is their collective expertise and mission. In embracing this new field, the Met is inviting a big-appetite eater to its dinner table. This will, inevitably, sideline departments for which the Met is internationally famous. The museum is creating an internal rat race it doesn’t need. As it is, it’s constantly and irritatingly crying poor.

The Met will always try to be the best and biggest in everything it does, but why compete with MoMA? In London, Berlin, and Paris, New York’s three European counterparts — if any could have something so simple and banal as a counterpart — modern and contemporary art have their own museums.

The museum’s expansion has many goals, though. One is to make a home for Leonard Lauder’s gift of 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, and other sublime and important Cubist things. Lauder gave the art to the Met nearly ten years ago with the stipulation that it make a space to display them in high style, and that means not in the bonus room in the cellar. The Tang money is the anchor gift addressing this. I think it’s generous and selfless to fund spaces for someone else’s gift.

No one likes the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, opened in 1987 and the target for a complete gut job and makeover for modern and contemporary art. There’s something to be gained in asking who screwed up since this space is only 35 years old. No one said “It doesn’t work . . . let’s gut it” after construction of the Pantheon. People at the highest echelons in politics, business, education, and culture rarely probe their institutional failures. I’d like to see the Met break with this bit of denial and obfuscation, as I wanted to hear MoMA tell us who flubbed so badly that it’s 2004 redo, costing $800 million, needed a $400 million fix 15 years later.

None of this is Oscar Tang’s doing or concern. He’s solving problems. And if he thinks the Met needs a first-class space for modern and contemporary art, that’s the best evidence suggesting I’m wrong.

The Tang gift is something to celebrate, and the best present imaginable for the greatest museum in the world.