For its first exhibition devoted to Walt Disney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York explores the sources of inspiration of the American designer (1901-1966) and his studios in European decorative arts, notably French Rococo from the 18th century. century.
Where do the teapot come from, the clock and the candles animating like humans in “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), one of the productions associated with the rebirth of the Disney studios, and on which had worked in his time their founder? Probably precious and old decorative objects which only asked to come to life, like these porcelains from the manufactures of Meissen in Germany, or of Sèvres in France, answers the great New York museum.
This parallel between the Rococo style and the enchanting world of Disney is one of the most telling in the exhibition which starts on December 10 and brings together 60 pieces of art and decoration from the 18th century with drawings and essays from from the archives of American studios.
For the curator of the exhibition, Wolf Burchard, the two universes have as common points to try to give life to inanimate objects and to “seek to speak to our emotions, rather than to our intellect”, he explains. to AFP.
Dialogue is also played out in the painting. One of the masterpieces of the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), “The happy chances of the escarpolette” (“The Swing” in English), was to appear in “Beauty and the Beast” , but it is ultimately in “Frozen” (Frozen, 2013) that it will be referred to.
From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), inspired by the tales of the Brothers Grimm, to Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), adapted from versions by Frenchman Charles Perrault, the Met revisits the great classics light of a Walt Disney nourished by his European travels.
Born in Chicago in 1901, Walt Disney first traveled to France in December 1918, shortly after the end of World War I, as a volunteer for the International Red Cross. He returned to Europe in the summer of 1935, then several times after World War II.
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