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Not so the art schools, but "Disney memorabilia"—the auction-room word for old Mickey Mouse watches—are moving from the camp boutiques to Parke-Bernet, and a New York art dealer named Bernard Danenberg has contracted with Walt Disney Productions to exhibit "eels" (the clear plastic sheets on which final animation drawings are made) from a new Disney cartoon, Robin Hood. This migration of Disney's iconography from masscult to the commercial fringes of "high" art (it happened to Norman Rockwell last year) will be prodded along by a 7½-lb. tome entitled The Art of Walt Disney, written by English Art Critic Christopher Finch with the full cooperation of the Disney Archives and published, at $45, by Harry N. Abrams. The text has one defect: it is much too unctuous. Nevertheless the book reveals more clearly than anything written before the intricacy of the collaboration that went on in the studio in its earlier and better years. Finch resurrects from anonymity or near oblivion such artists and animators as Fred Moore, Bill Tytla and the abundantly gifted Albert Hurter, the presiding influence on Pinocchio. Hurter's pencil roughs and details exuded an essence of buckeye surrealism that got into gallery art only decades later—and then through Claes Oldenburg, who had himself worked at Disneyland.
But how can one describe the Disney collective's view of fine art? Its taste, ultimately, was Walt's and his was not markedly subtle; he had no pretensions to high culture and if he had been encumbered with such longings the barnyard vitality of early Disney would have been lost. When fine-art quotes appear in Disney's films, they are either apocalyptic and expressionist or else genteel: little in between. Their storehouse is, of course, Fantasia (1940). The cold crags and demon-infested clouds of the Night on Bald Mountain sequence refer straight back to the hellscapes of late-medieval religious art. Like many another image in Fantasia, it is also filtered through Art Deco, the popular style of the '30s. Using Deco idioms was as far as Disney ever went in the direction of classicism, but it would be shaky to suppose he picked up the habit in a museum. By the same token, he may never have heard of Gustav Klimt or even Monet, but another section of Fantasia, the Pastoral, now looks like a shotgun marriage of the two, with Disney's plump, nippleless nymphs and plow-horse centaurs cavorting around the iridescent blooms and bubbles of a pond in Arcadia.
The appearance of abstract art in Disney's work was fleeting. There was the Toccata and Fugue in Fantasia, with its pastel runs of animated Kandinsky. Now and then the studio would come up with an image that, while not really abstract, seems a distant reference to early European constructivism like the gush of music drawn as prismatic blocks issuing from the mouth of a dancing horn in Make Mine Music (1946). And, more distantly still, some of the Disney fantasies do run parallel to themes of high art, without displaying any awareness of their patrician Doppelgängers. The Isle of Jazz in Music Land (1946) is a brassy plebeian version of an almost archetypal image that in fine art reveals itself in Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead and Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera: an island as kingdom of mood.