"Silly" Art

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 126, 21 November 1941, Page 4

"Silly" Art

T would be interesting to know how many ] of our readers would have recognised the face on our cover page if it had not been labelled. If on the other hand we had shown Mickey Mouse, recognition would have been instant and universal. It is a case where everybody knows the creation, hardly anybody the creator. And yet so great an authority as David Low not only says, but is prepared to maintain, that Disney is the "most significant figure in graphic art since Leonardo." Has Low just gone mad? If we knew the answer we would know what Disney himself thinks he is doing; and it is doubtful if even Low knows that. For it is no longer a case of explaining Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck or of saying where Snow-White stands in the Disney scheme of things. Disney has ‘recently moved right out of the comics, Low claims, to the higher plane of the art of the future, and if Leonardo were alive to-day "he would be in his back room inventing simplifications of animating processes and projection devices." In other words Low suggests that art is about to move past static representations of nature, and perhaps of moods, and will not rest until it has added the beauty of movement. Stick-in-the-muds will scoff, but Disney has reminded us that women move and trees bend and that it is not enough to concentrate on form and colour and light. But if Disney has ascended into the light, what happens to the comic extravagances of his unregenerate days? Will grown-ups dare any longer to recognise Donald Duck, or will it be bad form in future to stoop lower than a Bach fugue or a Beethoven-Disney pastoral? We can’t have it both ways. We have either been too ridiculous in the past to be excused or we are going to be too solemn in the future to remember that Disney began by being "silly."