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Discovering Blair’s Magical World by Karl Cohen
Olloclip’s quick-change snap-on lens asemblies boost your phone’s image range. photo: courtesy W. Disney
AN ENORMOUS MUSEUM EXHIBIT HONORING
Mary Blair (1911-1978), one of Walt Disney’s most original and influential designers/art directors, has opened in San Francisco at the Walt Disney Family Museum. Blair's aesthetics and taste influenced many of the studio’s post WWII classics including “Alice in Wonderland” (1951), “Cinderella” (1950) and “Peter Pan” (1953) along with theme park attractions.
Blair is perhaps best-known as the illustrator of several Little Golden Books for children.
The show’s curator is John Canemaker, author of “The Art and Flair of Mary Blair: An Appreciation,” a major book about her work. I had the pleasure of seeing the exhibit before it opened to the public and John, whom I’ve known since the 1980s, was on hand to talk about it.
John was delighted to have rediscovered works he thought were “lost,” particularly paintings he couldn’t locate when he wrote his book about Mary. In one case, word was around LA that the museum was looking for works by her whose present owners were unknown.
One art collector notified John that he now owned a pair of large paintings that Mary had created for Brazilian musical movie actress Carman Miranda about 1945. The man was delighted to loan them for the exhibition.
Another discovery included in the show was a painting of Mary wearing a big floppy hat and relaxing on a rock by the ocean. Borrowed from the Museum of American Illustration, it is by Pruett Carter (1938), one of her teachers. John describes Carter as one of America’s top magazine illustrators in the 1930s and an influence on Mary’s work. Much to his delight John also found a photo of Mary posing for the Carter painting in the Chouinard Art Institute’s archive.
The tribute to Blair fills the museum’s large two story exhibit hall for temporary shows. Built over a century ago, the building was once a gym for the soldiers stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco, a former military base. Before California became a US territory, the Presidio began as a small Spanish fort.
Today the Presidio is a scenic National Park. The museum is situated on a slight rise near the edge of San Francisco Bay and, from its front steps, has a magnificent and unobstructed view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Learning the Rules
The show is divided into three sections; the first is called “Learning the Rules” and covers Mary’s early growth as an artist. She was a gifted student who went to San Jose State College (1929-31) and was awarded a scholarship to study at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1932. While at Chouinard, Mary won $100 in a national design competition for Cannon, a major textile company.
She graduated in 1933, became active with the California Water Color Society and married her former classmate Lee Blair in 1934. He had won an Olympic gold medal for a water color painting in 1932 when the games were held in Los Angeles. (As you might know, painting is no longer an Olympic competition.)
Although both Lee and Mary won awards as artists and were exhibiting their works, neither could support themselves from their paintings. In 1934, both found work at the studio of Ub Iwerks, a animator who took two Academy Awards.
Lee eventually took a job at the Harman-Ising Studio and when he accepted a position at Disney in 1938, Mary was hired to fill his former position as a color director at Harman-Ising. Then in 1940 Disney hired her to work in the Character Model Department to do concept studies for future films. The department was headed by Joe Grant who became one of Walt’s “nine old men.”
Mary’s storytelling skills, that Pruett Carter had helped her develop, were a quality Walt admired in her work. Carter helped her to excel at staging her images so they had a dramatic quality, teaching her to create each image with an interesting angle and composition.
That skill would become very important to her career at Disney. Having mastered the skills needed to tell stories visually; she would go on to be admired as a master of inspirational studies.
The museum’s show has a nice selection of works from early in her career including works from her first year at Disney. Much of it was done with broad brush strokes of watercolors and she often used bold areas of earth tones.
She was not concerned with showing traditional perspective or shading that suggests volume. Her brush strokes created a flat painterly look to her simplified her images. By early 1941 Mary had begun to experiment with new ideas including stylized designs and painting cute children with big heads and small bodies. That eventually became a look people associated with here work.
Breaking the Rules
Suddenly things changed for Mary in May, 1941, when the Disney studio was torn apart by a strike. The second part of the exhibit, “Breaking the Rules”, covers period from 1941 to 1953.
When the simmering labor unrest erupted into an ugly strike Mary took a two month leave of absence so she could stay at home and paint. In August while the strike was still on her husband, who had remained loyal to Walt and crossed the picket lines, informed Mary he had been invited by Walt to join him and several other artists on a trip to South America to do research, paint, and act as cultural ambassadors. Mary, instead of staying home went to Walt and asked if she could be included in the tour. Walt said yes.
The trip was organized by Nelson Rockefeller, who in 1940 was appointed by President Roosevelt to a position to improve US relations with Latin America. Disney’s group went on a good will trip aimed at promoting a favorable impression of the US in the countries they visited. The US government was anxious to prevent countries in Latin America with large German populations from becoming strong supporters of Hitler.
There was a second reason for the trip, to get Walt away from the studio so Roy Disney, Walt’s brother and business partner, could quickly end the strike. Although the strike had been going on for two months Walt was still refusing to negotiate a reasonable settlement.
With Walt out of the country, Roy agreed to end the strike with binding arbitration. Although the new union was successful in getting almost everything they wanted, by the end of 1941 the US was at war, Disney was having serious financial problems and most of the former strikers had been laid off for lack of work.
For Mary the trip exposed her to people who lived a much simpler life and their lives were full of joy and color despite what we call there living in poverty. In her writings she talked about her pleasure in seeing rural areas where the costumes were “bright and happy” and her delight in seeing rich colorful jungles. John Canemaker says what she was experiencing was translated into “amazing vital and exciting pictures.”
Walt’s discovery of Mary’s vivacious new work led him to assign her to numerous projects in the coming years. Mary’s design work is evident in long sequences in film after film starting with “Saludos Amigos” (1942), “The Three Caballeros” (1945) and “Song of the South” (1947). Her importance to Disney is also acknowledged by his sending her on more research trips to both foreign countries and to various parts of the US.
In 1942, she went to Mexico to study traditional costumes, Christmas rituals and other aspects of their nave cultures. In 1943 she went to Cuba. In 1944 she spent 10 days in Georgia making sketches for “Song of the South” and in 1946 Walt sent her to Ireland.
That same year, Lee Blair was discharged from the Navy and moves to NYC where he opens a company doing TV commercials and other projects. During the war Mary and Lee were separated a lot, but now Walt allowed her the rare privilege of working at home. She would fly to LA for important meetings.
She continue work on Disney productions including “Make Mine Music” (1946), “Melody Time,” (1948, notably the “Jonny Appleseed” sequence), “Adventures of Ichabad and Mr. Toad” (1949),” “Cinderella”, “Alice in Wonderland”,” “Peter Pan” and other projects. The exhibit focuses on showing her wonderful studies for “The Three Caballeros” (1940), “Song of the South” (1946), “Melody Time” (1948), “Cinderella” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Peter Pan.”
The work from 1941 to 1953 was the highlight of the show for me as she was constantly discovering things that inspired her imagination resulting in her visions for projects becoming richer and more varied.
At the heart of Mary's work was a love of simple bold forms, but now she was free to use whatever palette she felt best expressed the mood of the sequence she was working on. That is one reason why she is admired as a wonderful, joy filled inspirational artist/designer.
In 1953 after contributing so much to Disney’s first Golden Age, Mary decides to again to retire from the studio. She leaves Disney to work on her own art and to be with her family, but her relationship with Walt will continue as a designer of new kinds of projects. She was also free to work for other clients as well.
Creating New Worlds
The final section of the show, “Creating New Worlds,” covers later work for Disney and other clients plus personal paintings. She designed a wide range of things including TV commercials, garments and accessories and sets for Radio City Music Hall and Broadway productions. Her film work included set designs for “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying” (1967). Probably her best remembered non-Disney works are the illustrations she made for Little Golden Books published by Simon and Shuster (1950 – 1964).
In the 1960s Disney asked Mary to design several unique projects. The first was “It’s A Small World,” made for the Pepsi Cola pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. After the fair ended it was reassembled at Disneyland. Today copies of it are in Disney theme parks in Florida, France, Japan and China.
In 1967 Disney commissioned Mary to design murals for Tomorrowland. They were large murals, but years later they were covered over when the themes of the attractions changed. In 1971 a mural she designed that is 90-foot-high (27 meters) was completed for the opening of Disney’s Contemporary Resort at Disney World.
The Creating New Worlds section of the show fills the upper floor of the exhibit hall. There are large and small paintings, photographs and other thing to enjoy.
The show which features about 200 paintings plus photographs and other things will be on view until September 7. If you can’t get to San Francisco to see it, you can enjoy it at home as almost everything in it is reproduced in the exhibit catalog.
“Magic, Color, Flair: The World of Mary Blair” with text by John Canemaker, is actually a handsome oversized 176 page hardbound book instead of a small softbound catalog. It reproduces almost everything in the exhibit in full color. For details visit: http://www.waltdisney.org -
My Feelings About the Appeal of Blair’s Art
As someone who did graduate work in art history, who worked as a museum educator, and who has taught art history and appreciation to college students and the public, I take a guilty pleasure in enjoying Mary’s art. It certainly is not the kind of fine art I was taught to admire.
Our sophisticated world has created snobbish barriers that inhibit educated folk from simply enjoying her simple, attractive works. We are taught to look down on some of her work that is overly cute and kitsch. Some of it is and I’m not at all fond of her well-loved “It’s a Small World.” It is far too sweet and I disliked hearing the same tune over and over when I saw that attraction at Disneyland.
But I admire her work for Disney features and many of her paintings. Her mature work conveys a simple unsophisticated joy of life and you don’t need to a have a PhD to appreciate it.
According to John Canemaker, Mary’s work was created by someone who tried to be a successful fine art watercolor painter during the great American depression, but neither Mary nor Lee, her husband, could do that so they found jobs.
They were fortunate to find employment in an area closely related to what they really wanted to do with their lives. They both wanted to be fine artists who painted for their own satisfaction and could support themselves from the sale of that work.
John Canemaker found a statement written by Mary that reveals her feelings about having taken a leave of absence from Disney in 1941. He writes, “Mary was less than happy working in animation.”
But then he quotes her saying, “Two years there [at Disney] were interesting, but not enough to sidetrack my first ambition and art school – formed aspiration – illustration. So I quit in the summer of 1941. Two months of domestic life [began] again.”
What we don’t know is if she would have gone back to work at the end of the strike if she hadn’t gone to South America. If the strike and the trip to South America hadn’t happened, it is quite possible that Mary might not have found the style of art that made her famous.
Karl Cohen is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .