The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presents “Tim Burton,” a major retrospective exploring the full scale of Tim Burton’s career, both as a director and concept artist for live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer.
This exhibition brings together over 700 examples of sketchbooks, concept art, drawings, paintings, photographs, and a selection of his amateur films, and is the Museum’s most comprehensive monographic exhibition devoted to a filmmaker. An extensive film retrospective spanning Burton’s 27-year career runs throughout the exhibition, along with a related series of films that influenced, inspired, and intrigued Burton as a filmmaker.
The exhibition is on view throughout the Museum: the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the third floor features hundreds of drawings, paintings, sculptures, sketchbooks, and moving image works. Downstairs, in the Museum’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater Lobbies, a selection of largescale Polaroids created by Burton is joined by a selection of domestic and international film posters from his feature films, while musical compositions specifically chosen for the exhibition by Burton’s longtime collaborator Danny Elfman plays over the gallery’s speakers. In MoMA’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, a large-scale balloon and a deer-shaped topiary inspired by Edward Scissorhands are on view.
Magliozzi says, “While Tim Burton is known almost exclusively for his work on the screen, including Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and more recently Sweeney Todd, this exhibition covers the full range of his creative output, revealing an artist and filmmaker who shares much with his contemporaries in the post modern generation who have taken their inspiration from pop culture. In Burton’s case, he was inspired by newspaper and magazine comics, cartoon animation and children’s literature, toys and television, Japanese monster movies, carnival sideshows and performance art, cinema Expressionism and science-fiction films alike.”
MoMA’s exhibition draws extensively from the artist’s personal archive, as well as from studio archives and the private collections of Burton’s collaborators, and includes art from a number of early, unrealized projects. Never-before-exhibited drawings, paintings, and film props, as well as virtually unseen films—including Burton’s 1983 live-action, Asian-cast adaptation of Hansel and Gretel—and early student films, are on view.
Inspired by the selection of works MoMA’s curators chose for the exhibition, Burton created seven new pieces that are on display, including “Balloon Boy,” a 21-foot-tall, 8-footdiameter balloon appearing as a many-eyed creature that greets visitors in the Museum’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby throughout the opening weeks of the exhibition. Within the galleries a toyhouse diorama inspired by Burton’s six-episode Internet series “The World of Stainboy” (2000) is on display. This work is joined by an animatronic “Robot Boy” sculpture, based on a character from Burton’s 1997 children’s book “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories,” and a revolving, multimedia, black-light carousel installation that hangs from the ceiling. Three original Burton ‘creature’ sculptures are also on display within the gallery. These original works are joined by a precise replica of a deer-shaped topiary from Edward Scissorhands (1990), re-created for the exhibition by Atta Inc. and on display in MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. An original animation of MoMA’s logo conceived by Burton and produced by Mackinnon & Saunders, is on view in the Ronald S. and Jo Carole Lauder Lobby, and online on YouTube.
Visitors enter the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the third floor through a spectacular three-dimensional monster’s mouth. Inspired by Burton’s unrealized film project Trick or Treat (1980), the entrance was created for the exhibition by TwoSeven Inc. Upon passing through the creature’s mouth on its red-carpeted tongue, visitors proceed through a corridor lined floor to ceiling with Burton’s signature black-and-white stripes, and a presentation of Burton’s The World of Stainboy Internet series plays on six large monitors.
In the galleries the exhibition is organized in three sections, each in relation to Burbank, California, the city in which Burton was raised and the inspiration for much of his early work.
MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 Lobby Gallery has been transformed into a photo gallery with the display of 29 large-scale Polaroids, each approximately 33 x 22 inches, created by Burton between 1992 and 1999, along with a curio case of strange objects used in production of the Polaroids. In these works, Burton found another medium for expressing visual themes and motifs that also appear in his sketchbooks, drawings, and paintings. Created in studios and on desert and countryside locations with the aid of live models, the Polaroids employ fantastic objects created for photo shoots and puppets and props from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, while exploring Burton’s fascination with holidays, body modification, and the Gothic. The installation is accompanied by musical compositions by Danny Elfman that play over the gallery’s speakers. Additionally, a selection of domestic and international posters from Burton’s films are on view in the theater lobby galleries.
Tim Burton is organized by Ron Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, and Jenny He, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, with Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.
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