Monday, April 26, 2010

New York, Noo Yawk Part I: Tim Burton Exhibition

Photo courtesy of the MOMA website

This weekend I had the good fortune to see the Tim Burton retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The galleries were packed with people trying to squeeze in a visit on the last weekend of the show.

A little background blurb from the MOMA website:

This exhibition explores the full range of his creative work, tracing the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work in film. It brings together over seven hundred examples of rarely or never-before-seen drawings, paintings, photographs, moving image works, concept art, storyboards, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera from such films as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Mars Attacks!, Ed Wood, and Beetlejuice, and from unrealized and little-known personal projects that reveal his talent as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer working in the spirit of Pop Surrealism.

The size of the crowd impressed on me the degree to which people love seeing inside the creative process. I assume that most people at the MOMA that weekend were familiar with Burton's movies, and were there to discover what was behind his dark and quirky humor. I had the most fun looking at the developmental work for movies I had seen, tracing backward the evolution of characters and environments through dozens of sketches. I took away a picture of Burton's creative process that was delightful as any of the individual pieces I'd seen.

Unfortunately, the show closed today (April 26), but you can still order the catalog through the MOMA website.





1 comment:

  1. They mentioned this exhibit on Gossip Girl last night. I'm jealous you got to see it for realz.

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