Tim Burton's Twisted Art

The modern master of the macabre is celebrated with a MoMA retrospective of his wonderfully warped paintings, sculptures, and drawings. VIEW OUR GALLERY. Plus, more on Art Beast.

“Is there a doctor here? I want to check to see if I’m dead,” director Tim Burton said to the crowd who had come to the press preview of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. “I’m having some sort of out-of-body experience here.”

It was classic Burton: funny, a little ghoulish, a tad awkward. At heart, he is still the high school freak, even though his movies have made hundreds of millions of dollars; he’s had two children with the luscious Helena Bonham Carter; and now he has a major exhibition at one of the world’s great art museums (November 22-April 26, 2010).

Click Image to View Our Gallery of Tim Burton's Macabre World

But the core of the exhibition is Burton’s output as a fine artist: paintings, Polaroids, and, most interestingly, hundreds of drawings, from his adolescence on, that Burton says were intended to be “personal and private” and have never been shown. They reveal him as a talented cartoonist and caricaturist, reminiscent of Ralph Steadman and Edward Gorey. Some of the stuff is clearly ephemera—a desk blotter or a page of the Los Angeles Times on which Burton doodled—and some represents more mature work, whether a caricature of an emaciated, long-haired Ramone, or drawings of mutant creatures (often part human, part machine) or ghastly clowns.

• PLUS: View Our Gallery of MoMA’s Opening Night Tribute to Tim Burton Many of Burton’s creations are truly disturbing. Take “Untitled (Girl Series)” from the early 1980s, an ink, watercolor and crayon drawing of a woman wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. She possesses an almost Cubist face, with a receded hairline and crooked grimace, that looks like a death mask. She also has an attenuated neck and an exaggerated hourglass figure, with a tiny waist and breasts deformed into grotesque asymmetry. “Mickey Mouse stretched out of proportion” reads the caption on the drawing, which seems to reflect a not-so-latent hostility towards Disney, where Burton was once a frustrated contract artist.

And what hostility is being vented in “Mothera” (c. 1980-88), a drawing of a horrifying creature with a head full of curlers, a gaping, angry mouth, tentacles that end in a broom, vacuum, mirror, television, and rolling pin, and multiple tails that end in babies, who get whipped around as Mothera rampages on?

“Growing up not being a very verbal person, I communicated a lot through just—even with myself, by doing a drawing I can help understand a little something,” Burton said. “So for me it was quite therapeutic and cathartic.”