“Becoming a fine art”: Walt Disney and The Art of Animation exhibition, 1958–1966

On December 11, 1958, Walt Disney presided over the opening gala for The Art of Animation, the last exhibition to feature his studio's artwork during his lifetime. The retrospective premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Art and was notably ambitious (Figures 1 and 2). Designed and produced by the Disney Studio in three nearly identical versions, it contained more original Disney art than any previous exhibition and was accompanied by a souvenir booklet, referred to as a “catalog” in exhibition documents (Figure 3).¹ A recently published book of the same name by Bob Thomas was also sold at most venues.² The Art of Animation toured 20 US locations for 11 months (see Appendix). During that period, one version went to Europe in July, and at the tour's completion, another version was sent to Japan. The third version was refurbished and installed at Disneyland for a 6-year stint beginning in September 1960,³ by which time the exhibition had cost the studio about $400,000, according to a letter written by then Disney Vice President, Card Walker (1960).

As this study will suggest, The Art of Animation's content and venue selection were driven by two goals important to Walt Disney. The first was to use the exhibition as an elaborate marketing tool within a larger promotional program supporting the release of Sleeping Beauty (1959), a film which had been in development and production for the better part of the 1950s at the staggering cost of $6 million dollars (Maltin, 1987, p. 74). Walt's second goal for The Art of Animation was to position—once and for all—Walt and his studio within the history of fine art and to demonstrate that they belonged there. An exhibition filled with drawings, background paintings, and animation cels from Sleeping Beauty, the film Walt had “planned…as his masterpiece,” (Maltin, 1987, p. 74) became the perfect vehicle.

The warm embrace of the art world during the 1930s and early 1940s, including the sale and collection of tens of thousands of pieces of Disney animation art—many acquired by art museums and private collectors—had not ensured a permanent place for Walt and his studio's art within this world. Walt's own attitude in the matter, as reported in the press, varied. He could be indifferent, as in his oft-repeated 1937 comment to Aldous Huxley, “We just try to make a good picture. And then the professors come along and tell us what we do” (Time, 1937, p. 21). Or he could be modest, as when a cel from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “It's a great honor. I feel proud that the thing is stuck in there. But it won't change our policies any. We'll still go on in our old blundering way” (Nugent, 1939, p. 5). However, these reactions from Walt were privately accompanied by an unspoken desire for his studio's art to be valued as something more.

In July 1938, a mere 7 months after the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Walt and Roy Disney struck an exclusive deal with San Francisco gallery owner Guthrie Courvoisier, which placed original cels from the film within the elite spaces of art galleries and museums, rather than department stores, as originally planned by Disney marketing genius, Kay Kamen (Munsey, 1974, pp. 186–187). The brothers' decision to distribute Disney pre-production and production art through Courvoisier indicates how highly they valued their work. The related Disney “premiere exhibitions”⁴ of the early 1940s organized to coincide with the release of Fantasia (1940) and Bambi (1942) (Holian, 2022b) were another indication. The first of these two exhibitions, containing approximately 70 original artworks (Retrospective, 1942), opened at the Los Angeles County Museum in late November 1940. Once it closed in L.A., the show and its companion catalog, both titled A Retrospective of the Walt Disney Medium, toured multiple cities across the country, stopping at university campuses and established art museums. The later Bambi exhibition did not travel but was held at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in New York for a month in summer 1942. By this date, MoMA had already featured Disney artwork in four exhibitions, including the ground-breaking Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism of 1936 and Three Centuries of American Art mounted in Paris in 1938 (Mikulak, 1996a, pp. 32–34; Riley, 2023, appendix, table 7).⁵ Walt was also one of the first donors to the MoMA Film Library founded in 1935, where Disney cartoons featured prominently in the Film Library's programming (Mikulak, 1996a, p. 33). And a little over a year after the Bambi exhibition Walt was named to the Board of Trustees of MoMA, in November 1943 (New York Times, 1943, p. 38).

From the perspective of the late 1950s, however, the results of these efforts were as fleeting as they must have been disappointing. For a variety of reasons, including changes in taste among curators and critics, Walt and his studio had all but disappeared from discussions of American fine art by 1950. And yet, through the content chosen for display, the accompanying booklet, and the venue selection for The Art of Animation, Walt sought—one last time—to guarantee an enduring artistic legacy for him and his studio. Using unpublished documents connected to The Art of Animation, as my primary source material, I suggest that while Walt recognized the marketing possibilities of the exhibition, his desire for permanent fine art recognition was ultimately the stronger, shaping goal of the project. As such, this exhibition offers a final opportunity before Walt's death in 1966 to better understand his objectives regarding the artistic legacy of his studio and its animation.

Like many Disney art exhibitions, little scholarly attention has been paid to The Art of Animation. William Mikulak's unpublished 1996 dissertation, How Cartoons Became Art: Exhibitions and Sales of Animation Art as Communication of Aesthetic Value, contains a brief analysis of the exhibition's content, history, and critical reception based largely on contemporary press coverage (Mikulak, 1996b, pp. 217–227). Although he had access to the Disney Studio Archives, the primary, archival documents of this exhibition do not inform his research. My work both references and expands upon Mikulak's observations. A handful of other individuals have briefly addressed aspects of The Art of Animation. They include the late Jim Korkis, a.k.a., Wade Sampson, a writer for MousePlanet.com, who essentially reposted his 2006 blog post, “The Art of Disney,” in 2014 on Cartoon Research.com as “The Story of Disney's ‘The Art of Animation.’” In both pieces, Korkis noted its installation at Disneyland in 1960 but focused primarily on the Japanese version of the exhibit and its fascinating afterlife.⁶ In 2014, Charles Solomon provided additional details of the Japanese show but made no mention of the understudied early history of The Art of Animation or its US tour (Solomon, 2014, pp. 98–99, 102).

Despite claims made in a later informational brochure targeted at potential venues, The Art of Animation was not produced “in answer to numerous requests from universities and museums the world over” (“Catalogue”, 1958). It developed instead from a relatively modest proposal made to Walt by Albert E. Schlesinger, Vice President of the San Francisco Museum of Art's Board of Trustees, and a friend of Disney. According to one news report, Schlesinger “recognized the part Walt Disney had played in modern art” (The San Francisco Examiner, 1958, p. 23) and approached the museum's board, who “responded with enthusiasm” to the idea of honoring Walt (Morley, 1957). The February 1957 proposal called for “a festival of your productions to be marked by an ‘award’ which we should have great pleasure to present to you,” writes Grace L. McCann Morley, the museum's director. She further explains “we should like this particular (award) to represent recognition…for the art values that your work represents in motion picture history…”.

By this date, the San Francisco Museum of Art, had established itself through its collecting and exhibition record as an institution dedicated to the art of filmmaking. Indeed, as Morley reminded Walt in her proposal letter, the museum had previously mounted at least four exhibitions containing Disney artwork,⁷ and pieces from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Ferdinand the Bull (1938) had been added to its permanent collection. Walt responded to her proposal with enthusiasm, “As I explained to Al Schlesinger, we would be very happy to give it serious consideration and see what we can come up with. We would like to tie it in with the release of our forthcoming feature length cartoon, Sleeping Beauty, which we consider one of the finest productions we have ever made.” Walt promised to talk to the “various members of our organization that would have to approve a project of this sort” and write again (Feb. 1957). A subsequent letter from May 1957, again refers to the exhibition “and a possible tie-in with the release of our picture, Sleeping Beauty.” However, Walt noted that with the release of the film still about 18 months off “it is the opinion of all concerned” that specific plans should wait until after the start of 1958 “to discuss the possibilities of working out something with you in this connection. As I mentioned to you, this picture is our most ambitious effort to date in the animation field, and a great deal of thought will have to go into Sleeping Beauty's handling.”

The Studio's consideration of the project and any negotiations were concluded by May 1958 when Schlesinger and Morley visited Walt at the Disney Studios and toured Disneyland (Morley to Walt Disney, 1958). A month later the first details of the project were committed to paper by Joseph Preddy, head of Disney Public Relations. In his June 17, 1958 letter to Schlesinger, Preddy reports seeing a studio model of the exhibition, likely Figure 4. At this date, the show was designed to be mounted on 100, four by eight-foot freestanding panels covering about 4000 square feet, although panels could be removed to accommodate a smaller space.⁸ The use of such panels was relatively common and apparently suggested by Morley (Morley to Ken Peterson, 1958). In a later section that reads like a press release, Preddy states that “the exhibit is being designed to please not only the true connoisseur of art but (also) to delight the entire family.” It was to have five parts corresponding to different stages of the Disney production process and contain exhibition innovations designed to entertain and impress visitors, including dozens of projected film loops. The conceptual framework for the exhibition was also in place by this time. Preddy writes that “actual projection devices will be installed to show—through motion pictures—the development of the animated cartoon as a fine art (author's emphasis), starting with the projecting of an early Disney animated cartoon, such as Steamboat Willie on through the advancement of animation…culminating with scenes from Sleeping Beauty.” Thus, the development of the animation medium as “a fine art” would be shown here as synchronous and synonymous with the advancement of Disney animation from 1928 to the present.

While the show was in early development at the Studio, Morley, through her connections in the museum world, worked to locate an organization capable of managing the exhibition's complicated tour. In July 1958 correspondence with Preddy, Morley clarifies her mission, “I think I am right in understanding that Mr. Disney and his staff wish to have the exhibition presented as art, in art museums and under art organization auspices…if it can possibly be accomplished.” Through Morley's efforts, the well-established American Federation of Arts (AFA) was soon hired to handle the Disney project starting in the summer of 1958, and Special Representative Robert H. Luck was put in charge of placing the three versions of The Art of Animation into “institutions of status,” as Preddy called them. Luck was paired with Tom Jones of the Disney Publicity Department in Burbank, who apparently supplied him with a list of more than 50 cities with theaters capable of showing the 70 mm format of Sleeping Beauty. Luck then contacted the directors of art museums in each location (Archives of American Art [AAA]). In some cases, the art museum passed, and Luck had to make do with other non-profit institutions like the Buffalo Museum of Science, in Buffalo, New York, and the Museum of Science and Industry, in Chicago. The short scheduling timeline also proved a serious obstacle. Nonetheless, by February 20, 1959, all three versions of the exhibition were fully booked, though one notable compromise was necessary.

In New York, Luck was forced to place the show in the Stern Brothers department store. On January 19, 1959, days before the opening at Stern's, Vincent H. Jefferds of the Disney Character Merchandising Division in New York wrote Jones a memo about bookings for The Art of Animation and copied it to Luck and Card Walker, then Vice President in Charge of Advertising and Sales. Jefferds saw the exhibition as an enormous marketing opportunity and wanted to place the “promotion” as he called it, in large cities, regardless of where it was housed, but not at any price. Jefferds writes, “…Bob Luck was of the very determined opinion that any further use by anyone other than an art museum could result in a cancellation by the art museums that have not yet shown the exhibit. This is a firm opinion on his part. I didn't think any one of us would want to chance jeopardizing the program which was Walt's initial objective” (AAA). In other words, from the beginning Walt wanted the show primarily, if not exclusively, in art museums. Jefferds concludes the memo, “Perhaps you or Card should talk to Bob and see if you can find some angle wherein we could have the promotion and he could placate the other museums” (AAA). That conversation apparently never happened.

Although Luck continued to receive requests from commercial organizations for bookings, none were granted. Luck's reticence was understandable. In early November 1958, the chief curator at the Los Angeles County Museum, Dr. Richard Brown, who was then considering taking the exhibition, met Tom Jones, a member of the Disney Publicity Department, in New York and “became concerned over the commercial aspects of the Disney show” (AAA). Brown's colleague, Jim Elliott called Luck over these worries. In notes made following the conversation, Luck asks himself “if show going into places other than art museums is it too commercial for an art museum?” (AAA). A few non-art institutions could be tolerated, even deemed necessary “in order to make the exhibition available to as large a public as possible” as Morley herself had once suggested (Morley, 1958), but as Walt seemed to grasp, elite art institutions were required to permanently establish Disney animation as a fine art form. Securing these high priority bookings took precedence over promotional opportunities. The goal to achieve what Morley termed “art prestige” for the studio dominated (AAA). This overriding goal also determined the final exhibition design and accompanying softcover booklet, lavishly illustrated in color with primarily Sleeping Beauty art, which was “prepared by” the Disney Studio (WACA) and derived from Bob Thomas's recently published The Art of Animation.

The studio hired Thomas, a respected, veteran Associated Press reporter, to provide a history of the studio's productions and a detailed, behind-the-scenes view of the making of Sleeping Beauty as another promotional tool (Mikulak, 1996b, p. 218). Thomas placed his first work on the project in 1957 (Thomas, 1991, p. 6), but research was collected as early as 1950, by Disney art instructor, Don Graham (Sporn, 2008).⁹ By July 1955, Graham had written an early, unpublished draft of The Art of Animation, but it “never quite gelled to Disney's satisfaction.”¹⁰ A prop mockup of the book actually made an appearance in the Disneyland television show The Story of the Animated Drawing which aired November 30, 1955 (Korkis, 2014). Thomas later used some of Graham's research to write his version of The Art of Animation (Sporn, 2008). Ultimately, a tight relationship existed between these four Disney properties: The television show, Thomas's book, and later The Art of Animation exhibition and its booklet. The Studio promoted this link in the exhibition press. Topping their announcement of the show, The Los Angeles Times ran a photo of Los Angeles County Museum curator Dr. Richard Brown and Walt Disney holding the booklet and Thomas volume, respectively, with a caption that identified The Art of Animation as “a visualization of the book of the same title” (The Los Angeles Times, 1959, p. 57).

Between May and November 1958, while Grace Morley secured the Federation's services and Luck was busy scheduling, the exhibition evolved at the Studio under Art Director Paul Hartley, Art Department Manager, Ken Peterson, and the watchful eye of Walt and other members of his staff (Figure 5). According to an AFA press release, the show now contained seven rather than five “major sections.” These included Story and Research, Layout and Direction, Animation and Character Design, Background and Color, The Animation Camera, Sound and Music and Projection (AAA), and an 18-panel, introductory History section (WACA)¹¹ that sought to contextualize the art and innovations of Walt Disney. Like the exhibition booklet and Thomas's book, the History section began with prehistoric cave paintings where the narrative of art history also traditionally starts. Here, one such work from Spain that depicts a boar, apparently in motion, was identified as “The First Animated Drawing” (see Figure 6). The image—actually a modern, three-dimensional reproduction—also notably appeared on the exhibition booklet's cover (see Figure 3). An adjacent panel featured a film loop created by Disney artists showing the Stone Age boar in motion. The exhibition then moved to similar examples of early movement depicted by artists of ancient Egypt and Greece (see Figure 7), before leaping to the Italian Renaissance and the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (WACA). As Mikulak notes, critics of the 1930s had likewise linked Disney animation to important historical moments of cultural production in order to establish an “artistic ancestry” for the studio; however, in this case the presented Disney “ancestry” was of prehistoric origin, springing from art's own birth (Mikulak, 1996b, p. 220).

Within the exhibit, Disney was also linked forward in time to more recent, avant-garde art by way of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), reproductions of which appeared next to a tongue-and-cheek selection identified as “Squirrel Descending Tree by Disney” (WACA). The history section also included 19th-century optical devices (Figure 8) and the work of animation pioneers Winsor McCay, Pat Sullivan, and Earl Hurd, before culminating both chronologically and technologically with a panel devoted to Steamboat Willie (1928) (see Figure 7). Here, one of the exhibition's 34 projectors featured the short on a repeating loop. Its accompanying label described the first sound cartoon as “the beginning of the ‘Golden Age’ of animation” (WACA), and the panel served as a kind of gateway into the exhibition's production sections, which featured subsequent Disney developments illustrated by dozens of original artworks, many from Sleeping Beauty. The exhibition's introduction therefore presented Walt and his artists as modern extensions of art's ancient and revered history as well as participants in art's more recent, modernist experiments, while simultaneously launching the “Golden Age” of animation where it became a fine art form under Walt's guidance.

The text of the booklet also made these claims clear. The opening and closing pages of text are of special interest. The first page is illustrated with a color photo of Walt sitting on a wooden stool. On his lap and looking upward at Walt is Mickey Mouse. The same image was featured on a panel in the exhibition's History section (WACA), perhaps as a prompt for owners of the booklet to pause and read this signed introduction. Here, Walt sets up his personal history with the medium and the early success of Mickey Mouse, which led to studio growth and “new ideas.” According to Walt, “We began to see a new horizon for animation; not merely a medium for cartooning broad caricatures, gags and comic situations, but also as a means of bringing life and motion to fine illustration. The Silly Symphonies were our proving ground to this end and a springboard to the animated feature. The first was ‘Snow White.’ Its success proved animation was becoming a fine art” (Walt Disney Productions, 1958, n.p.).

Rather than box office receipts—which do not confer fine art status—the “success,” Walt likely references is the exhibition and sale of thousands of Snow White cels distributed by Guthrie Courvoisier to art galleries and museums in mid-1938 and early 1939. During this period at least 65 venues hosted a Disney-Courvoisier exhibition. Although such cels and other production and pre-production artwork from the film were sold through 1950 (Holian, 2022a, 2023a), the “Snow White phenomenon,” as Courvoisier would later call it, was concentrated in those early months (Courvoisier & McKean, 1939). New York City gallerist, Julien Levy, who initially served as one of Courvoisier's “eastern outlets,” sold 63 cels totaling $1345 the day his Snow White exhibition opened in September 1938 (Munsey, 1974, p. 188). Three weeks later, 300 pieces sold “almost at the start” of an exhibition at Philadelphia's Charles Sessler Galleries (Lewis, 1938, p. 66), and by Christmas 1938, 6200 of the 7000 Snow White cels released for sale by the studio had been sold to private collectors and public institutions alike by Courvoisier and his agents (Mechlin, 1939, p. 71). But the greatest art world coup occurred in November 1938 when a Snow White cel was given by Walt, through Courvoisier, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it entered their permanent collection (Burchard, 2021, p. 17; Holian, 2024). When asked to comment, senior curator Harry B. Wehle of the Met famously declared Walt to be “a great historical figure in the development of American art” (Associated Press 2). This endorsement from the most important art museum in the United States marked a critical high point for both Walt and the art of his Studio (Holian, 2024).

The power of art institutions to confer fine art status was apparently still fresh in Walt's mind nearly 20 years later. Shortly before planning began for The Art of Animation exhibition, Walt acknowledged this dynamic as he introduced The Story of the Animated Drawing for the Disneyland television series in November 1955. After Walt notes that an impulse to give a sense of movement to drawings is “as ancient as man himself,” he observes, “But in our time we've seen this dream come true: The animated drawing has matured and taken its rightful place among the fine arts.” To illustrate this point, he walks across his office set to a framed and matted cel from the Nutcracker Suite of Fantasia, and continues, “Art galleries all over the country exhibited many such set ups from that production. People bought them as they would any other kind of painting” (Beaudine & Jackson, 1955).

To return again to the booklet's introduction, Walt shares that the years following Snow White's success were filled with the studio's “constant” quest to “improve our art, our techniques” until finally “we have completed our most ambitious effort to date, the feature length production of ‘Sleeping Beauty.’” Walt concludes on a triumphant note, declaring that his artists “…have advanced the art of animation to a point where it can truly be called, ‘the art of living moving paintings’” (Walt Disney Productions, 1958). The word art appears four times in this introductory passage; Its repetition seems designed to convince, particularly when read in tandem with the booklet's concluding text, which contains the word an additional four times.

Like most of the rest of the publication, the passage on the final page was lifted, with light editing, from the introduction to Bob Thomas's volume. It begins, “The success of ‘Steamboat Willie’…marked the beginning of the Golden Age of animation. In thirty years, animation has progressed from relatively crude cartooning to the moving illustrations of ‘Sleeping Beauty’. It has become an art” (Walt Disney Productions, 1958). The last sentence asserts Walt's prophetic observation that “animation was becoming a fine art” after Snow White, and simultaneously declares that by 1958, animation is a fine art; it was no longer becoming one. Taken together, these pages frame the booklet's text and capture the overarching message of the exhibition, namely that Walt's visionary improvements to the medium, which are rooted in art's earliest history, led to fine art status for animation with the art and films of the Disney Studio as the medium's most developed form. The mere existence of a Studio-produced exhibition booklet, or “catalog” as it is referred to in the documents, indicates a legacy-minded approach to this show, as well as how important its message was to Walt and his Studio. Exhibition documents record 4510 copies of The Art of Animation booklet were sold for 50 cents during its US tour, and each venue was supplied with at least one gratis copy (AAA). Like all exhibition publications, The Art of Animation booklet served as a souvenir but also as a permanent record of the show, capable of disseminating its content and agenda to individuals and institutions long after its conclusion.

Newspaper reviews of The Art of Animation generally ranged from mostly favorable to enthusiastic. The exhibition was repeatedly hailed as “entertaining” as well as “educational” (Dietz, 1959, p. 30) with an “appeal to young and old alike” (The Daily Mail, 1959a, p. 9). In at least two cases, it was suggested that the show had brought “a little bit of Disneyland” into the art museum, a comparison that was both apt and likely sought by the Studio (Saltmarche, 1959, p. 45). After her initial May 1958 trip to the Disney Studio, Morley wrote Walt a thank you letter, extolling Disneyland. “If the same sense of drama and variety and imagination can be introduced into the exhibition it will be a great success.” The interactive, multimedia, sensory experience of the “living exhibit” with its 34 projectors distinguished it from the usual art exhibition, as many reviewers noted (Reeves, 1959, p. 38) (see Figure 9).

Despite Walt's goal, however, few critics regarded the material on display as “fine art,” but neither did they challenge its presence in an art museum. Jean Reeves of The Buffalo News, who covered the show at the Buffalo Museum of Science, parroted the exhibition booklet, asserting that animation “…has advanced to the stage that Walt Disney calls (it) ‘the art of living, moving paintings’” (1959, p. 38). But most writers covering the show either avoided the word “art” altogether, chose qualifiers, or placed the “art of animation” within a particular frame for interpretation that lay outside of the fine art sphere. For Henry J. Seidis, art critic for The Los Angeles Times, “It was Walt Disney whose ingenuity brought the art of animation to the state when it could be developed into a new industry in the entertainment field” (Seidis, 1959, p. 96). Meanwhile, Dallas art critic Raul Askew reported that the exhibition “surveys how that eminent craftsman (Walt Disney) and his many helpers have worked to make images move—and succeeded in making millions commercially” (Askew, 1959, p. 7). Walt was likewise described as a “master of entertainment” (The Daily Mail, 1959b, p. 7) and his staff as “teams of artist-specialists” (Kleckner, 1959, p. 68). Indeed, the streamlined, mechanical nature of contemporary animation was repeatedly remarked upon, sometimes unfavorably as signaling a loss of Walt's “personal touch” (Seidis, 1959, p. 96). According to art critic Senta Bier, “Original sketches by Walt Disney have the mark of a true artist, yet by now production by big artistic teams has succeeded the individual preparation of an earlier period” (Bier, 1959, p. 113).

One outlier was Washington, D.C. art critic Florence Berryman, for whom The Art of Animation had “substantial artistic merits.” In a section of her review subtitled “Native Art Form” Berryman writes, “Generally regarded as delightful entertainment, the animated cartoon has strong claims, in some authoritative opinions, to being the United States' major if not sole contribution to the world of art” (Berryman, 1959, D-4). Guthrie Courvoisier made the same assertion in his final “Dealer's Bulletin” released in September 1940 as part of his elaborate marketing scheme to sell Disney artwork and shape public and professional opinion regarding the fine art credentials of the pieces he distributed (Holian, 2023b). In those earlier years, the American-ness of Disney art was apparently one of its key attractions.

Apart from Berryman and a few others, Alfred Frankenstein, music and art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle was the only reviewer to address the exhibition as serious, fine art as Walt wanted. However, the result, in the case of Frankenstein, was scathing. After the ubiquitous survey of the exhibition's contents, he writes, “The whole adds up to a devastating exposure of the shallow commercialism that lies behind the Disney enterprise.” Frankenstein begins the next section with, “To call this show ‘The Art of Animation’ is to commit the elementary error of confusing skill with art…Walt Disney, as this show makes clear, has not created an art; on the contrary, he has prevented one from developing” (“This World” section, San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, 1958, p. 16).

Frankenstein's assessment appeared 3 days after the exhibition's premiere opening and concerned Morley enough that she wrote Harris Prior, director of the AFA, with a copy of the review on January 5, 1959. “I think Frankenstein's article was not quite fair…Knowing Frankenstein, I have an idea that he was annoyed by the publicity, which I understand was rather aggressive.¹² It was not done by the Museum, but handled by an outside group. Perhaps one of the things to learn from such an enterprise is that if a commercial organization wants art prestige, it would be wiser for it to seek and follow art advice in such matters rather than let the commercial dominate” (AAA). The underlying concerns of “commercialism” that at times accompanied this show no doubt worked against its fine art aspirations, particularly among the directors of host art institutions. By the late 1950s, elite art museums had separated themselves from such activities—like the earlier sale of Disney-Courvoisier artwork—and as Bob Luck's memos and letters testify, keeping that divide clear was paramount.¹³

After The Art of Animation closed at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska on June 1, 1959, Luck informed Jones that it was shipped to “Midtown Storage in New York City to be prepared for shipment overseas” (AAA). This show as well as the Japanese version may have enjoyed overseas sponsorship from the State Department (Bier, 1959, p. 113), but documents suggest the Disney Studio, rather than the AFA managed all bookings outside the US.¹⁴ Perhaps not surprisingly, department stores appear to be the chief venue. The Art of Animation arrived at Selfridge's in London, in time for the July 29, 1959, premiere of Sleeping Beauty and remained for about a month. During its first week it had “already attracted thousands of Londoners” and was set to tour “major cities throughout the country during the summer months” (Gruner, 1959, E-4). In early September the show opened in the “exhibition hall” of Lewis's department store in Manchester, before stopping in Paris where it was “a smash hit,” according to Card Walker. In the same December 14, 1959 letter, addressed to Harris Prior, director of the AFA, Walker explains that the show was committed to engagements overseas for the next 2 years. Prior had hoped to convince Walker to circulate a smaller version of the exhibition to “medium and small museums” in the United States (AAA). At the time of his response, Walker expected the European version to travel “into Germany and the Scandinavian countries” (AAA). Although no Scandinavian sites have been confirmed, stops in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Saarbrücken were reported by local press (Neckar-Bote, 1960, p. 2).

Meanwhile, the newly refurbished Japanese edition arrived in May 1960, where it “opened…with phenomenal success,” according to Jones (AAA), at the Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo (Solomon, 2014, p. 99). The exhibit circulated to 11 department stores before triumphantly concluding its tour at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Unlike their American counterparts, Japanese department stores routinely “sponsored fine art exhibits” (Korkis, 2014) during these years and so Walt's agenda for The Art of Animation remained intact when the exhibition went East.

With both versions traveling to ardent Cold War allies of the United States, it is tempting to view the foreign tour as politically strategic, much like that of The Family of Man photography exhibition originally mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between January 24 and May 8, 1955. According to MoMA, the ambitious show of 503 images taken by photographers all over the world “was a forthright declaration of global solidarity in the decade following World War II.” Four complete versions of The Family of Man were reproduced for international circulation by the United States Information Agency, while a fifth was made in Japan under contract with MoMA. During its 7-year tour between 1955 and 1962, the show was seen by 9 million people in 38 countries—friend, foe, and undecided alike—including Russia, India, Iran, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, and the countries of Western Europe (Sandeen, 1995, pp. 95–97). In addition to art critic Senta Bier's reference to State Department sponsorship for The Art of Animation, another reporter declared that the show was “sent abroad as a good-will gesture to Museums in cities in Europe and Asia.” They conclude their review, “It is a privilege to be able to see and enjoy the show. It is also satisfying to think that some of this inventive genius, which will appeal to everyone, no matter where, is one of the things available for export, to better explain America to our friends or enemies abroad” (The Daily Mail, 1959b, p. 7).

Although this research continues to evolve, no hard evidence has yet confirmed a political agenda for The Art of Animation. Preddy's important letter to Schlesinger makes clear he, at least in July 1958, saw this as a promotional opportunity for Sleeping Beauty. However, Card Walker, in his September 28, 1960, letter to the director of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, acknowledged the “broad public relation values” of The Art of Animation, and one might reasonably extend that understanding to the political, ambassadorial role the Disney exhibition performed in these overseas spaces. Afterall, Walt and his studio staff had already performed a similar diplomatic purpose during their 1941 Latin American “good will tour” sponsored by the US Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.¹⁵ And in fact, The Art of Animation was featured in an early 1960 issue of Ameryka—America Illustrated, a periodical published by the US Information Agency in Polish as a form of “soft propaganda” and distributed behind the Iron Curtain to Poland. The article featured photos and exhibition information provided to the Agency by Luck the previous fall (AAA).

Walt's early 1957 letters, written at the inception of The Art of Animation, capture his desire to harness its promotional possibilities for Sleeping Beauty. While this goal never went away entirely, his priorities, and consequently those for his company, notably centered on a legacy-minded quest for permanent fine art acceptance for the work of himself and his studio. Walt made a series of telling decisions to accomplish this personally important objective, communicating to both Morley and his staff that he—to use her words— “wished to have the exhibition presented as art, in art museums and under art organization auspices.” He appointed a Disney team to carefully design the exhibition, write the accompanying booklet, and liaison with the American Federation of Arts to tour the ambitious and expensive show, appropriately titled, The Art of Animation. Moreover, the Studio's usual marketing tactics were notably prioritized behind the search for “art prestige.”

And yet, despite its carefully planned content, “catalog,” and venue schedule, one could question whether the last art exhibition of Walt's lifetime achieved the fine art status that I believe was his central goal. On the one hand, by the end of its US tour in October 1959, The Art of Animation had been viewed by approximately 1 million people across the country (Democrat & Chronicle, 1959, p. 16) and mostly in an art museum. On the other hand, the exhibition and its booklet's declaration that—with the release of Sleeping Beauty—animation had achieved fine art status ultimately fell on the deaf ears of most art curators and museum directors. Regardless of Walt's best efforts, the lasting legacy of the Disney Studio is not traditionally found in the pages of art history but rather in the annals of cinema history and the culture at large, where it was already assured a place by 1958, thanks to the record-setting number of Oscars Walt and the studio had won in the preceding 25 years, the various honors he received, like the French Legion of Honor (1936)¹⁶ and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (1942), the opening of Disneyland in 1955, his forays into television, and the record box-office earnings of so many Disney classic films. The cultural impact of Walt and his studio's accomplishments is also—and still—felt in museum circles. In the more than six decades since The Art of Animation concluded its tour, Disney art has remained a subject of special interest, with several important exhibitions mounted during this period, both in the United States and abroad.¹⁷ As Walt would have wanted, many were shown at elite art institutions, but none have matched the aspirational vision that shaped and guided The Art of Animation. In 2023, the Walt Disney Company premiered a comparably ambitious show in the form of Disney100: The Exhibition, as part of the celebrations planned to mark the Company's centennial. Complete with a full-color catalog, the show contains more than 250 artifacts from the Walt Disney Archives, including some artwork. Disney100 has also started what may prove to be an equally far-reaching schedule, with two nearly identical versions currently touring the United States and Europe; Later sites have not yet been released.¹⁸ Regardless of the final list of Disney100 venues, The Art of Animation will remain the last large-scale Disney art exhibition to widely tour the United States, to say nothing of its multiple stops in Europe and Japan, that further expanded the show's viewership and cultural reach.

Heather L. Holian is a Professor of Art History and Associate Director of the School of Art at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, where she teaches classes on the art and artists of Disney and Pixar. Her animation research has appeared in edited volumes for Bloomsbury, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, McFarland, and the Animation Studies journal. Her current book manuscript addresses the history of early Disney art exhibitions (1932-66).