Eric Chaim Kline, Bookseller - Old and Rare Books

Pictures and Picture Making: A Series of Lectures: by Jean Charlot for DIsney Studios [Frank Nastasi's Copy]

Charlot, Jean

Los Angeles: NP, 1938. First edition. Ring_bound. Quarto. 183 individual single-sided mimeographed leaves + 22 additional leaves of photographic negative prints. Scarce mimeographed document printed from typescript, with all leaves and negatives three-hole punched along the left side, housed in modern black three-ring binder (11.5x 11"). The pagination throughout is only on a per lecture basis and is non-continuous. Printed pages with occasional manuscript corrections. The versos of most of the leaves throughout contain mounted small cutouts from b/w photographic prints either reproducing relevant images from art history, or being original technical hand-drawings by Charlot, serving as relevant illustrated figures on the rectos for the corresponding text pages opposite (275 in total). An additional thirteen of these images have been directly mimeographed onto the rectos. The 22 leaves of compiled photographic negatives found at the rear of the binder contain most of the same images seen throughout, and are organized according to lecture.

In 1938 Walt Disney invited the French-born Mexican-American artist Jean Charlot (1898-1979) to deliver a series of eight lectures on art history and technique to the staff of the Disney Animation Studios over the course of two months, from April 12th - May 31st of that year. Though Charlot was adamant against having any kind of lecture plan, as he states in his opening remarks, each of the lectures were still always themed (Natural vision, composition, two-dimensional composition, color and subject, planes and space, etc.). Each was accompanied by a series of slides reproduced and mounted here, both of Charlot's original impromptu drawings and reproductions of historic works of art. Fortunately a stenographer or recording device was present and took down each lecture, including the questions and answers posed by his audience. This extremely scarce mimeographed binder serves as a complete and systematic documentation of those important and significant lectures.

At the time of these lectures the company had just come off the massive and groundbreaking success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and was at work on the shorts "Mickey's Toothache" and the ultimately scrapped "Pluto's Robot Twin". Although there does not seem to be direct evidence or documentation pointing to the affect these lectures ultimately had on the future work of the studio, its diffuse influence can be surmised. At the very least, these in depth lectures provided a continued boost to the morale and confidence of the Disney staff, in placing the relatively new, and sometimes belittled art form of animated films on the vast continuum of the fine arts from prehistoric times, through classical antiquity, and until the present. This reassured the staff of their visual storytelling abilities and the relevance of their chosen work. These assertions have since been reinforced by the the fact that in the wake of these lectures a number of these animators stayed in contact with Charlot, and over the years since have asserted the personal impact these lectures had on their outlook.

Although the discussions here range widely from all historical periods of art, incorporate examples from the relevant work of many of the most famous international figures, and touch upon countless technical and specific qualities of the fine arts, arguably the most significant and unique aspect the text is Charlot's discussions of art in Mexico, where he lived most of the time beginning in 1921. Specifically the art of Mexican murals and the work of Jose Guadeloupe Posada (nearly forgotten during this period), who had just recently died in 1913, were of interest to Charlot. It is known that he began buying Posada prints and the original printing blocks from Posada's print shop, reviving interest which has never abated. Though we could find no specific reference to Posada in any of his lectures, the speaker does incorporate Rivera's murals, noting in passing that "a man like Rivera has absolutely to shun all textural qualities, all brush stroke qualities, because all things appear at a distance" (Lecture V, p. 12). Going further into the influence of Mexico's divergent populations and its effect on art, Charlot describes in his following lecture "[T]his static rectangle, to me, became assimilated to the Indian for a number of reasons, and one of them is that the true verticals and true horizontals are admirably fitted to the Indian character; the Indian is always in close contact with the ground, which is a true horizontal, and the man, in squatting, takes a very different shape and different proportions from the White man. If you have a white man sitting on a chair, you have those two little tooth picks under him, and he has no correct relation with the so-called Mother Earth" (Lecture VI, p. 7).

Only in the final lecture does Charlot finally speak on animation, humbly noting "I told you the other time I would talk on animation tonight, and I felt silly the whole week long because after all, you are the people who know most about it; but it will be a good result to me by clearing my mind about it, and I hope you won't hiss" (Lecture VIII, p. 1). The lecturer then goes on to sympathetically compare a close-up of Grumpy's face to a portrait by Raphael.

According to Ruel Denny in "A Tale of Two Studios: Artist Jeans Charlot in Walt Disney's Atelier" (taken from Feast of Strangers: Selected Prose and Poetry, 1999), these lectures although never published, "are provocative because they provide a partial but unique record of five concurrent artistic encounters in the twentieth-century: first, the intellectual collaboration in artistic research by Disney and Charlot; second, the encounter between the fine artist Charlot and a group of craftsmen in popular art; third, the connections and disconnections between the visual arts of the pre-cinematic period and those of the cinematic age; four, the marriage between cinematic animation techniques of storytelling and our inherited and folkloristic narrative of the oral and print traditions; and five, the migration into modern media, from primordial sources and picturizations, of anthropomorphized animal figures".

Some leaves throughout with minor age toning along edges, as well as some occasional light stains or adhesive residue
from the images pasted on the rectos. Some of the pasted on plates are loosening from the original drying adhesive, and it is clear that in a very few instances images have come loose or are missing. Binder and interior in very good+ condition overall. Extremely scarce. vg+. Item #47856

Provinence:
It is not known how many of these scarce mimeographed copies were printed, but there is another known copy held in the collections of the University of Hawaii, the state where Charlot spent his final years. It is known that the content of these lectures was never formally published. This copy bears the name of American television actor, comedian and Soupy Sales sidekick Frank Nastasi (1923 – 2004) at the top of the title leaf. There is no evidence of Nastasi's connection to Disney or that he had ever attended these lectures (he would have been 15 years old at the time), so it is not known how he came to be in possesion of the piece.

Price: $4,750.00