Pictures and Picture Making: A Series of Lectures

Item Details

Hollywood, Walt Disney Productions, 1938, Loose leaf

Very Good

Pictures and Picture Making: A Series of Lectures

Jean Charlot's Lectures on the theory of art and animation, taken in shorthand and mimeographed by Walt Disney Studios, Hollywood, Ca.

 1^st and only edition. Los Angeles: n.p. [Walt Disney Productions], 1938. 8-1/2”x11”, eight signatures comprising 181 individual mimeographed pages of text + 24 additional leaves of photostatic drawings and reproduced paintings. 3-hole punched; stapled at upper left.

The pagination throughout is reset for each signature, varying from 15 to 24 pages each.

This is a mimeographed transcription of a series of eight lectures given between April 12 and June 7, 1938 by Jean Charlot at the Disney Studios, Hollywood, California. The lectures included his theory of art, his analyses of the compositions of a large number of paintings, and an analysis of animation as an art form.

Jean Charlot (1898-1979) was a French-born American painter and illustrator. His Mayan-influenced murals and frescoes in the 1920's and 1930's played a pivotal role in reviving interest in Mexican art and he is generally credited as having been responsible for the explosion of interest in the work of Jose Guadalupe Posada. In 1938 he was retained by Walt Disney to present this series of eight weekly lectures on art history and technique to Disney’s animation staff.  Each lecture was accompanied by a series of slides to illustrate his points. These are not Charlot’s lecture notes, but a transcription of the lectures themselves; several of the signatures including question and answer discussions with the staff. Likely produced by Disney staff but unknown.

Although the lectures covered all historical periods of art, among the most significant are Charlot's discussions of art in Mexico, especially Mexican murals. According to Ruel Denny in "A Tale of Two Studios: Artist Jeans Charlot in Walt Disney's Atelier" 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".

Link: https://vault.jeancharlot.org/writings-on-jc/1999_reuel-denney_tale-two-studios.pdf

SCARCE: WorldCat shows one copy at the University of Hawaii; we have found no record of prior sales, but one copy currently online with slightly variant pagination.

CONDITION: Very Good; pages lightly browned but no significant damage; About 20 of the text leaves detached but otherwise undamaged; one leaf with moderate chipping to edges.