Creators

Creation & Courage

I defined an intellectual as someone who thinks ideas are more important than people.

We are undoubtedly at our happiest when creating, however humbly and inconspicuously.

The art of creation comes closer than any other activity, in my experience, to serving as a sovereign remedy for the ills of existence.

I sometimes talk to a jovial sweeper, who does my street, and who comes from Isfahan, in Persia, wherein lies the grandest and most beautiful square in the world, the work of many architects and craftsmen over centuries, but chiefly of the sixteenth. I asked him if he felt himself creative, and he said: “Oh, yes. Each day they give me a dirty street, and I make it into a clean one, thanks be to God.” People do not always discern the creative element in their lives and work. But those who do are more likely to be happy.

What can be said is that creation is always difficult. If it is worth doing at all, we can be sure it is hard to do.

But courage and creativity are linked, for all serious creation requires intellectual courage.

Creative originality of outstanding quality often reflects huge resources of courage, especially when the artist will not bow to the final enemy: age or increasing debility.

Chaucer & English

The Hundred Years’ War, which he launched five years before Chaucer was born, opened a deep chasm between England and France that made the close interaction and simultaneous development of their culture no longer possible. The use of French in official transactions went into precipitous decline. The rise of English as the language of law and government was formally recognized by the Statute of Pleading (1362), when Chaucer was a young man.

The following year the lord chancellor, for the first time, opened Parliament with a speech in English.

He found a language; he left a literature. No man ever had so great an impact on a written tongue, not even Dante, who transformed Florentine into the language of Italy. For Chaucer had the creative gift of appealing strongly to a great number of people, then and now.

vintner,

This is particularly noticeable in his relationship with Dante, whom he admired—who hasn’t?—but essentially ignored. Their minds and worlds of thought were quite different. Indeed, Chaucer, with a clear reference to Dante, admits in Troilus, “Of heaven and hell I have no power to sing.”13 We have here the first indication of a great divide already opening between English and Continental literature—an English concentration on the concrete and practical, as opposed to the abstract.

Poets, so far as we can tell, had no status in England in 1360. It was a different matter across the Channel, as Chaucer discovered. At the courts of France and Burgundy poets were held in high regard and were able to advance their own careers, and help their families, by pleasing verse-loving, sentimental princes. Chaucer found that in Italy Dante was the one truly national figure; Dante’s fame, beginning shortly after his death in 1321, had spread everywhere by the time Chaucer came to Italy. Boccaccio and Petrarch, both still living, were also celebrated and revered, the toasts of courts, the favorites of princes. Such favor was not, as yet, to be had in England, but it could be earned.

That Chaucer, a man of robust practicality, with his eye to the main chance, was influenced by such considerations of worldly glory and reward cannot be doubted.

Chaucer was probably the first man, and certainly the first writer, to see the English nation as a unity. This was his great appeal to his contemporaries, for the long war with France produced a sustained wave of patriotism, people no longer seeing each other as Norman or Saxon but as English, who no longer read French much and who wanted to read about themselves in English.15 What Chaucer gave them was this, and something more: his was the English they spoke. It was one of his great creative gifts, which no one else was to possess to the same degree until Shakespeare came along, that he could write in a variety of vernaculars.

It is the strength of Chaucer that he was conversant with the technical terms in which, for example, lawyers, intellectuals, military men, engineers, etc., talked about their trades; but he also mocked such jargon.

The relish with which Chaucer relates tales of low life shows his enormous appetite for comedy and his association, which was to become a staple of English literature from his day till the mid-twentieth century, of buffoonery with the lower classes. He was indeed the first to establish this convention, and he established it in such a masterful fashion that it endured over half a millennium.

He was the first English poet to deal in a lethal combination of satire, irony, and sarcasm.

Chaucer saw French and Italian poetry not so much as models to imitate but as verbal shop windows from which he could steal words that as yet had no English equivalents. He thus added over 1,000 words to our language—that is, these words cannot be found in earlier writers.21 They included these: jubilee, administration, secret, voluptuousness, novelty, digestion, persuasion, erect, moisture, galaxy, philosophical, policy, tranquillity. These are mostly polysyllabic, weighty words, used by scholars and professional men.

We do not know how many of these figures he invented or which were sayings in the London and Kentish vernacular he favored. All we know is that they first made their appearance in his work. And they are still current. Among the alliterations are “friend and foe,” “horse and hounds,” “busy as bees,” “fish and flesh,” “soft as silk,” “rose-red,” “gray as glass,” and “still as a stone.” We do not still say “jangled as a jay”; but we say “snow-white,” “dance and sing,” “bright and clear,” “deep and wide,” “more or less,” “old and young,” “hard as iron.” “No doubt” and “out of doubt” are Chaucerisms. So are “as the old books say” and “I dare say.”

Durer & Printmaking

…evidently the boy had been drawing for many years, probably from the age of three, which is when most natural artists begin.

His topographical watercolors were the first landscapes done by a northern European and the first use of watercolor outside England; and considering the novelty of the topic and the medium they are extraordinarily accomplished.

His output included 346 woodcuts and 105 engravings, most of great elaboration; scores of portraits in various media; several massive altarpieces; etchings and drypoints; and 970 surviving drawings (of many thousands).3 Virtually all his work is of the highest possible quality, and he seems to have worked at the limit of his capabilities all his life.

He virtually invented the self-portrait…

…to combat forgery, Dürer was the first to devise his own logo, AD—and a most distinctive one it is, the best of any painter’s.

Dürer was naturally apprenticed in his father’s workshop, but after three years he told old Dürer that he wished to specialize as a designer-artist. His father was disturbed but cannot have been surprised, given his son’s superb graphic skills. Goldsmithing was the high road to fine art in fifteenth-century Europe.

The best woodcuts are not only drawn by the artist but also cut by him—though…

Printing from woodcuts involves putting a lot of pressure on the surface of the blocks, so the lines cannot be cut too thin. This is why engraving on metal, which can take more pressure, is and has always been more precise than woodcutting.

In 1514 he produced what are undoubtedly the three finest engravings ever made: Knight, Death, and the Devil; St. Jerome in His Study; and Melancholia. St. Jerome is straightforward, a virtuoso exercise in the difficult art of internal perspective and the production of complex tonal qualities using only fine lines.

…by the time Dürer returned to Venice, he found himself almost as famous there as in Germany, so much were his woodcut books admired (and copied).

The realism with which he depicted fur amazed the Italians. Giovanni Bellini asked to borrow one of the “special brushes” Dürer used for fur. Dürer gave him a brush. “But I’ve got one of these already,” said Giovanni.

He traveled by horse to Bologna, where he was hailed as a “second Apelles,” then on to Florence and Rome. He made his own copies of innumerable Italian works of art, including drawings by Leonardo—according…

He drew a fundamental contrast between German and Italian art knowledge. Germans often knew how to paint because they possessed practical knowledge handed down from one generation to another in the workshop. But the Italians also knew why. They had theory.

Dürer left the large sum of 6,874 gold florins, and several unfinished commissions, including a huge altarpiece that he should, perhaps, never have agreed to do. But then Dürer was a lost man without hard work.

In 1515 he got hold of a detailed drawing of an Indian rhinoceros, taken from a creature sent to Lisbon from Goa. The animal was, alas, wrecked and drowned on its way to Genoa, and Dürer never saw it. But from the material he had, he produced a woodcut of astonishing power, presenting the animal as an armored being, and the image has been the archetype of the rhinoceros, all over the world, ever since. Indeed in German schools it was still in use in biology lessons as late as 1939.

…merchants from all over Europe bought Dürer’s woodcuts and engravings and took them home for native artists to imitate. Toward the end of the sixteenth century there was a phenomenon in German-speaking territory known as the “Dürer revival,” during which his works were reprinted and collectors, led by Emperor Rudolf II in Prague and Emperor Maximilian I in Munich, collected his paintings, prints, books, and drawings.

On the morning of 6 April 1828, the three-hundredth anniversary of his death, 300 artists gathered at his tomb to pay homage.

Shakespeare & Stage

Shakespeare’s imaginative and artistic fecundity—and depth—are an apparent demonstration of the unimportance of heredity or genes in creative lives. His father, John, was a provincial glover, who prospered for a time as a small-town worthy, then declined; his mother came from a higher social group, with landed connections, but also provincial. There is no evidence of any kind of previous literary or artistic activity on either side of his family.

He was what Jane Austen was later to call a “sensible man.” He worked empirically, by trial and error, by learning his job and experimenting. He was rational. Always keen to get on, he was never guilty (to use his own words) of “vaunting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other side.”

Shakespeare seems to have grasped, early on, that his gift for writing plays was greater than his skills as an actor could ever be…

His company played more often at court than any other did: between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605 the company presented eleven plays, seven by Shakespeare…

Shakespeare made a good deal of money out of the theater, a fact to which his investments in land and housing in Stratford testify; and he remained connected with the company till his death. No other playwright had such a long and continuous connection.

…as theatrical facilities expanded, Shakespeare’s plays made more use of them. For instance, in Cymbeline Jupiter descended by machinery, as did Diana in Pericles and Juno in the masque in The Tempest. But machinery and big theaters were never essential to Shakespeare’s effects; this is one reason why his plays were, and are, easier to stage well than those of his leading contemporaries…

He was particularly successful in writing women’s roles played by the teenage boys who formed an essential part of the company. He wrote, as a rule, short but emphatic and incisive parts…

Shakespeare was adept at appealing to both the elite and the “vulgar” or “groundlings” in the same play.

Like all the greatest artists, he created his own public, teaching the audiences to appreciate what he had to offer, and he left the theater a much more subtle and sophisticated world than he found it.

Linked to Shakespeare’s practicality were his distrust for the abstract and his dislike of theory. He was in no sense an intellectual, that is, someone who believes ideas are more important than people. His plays are essentially about people, not ideas.

He had no whiff of the university, no “system,” whether from the medieval scholars or the ancient Greek philosophers. He was not trying to deliver a new “message.”

He was not a revolutionary in any sense or in any field. Quite the reverse. He valued stability. He had the instincts of a provincial middle-class tradesman who was doing well. He was a conservative who actively disliked radical ideas…

This love of “improvement” rather than revolution would have made Shakespeare an eminent Victorian.

He rarely allows his opinions open expression, preferring to hint and nudge, to imply and suggest, rather than to state. His gospel, however, is moderation in all things; his taste is for toleration. Like Chaucer, he takes human beings as he finds them, imperfect, insecure, weak and fallible or headstrong and foolish—often desperate—and yet always interesting, often lovable or touching. He has something to say on behalf of all his characters, even the obvious villains, and he speaks from inside them, allowing them to put forward their point of view and give their reasons.

Shakespeare fills seventy-six pages of the Oxford Book of Quotations.

There were 150,000 English words in his day, of which he used about 20,000, so his coinages were up to 10 percent of his vocabulary—an amazing percentage.

In musical inspiration Shakespeare is easily ahead of all rivals…

It is gritty realism and grimly comic, indicating that Shakespeare was familiar with low city taverns and their habitués, or at least knew how to conjure them up in words.

Hamlet. Shakespeare wrote this play at the summit of his powers, and that fact shows in almost every line. The play is long, very long.

At some time during the play’s editing and its early history onstage he seems to have discarded passages, many of which are fine, to bring the performance time down to reasonable limits. Even so, the play is very long; if enacted in full and with suitable intervals, it lasts five hours or more.

Bach & Mastery

Nothing is heard of the Bachs before about 1550. Very little is heard of them after about 1850. But during the 300 years in between—that is, from the age of Luther to the age of Bismarck—members of the Bach family, radiating from Thuringia all over Germany and even beyond, constituted the human core of German music, especially of its Protestant north. At times, the word “Bach” became synonymous with “musician” in the world of choir stalls and organ lofts.

philoprogenitive:

The Bachs married, almost without exception, wives from their own class, usually from musical families, who could combine annual childbearing with copying musical parts and performing in family concerts as singers or instrumentalists. The Bachs formed extended family networks of great resilience and helped each other in difficult times. They were overwhelmingly Protestant (usually Lutheran), churchgoing, pious, and law-abiding.

autodidact

Bach (like Dürer) traveled to meet masters, such as Buxtehude in his case. He also traveled to try out fine organs he had heard about. But essentially he learned about music by poring over scores in music libraries and, whenever possible, copying them out himself. From the age of thirteen he spent countless hours copying French, Italian, and German composers, chiefly of organ music but also of other instruments and even ensemble scores.

Although Bach was in continuous musical practice for nearly half a century, he was hardly what we would now call a celebrity. In his first official post he was described as a “lackey” and all his working life he was at the beck and call of petty princes, church administrators, or town councillors, who often combined ignorance with arrogance. When he wished to move from Weimar to Köthen, the reigning duke was so incensed by the tone in which Bach handed in his resignation that he imprisoned Bach for a month in the ducal jail.

Bach’s conduct was uniform. He was the reverse of arrogant, but he had a quiet, natural pride in his skills and performance and a shrewd sense of what was due to him, in salary, responsibilities, treatment, assistants, and deference. His demands were always reasonable; and it must be said that his employers almost invariably ended by meeting them.

It is impossible to find, in any of his scores, time-serving repetitions, shortcuts, carelessness, or even the smallest hint of vulgarity. He served up the highest quality, in performance and composition, day after day, year after year, despite the fact that his employers, as often as not, could not tell the good from the bad or even from the mediocre.

If Bach had a fault, it was his cerebral but also instinctive and emotional insistence on the highest standards, in himself and others.

Bach was criticized at the time, by those who did not understand his religious motivation, for making high technical demands, in instrument playing and singing, the norm for his entire range of compositions.

“Since he judges according to his own fingers, his pieces are extremely difficult to play; for he demands that singers and instrumentalists should be able to do with their throats and instruments whatever he can play on the keyboard. But this is impossible.”

Bach wrote mainly for himself and for musicians directly under his control or supervision, and for pupils he was training for the highest pitch of accomplishment. He did indeed publish some work, but not for the general musical public, and least of all for amateurs. He published for professional musicians of high quality who belonged to his school—a much narrower group than, say, Handel’s followers and admirers.

Even in Germany, and even among the musical community there, though Bach was seen as a great master, few (if any) then recognized the sheer scale of his achievement. Only nine of his significant works were published in his lifetime. Yet, unlike any other composer in history, Bach wrote examples (often in formidable numbers) of every type of music then known…

His encyclopedic reach was a matter not of vision or vainglory but of work. He produced something new virtually every week of his life—one is tempted to say almost every day—since (like Dürer with his watercolors), Bach composed even when traveling. He wrote music in his head, memorized it, and only afterward tried it out on the keyboard…

Considering the amount of time Bach had to spend playing, conducting, arguing with officials, teaching, and copying, this output is astounding—the man was a copious, gushing, unceasing fountain of creativity.

“No one understood registration as well as he. Organ builders were terrified when he sat down to play one of their organs and drew the stops in his own manner, for they thought the effect would not be as good as they were planning. Then they heard an effect that astounded them.”10 This skill, never surpassed before or since, was the result of long experience, familiarity with numerous fine organs, and experiments on their mechanisms acquired in building and rebuilding them—much scrambling about in organ lofts.

As Bach knew, and often made clear, music is a complex business because of the natural imperfections of the sonic scale and the inadequacy of man-made instruments. Perfect solutions were impossible, and standards, including his own, had to be personal.

Bach never sought fame, only perfection. He had his sense of worth, but his real interest was in creating and revising musical works of the highest quality, for all types and combinations of instruments and in all forms.

He was never wealthy and often had difficulty accommodating his vast family in comfort.

They were valued, all together, at 122 thalers and 22 groschen, probably more than Bach had ever earned in a single year. But this legacy had to be divided between nine surviving children and his widow, Anna Magdalena.

Relentless Artists

He seems to have drawn or painted from the age of three, and he started to sell his work when he was very young…

Turner’s father, a wig maker and barber, recognized Turner as an artistic genius when the boy was ten or thereabouts, and not only raised no objections to an artistic career but actively promoted it with all the means in his power. As soon as Turner began to make money, the father gave up his business and turned himself into his son’s salesman, promoter, and studio assistant…

He never did anything in his life except draw and paint…

He worked all day, every day. His family life was nothing…

Work occupied his entire life until a short time before his death, at age seventy-six…

Turner worked on his own, seeking and taking no advice, attracting no pupils…

…sui generis.

“People talk a great deal about Sunsets, but when you are all fast asleep, I am watching effects of sunrise—far more beautiful—and then, you see, the light does not faint and you can paint them.”4…

…doing nothing” conceals the fact that Turner, on a working trip, was never idle, often doing several works at once, turning from one, which was drying, to concentrate on another, sometimes with four or five sketches spread out on a table at once.

He was secretive always when working.

Turner often made sketches “by stealth.” On this trip, eyewitnesses recorded Turner’s going out in a small boat in heavy weather. The rest were seasick, but Turner “sat in the stern-sheets intently watching the sea and not at all affected.”

Turner was a hardy man. Sun, ice, heat, cold, and stormy seas meant nothing to him when art was to be created. When he was sixty-seven, he wanted to make accurate sketches for a big oil he was planning, to be called Snow Storm: Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. He had himself lashed to the mainmast of the Ariel, in what turned out to be a gale, and continued sketching.

By 1810 he was credited with founding the “white school,” which waged war against the browns and sepias of the old masters.

The Literary Gazette accused him of replacing the “magic of nature” with “the magic of skill,” when in fact he was doing the opposite—using truth to destroy artificial conventions.

…by the 1840s he was probably the world’s best-known figure in art. That was, as David said, an amazing thing to happen to a “mere landscape painter.”

He raged with fury if asked to comment on, or as he thought authenticate, an old painting of his: “You have no right to tax my memory with what I might have done one hundred and fifty years ago.” When owners brought an unsigned work of his to show him, they were rebuked—“I won’t look at it! I won’t look at it!”—and he would leave the room.

From the age of six, I could draw forms and objects. By 50 I had turned out an infinite number of drawings. But I am not happy about anything I did before 70. Only at 73 did I begin to understand the true form and nature of birds, fish and plants. By 80 I had made a lot of progress. At 90 I will begin to get to the root of it all. By 100 I will have reached a Superior State in art, undefinable, and by 110, every dot and line will be living. I challenge those who live as long as me to see if I keep my word.

“This month, I have no money, no clothing, no food. If this continues for another month, I will not live to see the Spring.”

During another phase he says he has been drawing lions’ heads every morning by way of exorcism (of bad luck). His Book of Exorcism was published.

He went on working, like Turner, virtually to the end.

Women & Austen

oeuvre

…we know comparatively little about Austen’s ascent to creativity because her family, beginning with her elder sister Cassandra, and continuing for two generations, suppressed or censored her letters…

Cassandra admitted that she burned many of the letters, and we know she cut the survivors heavily. The family also altered and distorted the record in order to make Austen appear more genteel and socially law-abiding than she actually was.

We do not hear of many career women, because the gifted daughters never got started. This seems to have applied particularly to painting: the majority of men (and women, too, I suspect) found the idea of a woman artist abhorrent.

Pliny, in Book 35 of his Natural History, lists six women artists of antiquity.

Angelica Kaufman and Mary Moser, were among the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768, but no woman member was elected for more than a century afterward…

…as recently as the 1960s, women Royal Academicians were not allowed to attend the annual Academy Banquet, but merely permitted, on sufferance, to join the men after the toast to the royal family.

…no man ever proposed to her until after she made herself rich and famous. Her father was an estate agent, like Wordsworth’s, and was mean, especially to her: after she nursed him devotedly for years, all he left her was £2,000 in trust, enough to produce an income of £90 a year but not enough to live on even then. She faced what she called the “horrible disgrace of spinsterhood” and, in order to remain respectable, lived with the family of her unpleasant, disapproving elder brother, Isaac, and spent her time in plain sewing, playing the piano, and reading to her nephews and nieces in a household of conventional religious and social observance which was to her stiffeningly narrow.

By now she was rich, and the tables were turned. She was increasingly recognized not only as a storyteller of extraordinary gifts but as a moral mentor of formidable power. Polite society, far from shunning, queued up at her door and was often refused admittance.

It is a pity that Marian Evans had to go down in literary history saddled with a masculine pseudonym.

By the time her work was published, in the 1850s, it was no longer necessary, as a rule, for a woman novelist to write under a man’s name.

Austen, once she attached any name at all to her writings, insisted on her own.

One of the greatest advantages she enjoyed, from early childhood, till her death, was the love and intimate friendship of Cassandra. Their mother said that Jane wanted to share everything with her elder sister, “So that if Cassandra were to have her head taken off Jane would want to lose hers too.”

The decision of the Reverend George Austen to retire to Bath meant the end of the shared sitting room, and Jane was never again fortunate enough to have a private place in which to write. She was obliged to use communal rooms in comparatively small houses.

ribaldry,

…she had no sex life of her own: and there are only sixteen kisses in her novels, none between lovers.

…from first to last, Austen never met published authors or literary figures of any kind.

…her circumstances, with all their limitations, were highly conducive to helping her become a professional novelist of the highest quality. But that was only possible because, in addition to all her other gifts, she possessed one which is often quite lacking in creative people—the habit of self-criticism. Austen was a superb judge of what she could do, and what was her best.

Austen never had any difficulty with words, vocabulary, grammar, or syntax. Spelling was a different matter. She had difficulty with i’s, e’s, and y’s.

Evelyn Waugh wrote that personal experiences are a novelist’s capital, to be hoarded, and spent only with prudent avarice, because they are irreplaceable. Austen is an excellent illustration of this rule.

Fashion’s Capital

Britain was the world center of the textile trade (except for silk) and was the first country to establish large department stores, so it is curious that Worth, who was enormously inventive, methodical, and businesslike, did not choose to make London the center of high fashion.

Queen Victoria, though she reluctantly adopted the cage (and later, equally reluctantly, discarded it), was a plain, dowdy woman, not interested in dress even before the death of the prince consort in 1861 turned her into a widow weed woman. By contrast, Empress Eugénie was passionate about clothes and turned her court into a manequin parade. In 1860 she appointed Worth her official dressmaker and, for the first time, he began to make for her entire multi-dress outfits, one set in January for the spring and summer, and another in July for the autumn and winter. This determined the cycle of the Parisian dress year; and since the empress rarely if ever wore the same dress twice, and certainly never wore a dress from the year before (and since all the Parisian rich followed her example), Worth greatly expanded the volume of what he called haute couture.

Worth responded with astonishing ingenuity and ruthlessness. He invented “planned obsolescence” a century before the term was coined.

By the time he retired and handed the business over to his son, Gaston, Worth had explored virtually every shape open to the designer and proved what all dressmakers learn in time: there are only half a dozen basic ways of sculpting a dress, using the focii of hemline, waist, bust, neckline, and sleeves. If fashion is to change regularly, repetition is inevitable—Worth reintroduced the bustle three times and the leg-of-mutton sleeve twice—and the art of the skillful designer is to conceal it. Under Gaston Worth, the Parisian fashion world took its classic organizational shape: concentration around Avenue Montaigne; biannual shows coordinated in the first fortnight in January and the last two in July (six weeks before the autumn salon); and membership in the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, which fought piracy, disciplined the fashion press, and upheld standards, including the manner in which original designs could be sold to large ready-to-wear firms in Britain and America.

There was no intrinsic reason why women’s high fashion should be centered in Paris rather than London. Paris became the center essentially because Empress Eugénie provided client-leadership and Worth responded with designer leadership. If Victoria had died in, say, 1870, and Alexandra, an unusually handsome woman with a fine figure, had become queen and offered client leadership, Worth would have responded by transferring his house to Mayfair, and the whole story would have been different. Design was, and is, international, and a good dressmaker can operate anywhere if the market is encouraging.

…some of the best Parisian designers were foreigners. For example, an Englishman, Captain Molyneux, set up his house in Paris in the 1920s and again in 1946.

…the greatest designers during the years between the wars, one was Mainbocher, an American; and another was Elsa Schiaparelli, an Italian. These two set up shop in Paris in 1930 and 1929 respectively.

Queen Elizabeth, a Scotswoman with a natural predilection for tweeds and tartans, pursued a homely upper-class native dowdyism for her entire long life (her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, following her), attended by a suitably homegrown couturier, Norman Hartnell. Hartnell laid down his philosophy of dressing royalty as follows, making it clear why his clients could never be called smart: “One of the essential elements of a majestic wardrobe is visibility. As a rule, ladies of the royal family wear light-colored clothes because such colors are more discernible against a great crowd, most of which will be wearing dark, everyday clothes.”

So the fashionable world went to Paris, and all the great designers were to be found there.

Balenciaga & Dior

OF ALL THE CREATIVE PEOPLE I have come across, Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972) was easily the most dedicated to the business of making beautiful things. His work absorbed him totally, and there was no room in his life for anything or anyone else. When the cultural revolution of the 1960s, that disastrous decade, made it impossible (as he saw it) to produce work of the highest quality, he retired and quickly died of a broken heart.

Among the foreign-born masters of Parisian fashion, Balenciaga was the greatest.4 Indeed many would rate him the most original and creative couturier in history. And he was a true couturier, not just a designer: that is, he could design, cut, sew, fit, and finish, and some of his finest dresses were entirely his own work.

Cristóbal, age three and a half, joined the class and showed astonishing skill with a needle. For the next seventy-four years he could, and did, sew superbly, and kept his hand in by doing a piece of sewing (be it only darning) every day of his life. His first original work was a collar set with pearls for his cat. The collar was noticed by a grand lady of the neighborhood, Marquesa de Casa Torres (the great-grandmother of Queen Fabiola), who became his first patron, getting him to copy one of her best dresses.

…experts as well as customers marveled at the speed with which he went about his work, especially the difficult business of fitting models with scores of garments just before a collection (he could do 180 in a day). The explanation is that from the age of three to his mid-twenties he learned thoroughly every aspect of his trade, building on his immense natural gifts—he had, for instance, strong, powerful, but also delicate hands and was ambidextrous; he could cut and sew with either hand.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he had to shut up shop, and it was natural for him to transfer to Paris (the third floor of number 10 on the new Avenue George V) in 1937. When the war ended in 1939, he reopened in Spain and was soon dressing General Franco’s wife. But Paris thereafter remained his chief base…

Balenciaga presented his first collection in August 1937, charging about 3,500 francs for a dress, and earning 193,200 francs in a month—a good start.

He was launched, and thereafter, until his retirement at the end of the 1960s, his was one of the major Parisian houses and he himself was regarded by the cognoscenti as the top dressmaker.

In 1938 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Paris, and the dressmaking industry there celebrated the fact that England had a jolly and delightful but dowdy queen, no threat to their interests…

…giving the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, a collection of dolls with a 300-piece wardrobe designed by Paton, Lanvin, Paquin, Vionnet, and Worth, with hats by Agnès, furs by Weil, and jewels by Cartier. The fact that Balenciaga was invited to contribute underlined his membership in the Parisian elite. But he declined, not wishing—then as evermore—to take part in mere publicity stunts, a characteristic assertion of his high seriousness.

When France surrendered to the Nazis and Paris was occupied, the fashion industry was in a dilemma: to carry on or not? To risk being accused of collaborating, or to fire all their employees? In France the fashion industry was regarded as a vital exporter. In 1938–1939, one exported couture dress would pay for ten tons of imported coal, and a liter of exported perfume would pay for two tons of imported gasoline. The Germans were jealous of the French fashion industry, and both Hitler and Goebbels believed that under the Nazis’ “new order” for Europe, Berlin would usurp the role of Paris as the world center of fashion (and of art generally).

The idea was to recruit all the top cutters, sewers, and designers as forced labor and set up dress houses in Berlin. Some people in the industry resisted: Michel de Brunhoff, head of the Paris Vogue, shut it down rather than work under Nazi supervision. Some collaborated. Chanel sucked up to the Nazis, lived openly with a young Nazi lover at the Ritz in Paris, and flourished mightily, accumulating vast sums in hard currency so that she was later able to flee to Switzerland when the Allies retook Paris, and gradually buy her way back to respectability by bribery.

Lucien Lelong, head of the Chambre Syndicale, steered a middle course. He negotiated with the Nazis; defeated the attempt to transfer Parisian fashion to Berlin; operated a two-city base, with Lyon, in unoccupied France, sharing the leadership with Paris; and by these means saved 97 percent of the industry and 112,000 jobs. The price was to hand over the industry’s Jews to the S.S., who deported them to death camps. That done, the industry flourished during the war.

France was devastated, bitterly divided, and impoverished. All we have left, said André Malraux, “are our brains and our artistic skills”—that is, intellectuals and designers.

…society.” Young Dior, plump, pink-cheeked, with a receding chin and popping eyes, had his mother’s physique and her longing to move up the social ladder, though his inclinations were toward smart bohemia rather than le gratin. His father was a successful businessman who ran a fertilizer factory specializing in liquid manure.

The profits of liquid manure allowed Dior père to maintain a house in Paris, as well as in Normandy, and young Dior took full advantage of it. He could draw; he loved dressing up, with the help of his adoring mother; and he enjoyed designing fancy frocks for his sisters. He flatly refused to go into his father’s business. But his father vetoed the École des Beaux Arts, forcing young Dior to study for a career in diplomacy.

Dior never became a diplomat…

He designed clothes for his female friends; attended masked balls…

…them.” His brother was locked up in an insane asylum. His mother died. In 1931, in the Depression, his father went bankrupt. Virtually all the galleries, including Dior’s, failed.7 Without this financial disaster, Dior would probably have spent his life as a middle-ranking art dealer, and died unknown.

Dior certainly believed in luck. He kept lucky charms in his pockets and fingered them constantly. He often visited fortune-tellers. To the end of his life, he regularly consulted an astrologer, Madame Delahaye, who cast his horoscope. A “wise woman” (as he said) had told him during the war, “Women will be very lucky for you. You will earn much money from them and travel widely.” As of July 1946, however, Dior was a nobody in his forties, with nothing in his design career to suggest genius. Then, that month, he met Marcel Boussac, a textile magnate who was called “King Cotton.” Boussac wanted to own a big Paris fashion house to give prestige to his booming but humdrum business; and he had a crumbling house called Philippe et Gaston. Someone told him that Dior might be able to produce ideas—hence their meeting. Dior told him: “I am not interested in managing a clothing factory. What you need, and I would like to run, is a craftsman’s workshop, in which we would recruit the very best people in the trade, to reestablish in Paris a salon for the greatest luxury and the highest standards of workmanship. It will cost a great deal of money and entail much risk.” This was, looking back on it, an amazing speech to make to a hard-nosed businessman, for Dior was extraordinarily shy…

But Boussac liked the idea and offered to set Dior up immediately with an investment of 10 million francs (this was later increased to 100 million). At the last minute Dior, frightened, almost turned down the offer, but he was persuaded into it by his fortune-teller.

He spat in the face of postwar egalitarian democracy and said, in so many words, “I want to make the rich feel rich again.” His first collection, which purposefully sought to put the clock back and defy the conventional wisdom of the time—that luxury and privilege had gone for good—turned out to be, to the delight of Boussac, the most successful in fashion history.

Dior recruited and continued to employ in his atelier the best people to be found in France, men and women who would die rather than turn out an article which was, in the tiniest degree, below the best in the world. The sewing was perfect, the cutting impeccable, the fitting infinitely patient and exact. The success of the house was immediate and prolonged, and the volume of business continued to grow steadily in the ten years up to Dior’s death in 1957, by which time the house employed 1,000 of the finest experts ever gathered together under one roof. During this decade Dior sold over 100,000 dresses made from 16,000 design sketches and using 1,000 miles of fabric.

Balenciaga, so far as I know, never said a word about the “new look,” or Dior’s triumph. He never commented on other designers. He certainly approved of the high standards of workmanship which Dior insisted on, and which matched his own. That, in Balenciaga’s view, was what haute couture was all about. He did say, once, that he envied Dior’s skill as an artist. Dior was stunningly quick with pen and brush—“I often do several hundred drawings in two or three days,” he said—and some of the results were striking. By contrast, Balenciaga had to rely on the draftsmanship of his assistant Fernando Martinez. But draftsmanship must have been the only skill of Dior’s that he wished he possessed. In every other way he was immeasurably superior. On the question of quality, indeed, Balenciaga sometimes felt that Dior was unrealistic, going too far, precisely because he could not (like Balenciaga) sew, cut, and make a dress himself and was not fully aware of the sheer effort involved in superlative sewing.

She was one of his customers, though she also patronized Dior, and on this occasion she wore a Dior dress that buttoned down the back—or should have. Her maid was on vacation; she herself could not button the dress alone; and her husband, summoned to help, flatly refused: “I won’t get involved in that absurd garment—get your friend Monsieur Cristóbal to do it when he comes.” So that is what happened. The dress had no fewer than thirty-six tiny buttons at the back, each covered with brilliant Lyon silk. Balenciaga, with his wonderful fingers, succeeded in doing it up, but with some difficulty. Somewhat exasperated, he said, “Twenty-four buttons would have been quite enough to preserve the fit of the dress perfectly. But thirty-six! He is a madman! C’est de la folie furieuse!” There followed other remarks in demotic Basque, the purport of which Madame Hérnon could only surmise.

Balenciaga may have felt that Dior did not take the craft seriously enough. By his reckoning, Dior, who could not actually make a dress, was not a couturier, merely a designer. (That was true of virtually all the others, then and since.

He certainly did not see Dior as a rival, and he had no fear that his own claims to excellence would be overlooked. Dior dressed the rich, Balenciaga the very rich. During the 1950s, a woman “graduated” from Dior to Balenciaga. And equally, Dior was never jealous of Balenciaga’s superior skills. He recognized them and revered the man who possessed them. He always called Balenciaga maître. In December 1948, Balenciaga’s partner, Vladzio, died at age forty-nine. The master was so upset that he seriously considered retiring and returning to Spain. The word got around, and Dior went to see him on Avenue George V and begged him to stay: “We need your example in all that is best in our trade.” Dior suggested, instead, that Balenciaga should buy Mainbocher’s old premises next door, which were up for sale, and expand. Balenciaga, touched, did exactly as Dior recommended.

He regarded making dresses as a vocation, like the priesthood, and an act of worship. He felt that he served God by suitably adorning the female form, which God had made beautiful. His approach was reverential, indeed sacerdotal. His premises reflected his own vocational tone. In those days, haute couture shops varied in atmosphere greatly. Molyneux tried to make his like an aristocratic London town house. You rang a bell and an English butler answered the door and ushered you in. Dior’s premises were grand but busy, with much va-et-vient, like a big salon on one of the hostess’s “days.” Dior himself, affable and gregarious, could be seen roaming about, wearing a white overall over his well-cut Savile Row suit. Bonjour, patron! sang out his women workers, always pleased to see him. By contrast, Maison Balenciaga was like a church, indeed a monastery. Marie-Louise Bousquet said, “It was like entering a convent of nuns drawn from the aristocracy.” Courrèges, who worked there, described the atmosphere as “monastic in both an architectural and a spiritual sense.” Emanuel Ungaro remembered: “Nobody spoke.” If it was absolutely necessary to speak, the voice had to be hushed or reduced to a whisper. Security was intense. It was difficult not just to get in at all but to move from one room to another, for all entrances were guarded by fierce females.

Balenciaga did a limited trade in scarves, gloves, and stockings; but he sold only two (very expensive) perfumes: Le Dix and La Fuite des Heures. He gave the impression that he thought such things vulgar and irrelevant to his main work, and permitted them reluctantly, since they were highly profitable. He never did anything to court popularity. He never gave interviews (except once, to the London Times, when he had decided to retire). He never went out in society. There are virtually no photographs of him and none at work, though we know he wore black trousers and sweater and used a curious curved table on which to sew or cut material, with rulers and a square as aids. All the rooms in his atelier, as noted above, were closely guarded, and his own room was totally inaccessible except to the most senior staff. At one time it was widely believed he did not actually exist and that Balenciaga was a pseudonym. His remoteness was not a pose but part of his dedication to his art. He worked fanatically hard when he was actually in Paris. Each collection had between 200 and 250 designs, all of which he completed himself, since he had few trusted assistants and often turned down promising juniors, such as the seventeen-year-old Hubert de Givenchy.

He was sometimes angry, but his anger expressed itself in irritable foot movements, never in violence of any kind. He never raised his voice. Indeed silence was his norm. Ungaro said: “There was something noble about him.” When he was satisfied with his designs, and the clothes were made up, each outfit had four fittings: one for materials, and three for shape, using models. In just one day he could get through fitting sessions for 180 outfits by dint of intense concentration and by working with a team who knew exactly what his gestures signified, for few words were spoken. It was said that he disliked women, but there was no evidence that he disliked them more than men. He saw them as racehorses: “We must dress only thoroughbreds.” He used to quote Salvador Dalí: “A truly distinguished woman often has a disagreeable air.”

His fundamental principle as a dressmaker was to make women happy. “He liked to make a duchess of sixty look forty, and the wife of a millionaire tradesman look like a duchess.” His clothes were, above all, comfortable to wear, an amazing fact—and it was a fact—considering their grandeur, their complexity, and the magnificence of their materials. His designs accommodated a well-rounded stomach, a short neck, and overly plump arms and shoulders, and left space for ropes of pearls and for…

Balenciaga argued that if a woman was comfortable in her clothes, she was confident; and if she was confident, she was at her best and wore her clothes with style. He said that some designers put a strain on the client so that she was glad to get the dress off at the end of an evening. He wanted his clients to be reluctant to…

While Dior made changes twice a year, Balenciaga was always fundamentally the same, especially in his splendid evening dresses, which were his specialty. A woman could buy one of them as an investment because properly looked after, it would last forever. In 2003, I saw a young woman of eighteen wearing a superb dress. “Is that not a Balenciaga?” “Yes. It belonged to my grandmother.” He wanted his dresses to be bequeathed, as they were in imperial Spain. In a sense he was antifashion. He was impressed by the way dresses…

…was Balenciaga’s view that his clothes, properly put on (and it was rare for a customer not to follow his rules), raised the wearer into a classless, ageless empyrean, a superculture where a woman’s body, even if old and defective in places, entered into what he called a “mystic marriage” with his clothes. For this reason he did not, like some designers, expect a client to suppress her personality; he expected her to emphasize it—he rejoiced when a woman “added to” his work. Strict and implacable in many ways, he had a certain creative modesty which allowed him to see that his dresses only became alive when worn, and that the wearer was needed to complete the creative act.

Textile and lace manufacturers, embroiderers, and specialists in gauze and dyes lined up for appointments to see him and often collaborated with him to produce completely new, complex materials. He could dye himself, and often did. His skill at embroidery enabled him to pick out the occasional genius. He dealt with large firms and tiny Lyon or Como workshops alike, and to him a first-class textile creator was an equal. Gustave Zumsteg created for him in 1958 “Gazar” and in 1964 “Zagar,” a refinement, which miraculously combined fine texture, thickness, and stiffening so that Balenciaga could sculpture dresses made of it without artificial support.

Balenciaga never allowed his sensuality to ignore practicalities. When Zika Ascher showed him a new blend of mohair and nylon thread, thick and spongy, Balenciaga admired it but asked, “Will it take a buttonhole?” “Oh, yes!” “We shall see.” He took the sample away into his sanctum and returned a few moments later, with a superbly sewn buttonhole—one of the most difficult tasks a seamstress faces, especially with intractable material. Gérard Pipart, inspecting it, exclaimed, “A buttonhole by Balenciaga! It should be framed.” The master gave his wan Spanish smile. He often sewed to keep his hand in, and for every collection he designed, cut out, sewed, and finished, entirely himself, a “little black dress,” usually of silk, sold like the others but never identified as his.

That world was disappearing even in Balenciaga’s lifetime. The death of Dior in 1957 was the final fatal blow. Dior was a man who loved rich food, he had fought a constant but losing battle against surplus flesh, and his heart inevitably failed. His funeral was a historic gathering of high fashion: only Chanel, who had returned from her exile in Switzerland and brazenly reopened her shop four years before, failed to pay tribute.

In the 1950s he had been generally regarded as the greatest dressmaker in the world. But he worked in fashion; he was fashion; and it is of the nature of fashion to turn every one of its heroes, sooner or later, into a museum piece. In the 1960s he was increasingly criticized. His dresses were said to be so overwhelming that they “dwarfed the woman.” He was “not for the young.” He refused to go into the pret-à-porter trade—“I will not prostitute my talent.” He hated miniskirts. He felt that “youth has no time for grand couture and the craftsmanship on which it rests.” He never commented, but he looked down his nose at designers like Yves St. Laurent, taking over at Dior, who was “trendy”

In 1966, to defy the trend, he lengthened skirts, but the big New York buyers would not take his wares. In 1967 he appeared to capitulate by making short tutu dresses and trouser suits, and did good business. But in 1968 he was uncompromising again and sold nothing wholesale. His individual clientele flourished as ever, but he was himself an increasingly disillusioned and melancholy figure.

Balenciaga continued designing for a time, and it is significant that his dresses of the late 1960s—against the trend; “cut against the bias,” as he put it—are now the ones most admired, collected, and copied. But his heart was no longer in the game, and he found that the new tax rules and labor regulations made it increasingly disagreeable to run his business. Abruptly, like de Gaulle, he retired, shut down his Paris house completely…

He died in 1972, sad and lonely, a great artist broken by the years…

High fashion, begun by Worth, essentially ended with Balenciaga’s retirement, and with it went a tradition not only of civilized, and occasionally inspired, design, but of craftsmanship of the highest possible standards. The fashion industry continues, polycentric and multicultural, and on an enormous scale as the world becomes wealthier and travel easier. But it is most improbable that the kind of dresses Balenciaga created in the 1950s and 1960s will ever be made again. They are, indeed, museum pieces to inspire women or, among the fortunate descendants of his clients, heirlooms to be treasured and, on grand occasions, flaunted.

Picasso: Rise & Output

Picasso seems to have grasped, quite early on, that he would not get to the top in the field of conventional painting from nature. In Barcelona the competition was severe. In particular, he was up against perhaps the greatest of modern Spanish painters, Ramon Casas i Carbo, fifteen years his senior and far more accomplished in traditional skills.

Picasso visited Paris twice more and found that he had no difficulty in staging shows there or in selling his work. In 1904 he effectively left Spain for good, partly to escape conscription, but chiefly to get away from life under Casas’s shadow, and from endless disparaging comparisons with Casas. Picasso also saw that Paris, with its preoccupation with novelty and fashion, was the place where he could shine and rise to the top.

Picasso was perhaps the most restless, experimental, and productive artist who ever lived. But everything had to be done at top speed. He was incapable of lavishing care, time, or sustained effort on a work of art. By 1900 he was turning out a painting every morning, and doing other things in the afternoon. He tried sculpture, facial masks, and symbolism, among other forms of expression, and from then until his death, at age ninety-two, he remained a master of spectacular output, working on paper and canvas; in stone, ceramics, and metal; in every possible variety of mixed media. He also designed posters, advertisements, theater sets and costumes, dresses, logos, and almost every kind of object from ashtrays to headdresses.

In the twentieth century, more words, often contradictory, were written about Picasso than about any other artist. Picasso was a millionaire by 1914 and a multimillionaire by the end of World War I; and his wealth continued to grow, so that by the time of his death he was by far the richest artist who had ever lived.

He took a long time even to become literate and was middle-aged before he could communicate in French. Very few of his letters survive, for the simple reason that to him writing a letter was more difficult, and took more time and effort, than doing a painting. Matisse wrote him many letters, which we have, but got only one in return, in which his name was misspelled (“Mattisse”).

There was intense competition, but Picasso became the champion player, and held the title till his death, because he was extraordinarily judicious in getting the proportions of skill and fashion exactly right at any one time. He also had brilliant timing in guessing when the moment had arrived for pushing on to a new fashion. Although his own appetite for novelty was insatiable, he was uncannily adept at deciding exactly how much the vanguard of the art world would take. This cunning was closely linked to an overwhelming personality and a peculiar sense of moral values. His ability to overawe and exploit both men and women—some of them highly intelligent and uneasily aware of what he was doing to them—was by far the most remarkable thing about him.

His sexual appeal, when young, was mesmeric, both to women and to homosexuals. He later claimed to have first slept with a woman when he was ten, and he attracted women long before his fame and money became their object. His appeal to homosexuals, especially those who enjoyed the passive role, was even stronger; he seemed a small, fierce, thrusting tiger of virility. Picasso himself was overwhelmingly heterosexual by inclination. But in the culture from which he sprang there was no disgrace to his manhood in taking the active role to satisfy a needy “queen,” to use his expression.

Picasso also appealed, aesthetically, to lesbians, and it is significant that he called the masculine Gertrude Stein “my only woman friend.”

Picasso: Power & Cruelty

…he lacked two things that ordinary people take for granted: the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. This lack was one source of his power. At the center of his universe there was room only for Picasso—his needs, interests, and ambitions. Nobody else had to be considered. He began by exploiting his penurious father.

Once he acquired a reputation, he proved a harder businessman than any of his dealers, whom he hired or fired on a strictly commercial basis. He boasted: “I do not give. I take.” To his harsh mind, kindness, generosity, and consideration for feelings were all weaknesses, to be taken advantage of by master figures like himself. Those who helped him, such as Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire, and countless others, were dropped, betrayed, or lashed by his venomous tongue. His ingratitude was compounded by jealousy, especially of other painters, which may have sprung from insecurity about the merits of his own work and a feeling it was all a con.

He said odious things about Matisse, who thought him a friend.

He was particularly vicious toward his fellow Spaniard, the modest and likable Juan Gris, persuading patrons to drop him, intriguing to prevent him from getting commissions, and then, when Gris died at age forty, pretending to be grief-stricken.

…he was a major power in the Parisian art world, since he carefully controlled the release of his paintings and dealers groveled to do his bidding. He could effectively stop any painter he disliked, below the top rank, from getting a show: that is what happened to one of his mistresses, Françoise Gilot, when she left him.

…for him, women were divided into “goddesses and doormats,” and that his object was to turn the goddess into the doormat. One of his long-term mistresses said of him: “He first raped the woman,…then he worked. Whether it was me, or someone else, it was always like that.” He was predatory—and intensely possessive. He discarded women at will, but for a woman to desert him was treason. He told one mistress: “Nobody leaves a man like me.” He would steal a friend’s wife, then tell the man that he was honoring him by sleeping with her. He told Gilot: “I would rather see a woman die than see her happy with someone else.”

…anyone.” He was overheard saying to himself, over and over: “I am God, I am God.”

…admirers. As he put it, “being unfair is god-like.”

Picasso loved to rule over a seraglio but avoided the risk of harem conspiracies by setting one woman against another. His delight was to see his victims turning their rage on each other instead of on himself. He would create situations in which one mistress angrily confronted another in his presence, and then both rolled on the floor, biting and scratching.

23 He was mean to his women, liking to keep them dependent on him. Most parted from him poorer than when they met. It is true that he sometimes gave them paintings or drawings. But he never signed these works. If, after a rupture, a woman attempted to sell such a gift, dealers would not handle it without Picasso’s authentication, which was refused.

Without both a signature and Picasso’s personal authentication, such works were commercially valueless. In short, they had no intrinsic value. Few leading painters have ever been so easy to copy or imitate. Because of his abuse of his power of authentication, and the fear in which dealers held him, some works rejected as forgeries are undoubtedly by him, and it is likely that many authenticated works are fraudulent.

Many people find it hard to accept that a great writer, painter, or musician can be evil. But the historical evidence shows, again and again, that evil and creative genius can exist side by side in the same person. It is rare indeed for the evil side of a creator to be so all-pervasive as it was in Picasso, who seems to have been without redeeming qualities of any kind.

When he realized that his sexual potency had gone, he said bitterly to his son Claude: “I am old and you are young. I wish you were dead.” His last years were punctuated by family quarrels over his money. His demise was followed by many years of ferocious litigation. Marie-Thérèse hanged herself. His widow shot herself. His eldest child died of alcoholism. Some of his mistresses died in want. Picasso, an atheist transfixed by primitive superstitions, who had his own barber so that no one could collect clippings of his hair and so “get control” of him by magic, lived in moral chaos and left more chaos behind.

Picasso & Politics

…the left deified Picasso, who identified his interests with those of communism from the mid-1930s. Before that he had vaguely supported “progressive causes,” as did most avant-garde artists.

…however, he never lifted a finger to help the desperate Republic. Though happy to protest with his brush against the Nazis’ atrocities, he never, to the end of his days, acknowledged the torture and execution, by the Stalinists and the Spanish Communist Party, of thousands of Catalonian anarchists, including people he had known. He was a great signer of collective letters of protest—signing cost nothing—but appeals to him to help individual Spanish refugees, including old friends, fell on deaf ears.

perfidy.

Picasso was hailed as a heroic figure by the French Communist Party…

Thus the support of the left was of immeasurable help to Picasso in establishing him, even in his lifetime, as the “greatest painter of the twentieth century”; and even though the communist empire has disappeared, and communism is dead, Picasso remains an unassailable hero of the left.

Disney & Animation

impecunious

But he did get some art education, even if he never had the luxury, like Picasso, of cutting art classes in favor of visiting brothels.

…he developed two passions. First, he wanted to run his own business and be his own master—he had the American entrepreneurial spirit to an unusual degree, and by the age of twenty he had already run his own company, gone bankrupt, and set up again. Second, he wanted to get into the art or craft of animation.

Disney always felt that animation without sound was dead and that the nature and quality of the sound were the key to success. But initially the sound dimension baffled him.

Disney lived from hand to mouth. Five dollars was a lot of money for him, and he often had to borrow cash. But he contrived to keep abreast of what was a rapidly evolving technology, both in animation and in moving photography.

Disney’s original company, the Laugh-O-Gram Corporation, made short animation films, animation plus photography films, and advertising shorts using cartoon figures. But though Disney owned his own movie camera, bought on credit, and borrowed cash, he was forced into bankruptcy. All he kept was the camera and a print of Alice to use as a sample. He was forced to disband his team and use his camera for freelance news photography…

He did private jobs, too—filming weddings and funerals at $10 or $15 each. He did not starve, but he often lived off canned beans. His contacts with the news studios persuaded him that he had to establish himself, and a new production company, in Hollywood. So he sold his camera and, with the proceeds, bought himself a ticket there, with $40 as his capital…

…is impossible to exaggerate the need for a producer like Disney to respond quickly to changes in public taste and to the need for novelty. Just as Picasso, in Paris, went from one phase to another, to cater to the insatiable appetite for ideas of the art world, so Disney had to adapt and change his cartooning.

He had called the mouse Mortimer, so when he decided to feature a mouse series, he chose the name Mortimer Mouse. But his wife, Lilly (he had just married on the strength of the profits from Alice), objected: “Too sissy.” That was when Disney picked Mickey. The essence of Mickey Mouse was that he inspired affection, just as the mouse on Disney’s desk had “won my stony heart,” as he put it.

Disney, however, never liked the artificial side of the Hollywood “picture palace” industry. He was really a product of the arts and crafts movement and of art nouveau, which had formed the aesthetic background to his first attempts to draw. Hollywood was art deco, quite a different visual influence. Disney’s instinct was always to get back to nature (whereas Picasso’s was to get away from it).

…long before the turn of the twenty-first century, Disney’s business had expanded from cartooning into completely new forms of entertainment. Disney wanted to retain nature and surrealize it (to coin a phrase), but he also wanted to combine it with a fantasy world. In a sense, this is exactly what Watteau had done with his paintings of fêtes and arcadia in the early eighteenth century. Fantasia had been an exercise in such juxtaposition, but during World War II Disney had brooded on the possibility of creating these worlds not in the studio, of paint and celluloid, but in real life.

Disney was, in the highly charged ideological atmosphere of the 1930s, his most creative period, a strong supporter of what would now be called family values and traditionalism, who primly and obstinately (though silently) refused to allow his organization to promote collectivism or socialist values. As he employed a good many intellectuals, artists, and writers who at that period leaned overwhelmingly toward the left, this produced tension at Disney Studios and, in 1940, led to a strike aimed either at forcing Disney to make pro-Communist propaganda cartoons or at shutting the studio down. Disney defeated the strike, with some help from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and pursued his own individual way until his death. As a result, left-wing writers tried to demonize him, both during his lifetime and later.