Tim Burton

November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010 Theater 1 Gallery Theater 2 Gallery Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor Museum Lobby This major career retrospective on Tim Burton (American, b. 1958), consisting of a gallery exhibition and a film series, considers Burton's career as a director, producer, writer, and concept artist for live-action and animated films, along with his work as a fiction writer, photographer and illustrator. Following the current of his visual imagination from his earliest childhood drawing through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects. The opposing themes of adolescence and adulthood, and the elements of sentiment, cynicism, and humor inform his work in a variety of mediums—drawings, paintings, storyboards, digital and moving-image formats, puppets and maquettes, props, costumes, ephemera, sketchbooks, and cartoons. Taking inspiration from sources in pop culture, Burton has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as a spiritual experience, influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics. The gallery exhibition focuses on work generated during the process of conception, development, and production of his films, and will cover Burton's realized and unrealized projects. It will include works on paper and sculpted in various mediums, as well as work in digital and moving-image formats such as concept art, production designs, drawn and painted animation art, 3-D models, puppets and maquettes, script treatments, storyboards, screen tests, other audio-visual components, and examples of his work as a graphic artist for non-film projects. Burton's films include Vincent (1982), Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (as producer) (1993), Ed Wood (1994), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Corpse Bride (2005), and Sweeney Todd (2007); writing and Web projects include The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (1997) and Stainboy (2000). MoMA