#310 Walt Disney and Picasso

**David Senra** (0:00)
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The 20th century saw a transformation of our visual experiences comparable to the blossoming of the Renaissance in the 15th century.
We saw many more things, and we saw them differently, both because they were different, and because events and artists accustomed us to look with different eyes.
Much of this altered vision was due to technological change, especially the beginning of cinema, television, videos, digital cameras, and the rapidity with which all were made accessible to humanity everywhere.
But these visual revolutions were compounded by artists with the expression of what was going on in their own minds.
The interplay between the new technologies and the new individualism created an element of visual change.
New experiences for our eyes were the product both of relentless, impersonal forces marching humanity forward and of powerful, creative individuals striving to rest control of change in order to realize their personal ways of seeing things.
Among this group, none were more successful than Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney. A comparison of the two is instructive. Both were outstanding, creative individuals, first and foremost.
Each embraced novelty with shattering enthusiasm, but there were essential differences.
If Picasso created shocking novelties, he did so in a traditional old world manner, in an artist studio, and in the familiar capital of art, Paris.
Disney, on the other hand, was of the New World, a Midwestern who eagerly embraced both America's entrepreneurial ever-vessence and the new technologies leaping ahead of popular taste. He went from the open spaces to Hollywood. Hollywood was not so much a place as a concept. When he was born, it didn't yet exist. During his lifetime, Hollywood became the global capital of the popular arts, thanks in part to his creativity.
Disney made use of the new technologies throughout his creative life, just as Picasso exploited the old artistic disciplines of paint, pencil, modeling and printing to produce the new.
The influence of both Picasso and Disney continues in the 21st century, powerfully and persistently raising a question, which man has been and is more potent?
Okay, so that was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Creators and is written by Paul Johnson.
Okay, so what this book is is a collection of essays on some of history's greatest creators, people like Mark Train, Shakespeare, Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Victor Hugo, TS. Eliot, Dickens. But what I want to focus on today is Paul's essay comparing Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney. And so just to give you a sneak peek, I'm working on what's going to wind up being an extremely comprehensive episode on Walt Disney.
And this initial essay was just initially, I was like, oh, I'll just use it as part of the research. And I got I looked at how many highlights and notes that I made on the essay. I'm like, oh, this is it's the same amount of highlights and notes that I have for individual episodes. And I thought it was so interesting. I'm a huge fan of Paul. I'll have to look up the episode numbers. I don't have in front of me, but I've read five, maybe five of Paul Johnson's books. He actually just passed away. He's a fantastic historian and writer. And I probably done episodes. I did episodes on his Winston Churchill biography, his biography on Socrates, his biography on Mozart. He's got another great collection of essays called Heroes, where he wrote about Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. I did an episode on that. So just a huge fan of his writing and his ability to synthesize all these different historical figures. And so it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that I had a hard time not turning the page reading this essay. And then, of course, I was just obsessed with taking notes and highlights. So I'm going to focus on his comparison. He's going to give overviews of both the life of Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney. Okay, so let's jump into Picasso. So he's born in Spain, and he says his father was an art teacher and an artist, specializing in birds but fascinated by bullfighting. Picasso's father continued to teach him until he was 14, and then his father put him for a limited time at one of Barcelona's excellent fine arts school. And then after that, Picasso sets up on his own as a teenage artist. This is the next line. This is incredible writing and a description of Picasso. I guess I'll tell you up front. It'll be obvious as we go through the highlights and notes today. You can always tell if you read between the lines what an author thinks.