In what has to be a first, the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in New York is  devoting considerable museum space to a working Hollywood filmmaker. Just opening this weekend is Tim Burton, a major retrospective exploring the full scale of Tim Burton’s career, both as a director and concept artist for live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer. On view through April 26, 2010, the exhibition brings together over 700 examples of sketchbooks, concept art, drawings, paintings, photographs, and a selection of his amateur films, and is the Museum’s most comprehensive monographic exhibition devoted to a living filmmaker. An extensive film retrospective spanning Burton’s 27-year career runs throughout the exhibition, along with a related series of films that influenced, inspired, and intrigued Burton as a filmmaker.

The exhibition is on view throughout the Museum: the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the third floor features hundreds of drawings, paintings, sculptures, sketchbooks, and moving image works. Downstairs, in the Museum’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater Lobbies, a selection of largescale Polaroids created by Burton is joined by a selection of domestic and international film posters from his feature films. In the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, the 21-foot Balloon Boy baloon sculpture greets museum visitors. In the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, a deer-shaped topiary inspired by Edward Scissorhands is on view.

MoMA’s exhibition draws extensively from the artist’s personal archive, as well as from studio archives and the private collections of Burton’s collaborators, and includes art from a number of early, unrealized projects. Never-before-exhibited drawings, paintings, and film props, as well as virtually unseen films—including Burton’s 1983 live-action, Asian-cast adaptation of Hansel and Gretel—and his early student films. An original animation of MoMA’s logo conceived by Burton and produced by Mackinnon & Saunders, is on view online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFZ3gP0pqzE.

Tim Burton is organized by Ron Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, and Jenny He, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, with Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, The Museum of Modern Art and sponsored by the cable network Syfy.

Sandy Mandelberger, Film New York Editor