The monster cache

Diane Nottle

• Last Updated: November 22. 2009 6:06PM UAE / November 22. 2009 2:06PM GMT

Actor Johnny Depp arrives with actress Helena Bonham Carter and director Tim Burton for a Museum of Modern Art tribute to Burton in New York. Lucas Jackson / Reuters

In Tim Burton’s world, people have elongated bodies and oversized heads and, sometimes, scissors for hands. But the eyes are particularly haunting: big and round, often with tiny pupils in pools of white. Even animals and creatures of indeterminate species have the eyes, which register innocence, mania and alarm.

Their laserlike intensity is seen on animated characters such as the Corpse Bride and Stainboy as well as the actors who take roles in Burton’s live-action films: Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd or Helena Bonham Carter in Big Fish.

One of Burton’s most popular films, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), adds Halloween elements to the Christmas mix. And now, as New York girds for its own seasonal nightmare – the annual holiday onslaught of shoppers and tourists – the Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition Tim Burton, a retrospective that covers 40 years and includes more than 700 drawings, paintings, sculptures and films.

Burton, 51, is best known as a filmmaker, but the exhibition, which opened yesterday on two floors of the museum, demonstrates that he is first and foremost a visual artist, one with a deeply idiosyncratic bent toward the macabre. He is, in a sense, an heir of The Addams Family creator Charles Addams and the illustrator Edward Gorey; his worldview may revolve around the grave, but it is infused with playfulness and cheer.

As soon as visitors enter Moma, it becomes clear that something different is going on. Just past the ticket-takers, the lobby is filled with Balloon Boy, a six-metre-tall, blue inflatable figure shaped like a light bulb with five eyes and crosshatched scar lines. The windows beyond look out on a recent addition to the sculpture garden, a replica of a topiary stag from Burton’s 1990 film Edward Scissorhands.

Upstairs, visitors enter a special exhibitions gallery through the gaping, toothy mouth of a black-and-white monster from an unrealised film project. From there, they pass through a corridor of video screens showing Stainboy cartoons as music by Danny Elfman, who has scored nearly all of Burton’s feature films, plays in the background. A carousel trailing fanciful little monsters spins in a black-lit room just before the cookie-making robot from Edward Scissorhands – a tall, skinny device with red eyes and an unnerving grin – welcomes viewers to the main gallery.

The exhibits divide Burton’s life and work into three periods, all involving Burbank, the Los Angeles suburb where Burton grew up and apparently couldn’t wait to escape. “Surviving Burbank” (1958 to 1976) covers his early years, including teenage projects such as an anti-littering poster. “Beautifying Burbank” (1977 to 1984) traces his years as a student at the California Institute of the Arts and a Disney animator.

“Beyond Burbank” (1985 on) will hold the greatest interest for fans of Burton’s films. It celebrates the movies that made his name, including Beetlejuice, Batman Returns, Batman Forever and Sleepy Hollow, as well as the more forgettable ones such as Mars Attacks!. A life-size mannequin of Depp as Edward Scissorhands presides over a display of cinema artefacts: the Penguin’s wicker baby carriage, a white angora sweater that was part of the wardrobe in Ed Wood, the Headless Horseman’s cape and a pumpkin-headed scarecrow.

Yet even in the early years there are hints of the films to come. The Gardener, a watercolour from the early 1980s of a grinning, short-haired woman in black, is captioned “Replaces missing hands with various garden utensils” – in this case, scissorlike blades. Plump, striped catfish look like the predecessors to the central metaphor of Big Fish.

An early pencil drawing, Girl Listening to Man with Bad Breath depicts the halitosis as a legion of bats, dragons and the like. In another drawing, Cupid shoots an arrow through the heads of an embracing couple, skewering them together.

And everywhere there are those eyes. One vitrine displays a full set of plaster-and-acrylic eyeballs from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. The pupils become progressively smaller, almost to a pinprick, as the eyeballs grow larger.

The underground theatre gallery houses the postscript to the exhibition: large-scale Polaroid photographs from the 1990s, surreal images reminiscent of themes in the main gallery. They include a blue baby doll stuck with nails, a tiny dog wearing antlers and, of course, a cactus sprouting eyes. Creepier than the work three floors above, the photographs are best enjoyed en route to one of the Burton films being screened during the exhibition’s run, along with movies that influenced him – mostly horror.

* Tim Burton continues until April 26 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Visit www.moma.org for more information.