‘It’s not so much about art, it’s more about the process’: Tim Burton of the Design Museum

“If you had asked me a year ago what defines the Burtonesque, I might have referred to the usual aphorisms around spirals, stripes and chessboards,” says Maria McLintock, the curator behind The world of Tim Burtonan extensive new overview in the Design Museum. ‘It’s actually about a craft, a dedication to slowness, to the handmade; from working with designers like Colleen Atwood on costume or Rick Heinrichs on production, in a very involved and iterative way.” McLintock is well aware of the particular sensibility of Burton’s creative output – as a teenager she consumed the filmmaker’s oeuvre, she says – and the show offers a rich interrogation of his practice, particularly highlighting the relationships that shape have been most crucial in the spell he has been through. cast over the past five decades.

Initially conceived by curators Ron Magliozzi and Jenny He for MoMA in 2009, versions of the show have since been staged in 14 cities in 11 countries. This iteration marks a conclusion; a grand finale in the director’s adopted city (25 years and counting), with more than 600 objects on display and more than 32,000 tickets sold prior to the opening (the museum’s largest pre-sale ever). Untangling Burton’s signature approach to storytelling – carried out in the preparatory stages with drawings on whatever material is at hand, a napkin from the Ritz Paris or over the advertisements of the Los Angeles Times – here McLintock foregrounds the elements that honor a process. “Filmmaking is a design practice,” she notes. “And there’s a certain relationship that Tim has to design, and then there’s a kind of responsibility for us to emphasize the way design contributes to film and cinema more broadly.”

Divided into six rooms with names like ‘Crafting Imagination’ and ‘Drawing Narratives’, The world of Tim Burton introduces itself with its own black-and-white timeline before quickly veering into a colorful “neighborhood” display that references Burbank, California, where Burton was born in 1958; here is his award-winning design for a waste company next to the relevant certificate and an excerpt from the local newspaper (he was 13 at the time). Most striking throughout the show, however, are models and sketches – presented behind glass or among the papers stacked on a replica of Burton’s desk – while there are also reminders of his time at Disney early in his career. As the ‘middleman’, Burton was responsible for drawing the interpolations that create movement in the animation.

Elsewhere, ‘Building Worlds’ features a series of costumes alongside their first illustrations: a black-and-white striped dress worn by Christina Ricci in Sleepy Hollow – Atwood’s painted stripes, a nod to Burton’s emphasis on handcrafted features, as well as Johnny Depp’s leather suit – and special effects artist Stan Winston’s scissor hands – from Edward Schaarhandsperhaps one of the most intriguing and fan favorite pieces, consisting largely of straps. A more recent addition comes in the form of Jenna Ortega’s Rave’N dance dress from Wednesdaydisplayed alongside the character’s gray and black school uniform (the former was a design by Bond Street native Alaïa). “When you see the costumes up close,” says McLintock, “you realize that Colleen is nothing short of a genius. They’re all magical.’

“Production design or costumes, they define a character, define a thing. Film is a collaborative medium, it’s a back and forth idea,” Burton explained at the show’s opening, during a press roundtable with McLintock and Design Museum director and CEO Tim Marlow. ‘With collaborators, even with my rough drawings, I always felt like they understood what they were, and that was part of forming the collaboration. You can’t find it in everyone, it’s rare.’ The curator agrees, telling Wallpaper*: ‘Although there is a kind of author, the director, it really takes a village – an army to produce a film. The fact that Tim has, uniquely, worked with the same team over and over again felt very important to untangle and untangle. First, why that is the case, and second, how their contributions have defined aesthetics.”

Atwood, for her part, interviewed by Anja Aronowsky Cronberg for the accompanying catalogue, Designing worldssays her connection with Burton “was immediate. We shared the same aesthetic universe and the same minimalist approach; we spoke the same language.’ The sentiment is likely shared by Heinrichs, who met Burton at Disney (a clip of the pair in their early studio appears in a film that closes the show), as well as by puppet makers Mackinnon & Saunders, whose work fills the museum. Off the big screen, the breadth of Burton’s influence is underlined with photographs of Tim Walker, a music video for The Killers and an invitation to the late Alexander McQueen, sketched by Burton for the designer’s Autumn/Winter 2002/03 fashion show. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. “It’s not so much about the art, it’s more about the process,” says the filmmaker, who characterizes the common thread in his work. “For me, one thing leads to another.”

The World of Tim Burton can be seen at the Design Museum until April 21, 2025

designmuseum.org