Thursday, September 28, 2017

Gustaf Tenggren




Most of you have heard or read about Swedish illustrator Gustaf Tenggren. He was hired by Disney in 1936 to help develop the art direction for short films like The Ugly Duckling and The Old Mill.
He was very influential on Disney's early feature films as well such as Snow White and Pinocchio.




Recently Heritage Auctions offered some of Tenggren's non Disney original artwork. The late Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen were among his contemporaries.
Stunning work! In the painting below there is a cloud in the shape of a hand, holding the moon.
That idea ended up in Disney's Ichabod Crane film version.








For much more on Gustaf Tenggren, go here:


10 comments:

  1. Great to see Gustaf Tenggren artwork in your blog. I'm working on an article about him and his art, with John Canemaker's biography as starting point and the swedish biography book as research material. But so far, I haven't got to expand it further. Maybe because swedish is such a difficult language, even though it's a neighbor language to the Danish and sounds a bit similar.

    I'm merely collecting his work, my recent Tenggren book is the Ring of the Nibelung, a favorite story so epic that it's hard to describe the impact from it. But my revolutionary discovery is the Danish book volumes of Grimm's Fairy Tales with Gustaf Tenggren illustrations, first edition from 1923.

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  3. There's a brief article in the current issue of Scandinavian Review about Tenggren. It includes some of his artwork. www.amscan.org/app/uploads/2017/07/Pages-from-Summer_17-full-issue-with-cover.pdf

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    1. Great article. That could be useful as research material for my essay on Tenggren

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  4. Does anybody know what these non-Disney artwork illustrate to? Fairy tales, or children's books?

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  5. Hello, I wrote the book "Gustaf Tenggren – en biografi". The woman who owned the two non-Disneys contacted me for an evaluation before she sold them on Heritage some years ago. They are made around 2017-2018 when Gustaf was an art student in Sweden. They don't illustrate any special story but are mere practice tasks in his study process, and they are never published. I have not noticed, though, the hand gripping for the moon. Thanks for the heads-up!

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    1. Thank you for leaving a comment. I added a link to your Tenggren blog.

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