Concept painting of Mexico, created with gouache by Mary Blair in 1964
INTRODUCTION
Mary Blair said about her work on “It’s a Small World,” “this is the most interesting job I’ve ever had. [The] results are more delightful than anything I’ve tried before.” Blair, an American artist and illustrator, painted a concept painting of Mexico in 1964 for the popular Disney attraction. The piece represents Blair’s distinctive artistic style, characterized by imaginative primary colors, cheerful abstraction, and the tight use of watercolor and gouache. The painting functioned as a style guide and concept illustration for a three-dimensional installation, which was brought to life by dozens of sculptors, seamsters, composers, and engineers. The attraction was commissioned by Walt Disney for the UNICEF pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, a pavilion sponsored by the Pepsi-Cola Company.
In this paper, I will argue that Blair’s 1964 concept painting of Mexico communicates American nationalism, ineptitude of colonized peoples, and respect for feminine artists. Blair’s painting functions as a piece of visual propaganda, created to foster American nationalism in the Cold War era. By virtue of Blair’s patrons, her concept painting contrasts America’s supremacy with Mexico’s colonization. Blair also created this painting as a triumphant assertion of her femininity in the twilight of her successful career in the arts.
CONTEXT
The artist Mary Blair, born Mary Browne Robinson, was an illustrator, colorist, designer, and visual development artist born in Oklahoma in 1911. Her creative career officially began with her education at San José State University and the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. She went off with a scholarship at age eighteen with the promise of a bright future, but likely graduated with a different understanding of art after the Wall Street Crash in October 1929. While art education programs lost funding in many American public schools, fine art became increasingly mainstream. Art became both a utopia for escapists and an accessible platform for social debate.
Arthur D. Efland, a former professor of art education, wrote about artistic influences during this period: “the Marxists declared the downfall of the capitalist system, while new ideologies like the ‘America First’ movement, Fascism, and Nazism gained willing adherents.” From 1935 to 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sponsored the Federal Art Project (FPA) as part of his New Deal, which is considered the beginning of public modern art. Roosevelt used the FPA to employ struggling artists, commission artwork for display in government buildings, and build community art centers for the democratic expression of American culture in all areas of the country. Public propagandistic art was commissioned by the government to reinforce a sense of traditional American culture—even of its supremacy—as Europe hurtled towards the second world war. Additionally, groups who hadn’t had much of a cultural voice in America—schoolchildren, teenagers, women, Native Americans, global immigrants—were inspired to use public art to process their thoughts and express themselves. These new ideas about public art likely bled over into Blair’s artistic education.
Blair graduated from Chouinard in 1933 and married watercolor artist Lee E. Blair in 1934. She and her husband joined the California Water-Color School, a prestigious art society where Blair exhibited her work and developed her innovative design skill, imaginative color choice, and uniquely empathetic subjects. Her use of color, perhaps her most recognizable artistic signature, was later compared by her colleague Marc Davis to that of Henri Matisse. Though she dreamed of a career of a fine artist, Blair worked as an animator with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the Ub Iwerks studio before joining Walt Disney Animation Studios in 1940. She only worked as an animator there for a year, contributing to the films Dumbo and Lady and the Tramp. Shortly after she left her job at Disney in 1941, Walt Disney recruited Blair and her husband to join a team of fourteen other artists on a three-month research tour through South America. This Disney artistic expedition was sponsored by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of America’s Good Neighbor Policy. While on tour with the team, nicknamed “El Grupo,”Blair painted scenes from life in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Chile.
Nazi Germany was targeting Latin American countries, which were close to the United States and generally suffering from fascist governments to begin with. Roosevelt combated Germany’s flirtation with South America by commissioning propaganda art, advertisements, and films that fostered good feelings between the United States and South America. Blair had already established an artistic style of primary colors, cheerful stylization, and childlike figures that leant itself well to this new propaganda of Mexico. Mary Blair’s concept painting of Mexico shows the pressure on her boss, Walt Disney, to spread the image of an inviting, vibrant, nonthreatening Mexico.
The watercolor paintings Mary Blair developed of life in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Chile impressed Walt Disney so much that he brought her back to his animation studio as an art supervisor. Fellow animator Marc Davis said about Blair, “she brought modern art to Walt in a way that no one else did. He was so excited about her work.” Roland Crump, an animator and Disney Imagineer, said “the way she painted—in a lot of ways she was still a little girl. Walt was like that… You could see he could relate to the children—she was the same way.” John Canemaker, a Disney animator who’s conducted extensive research on Mary Blair, said that “her work is such that it does appeal to a wide range of people and a wide age range.” Walt saw applications for Blair’s style in both futuristic pieces and in primitive folk art. In the decade after 1943, Blair contributed her expertise to the art direction, color design, and concept art for the films Song of the South, So Dear to My Heart, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Saludos Amigos, and The Three Caballeros.
Many animators who worked with Mary Blair—an overwhelming majority of whom were men—had trouble understanding her color choices and translating her paintings to animation. Ted Thomas, son of Disney animator Frank Thomas, wrote that “[my father would] say how very difficult it was to try to draw and translate her designs into animation because she was so superbly gifted at working in this very flat kind of medium; animation eventually has to be rounded and dimensional with volume.” Blair left Disney in 1953 and became a freelance artist and graphic designer in New York City. Her best remembered work from this time in her life are her illustrations, which were published in national ad campaigns, magazine articles, and Little Golden Books for children. She also worked on clothing designs, window displays for Bonwit Teller, and theatrical sets for Radio City Music Hall.
Walt Disney reached out to Blair again in 1964, remembering her innate sense of color styling, cheerful and naïve graphic abstraction, and watercolor paintings of the children she met in South America. Blair wrote in a letter sent thirteen years afterwards, “Walt said that I knew about colors he had never heard of!” Walt commissioned her to design “It’s a Small World,” an immersive attraction requested by Pepsi to benefit the United Nations Children’s Fund in the UNICEF pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The concept of “It’s a Small World” developed in the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Disney asked Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman, his favorite staff songwriters, to write one song about peace and brotherhood that could “be easily translated into many languages…” The Sherman Brothers wrote the song “It’s a Small World (After All)” to be played as a round, creating harmony through the ride experience. The song is now one of the most translated pieces of music in history.
“It’s a Small World” is a slow boat tour of all seven continents, populated by representations of well-known landmarks and dolls in traditional clothing. Mary Blair created this painting as a concept image for the vignette of Mexico in the attraction. Her two-dimensional designs for the attraction were translated into sculpted dolls, native costumes for the dolls, set pieces indicating local nature and architecture, boats to carry passengers down an artificial river, a facade constructed for the attraction, and illustrations for printed advertisements. Kevin Blair, a young relative, remembered his great aunt’s enthusiasm for the project and said, “she always had a ‘small world’ in her heart… it was such an important part of her life after it was done.” Blair’s concept art, including this painting, wasn’t displayed to the general public until after her death in 1978.
FORMAL DESCRIPTION
The piece is a gouache painting of two smiling people standing in front of a tan pyramid. Both people have brown skin, two circular eyes, and a smiling mouth. Their anatomical proportions are closer to those of a baby doll than those of children or adults. The person on the left is wearing a striped dress and a tall, colorful helmet with five arrows sticking out of it. The person on the right is wearing a striped turban and sleeveless dress. Their clothes show a lighthearted mix of primary colors—red, yellow, blue, white, and black. They stand tall with their arms lifted in a gesture that suggests welcoming or celebration.
The pyramid is flanked by two simple white huts, both with grassy yellow roofs and yellow ladders. A flat white circle floats above the top of the pyramid. The two people and three buildings are surrounded by a squiggly blue line. Clusters of turquoise and yellow brushstrokes are scattered around the blue line. The top half of the painting shows the same type of turquoise and yellow brushstrokes, here arranged into lines. Three blue birds with red plumage are perched in these lines. The birds have striped bills the same colors as the people’s striped clothing. They are also cheerfully stylized like the two people. The entire painting is set against a solid, mottled dark green background. The horizon line is ambiguous, creating the sense that the background goes on to surround the viewer beyond the canvas.
The subject is a welcoming representation of the country of Mexico. Two Mexican children dressed in traditional clothing guide viewers to look at the jungle foliage, colorful birds, typical houses, and a Mayan pyramid. The scene is framed by a simple blue river, lined with plants that might be ferns or agave bushes. A full moon hangs exactly over the point of the pyramid. The simple primary colors, flat background, and stylized people show that Blair didn’t paint this scene from life, but rather as a staged collage of the unique attractions of Mexico.
Mary Blair created this painting as a concept image for the “It’s a Small World” attraction, displayed at the 1964 New York World’s fair and first constructed in Disneyland in 1966. The attraction is a slow boat tour of all seven continents, populated by representations of well-known landmarks and dolls in traditional clothing. Mary Blair spent most of her design career creating concept art for Disney animated movies and theme park attractions. Blair wrote in 1967 that “the beginning of a design is always a difficult time for me. I am very aware that the original concept must do something worthwhile creatively or all the hard work to follow will be wasted. Usually I begin working by making little doodle sketches to plan the overall design and pattern. Many of these end up in the waste basket; but the successful ones are kept to enlarge…”
SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS
The concept painting of Mexico that Blair created for the “It’s a Small World” Disneyland attraction was painted some twenty-five years after her Disney research trip to South America, the end of Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project, and the United States’ declaration of war after Pearl Harbor. Despite its removal in time, the painting can still be read with the lens of semiotics to describe relations between America and Mexico after World War II. Semiotics is the study of signs and their use or interpretation, described by its inventor Ferdinand de Saussure as the study of “the life of signs within society.” A sign is any idea with a word assigned to it in a given language—or, in other words, the combination of a signified concept and a linguistic signifier. The word associated with a sign, either spoken or written, brings to mind the certain concept, including the concept’s literal denotation and the wider connotations. Images like icons or symbols can also be used in place of words to represent concepts or items; accepted systems of images, known as cultural semiotics, can arguably transcend social barriers more nimbly than linguistic semiotics. Blair’s concept painting of Mexico serves as a visual symbol for the sign of Mexico, suggesting various explicit and implicit definitions.
The signifying word “Mexico”— pronounced differently in America than in the country itself—denotes a Spanish-speaking country in North America, located between the United States and Guatemala. This country is the product of the physical and cultural mixture of indigenous civilizations—the Mexica, Mayans, Olmecs, and so on—with Spanish colonists in the late Middle Ages and trade in the New World plantation/slave economy. The signifier “Mexico” also connotes aspects of popular Mexican culture like traditional folklórico dances, mariachi music, authentic cuisine, community fiestas, and holidays like Día de los Muertos. For Americans in the twenty-first century, “Mexico” can connote current debate on the US-Mexico border wall and negative stereotypes about illegal immigration. The concept of Mexico can be visually represented as a simplified icon of the country as it’s drawn on a map. Indices of Mexico’s existence such as a Mayan pyramid, Mexican-Spanish words and phrases, and Spanish Colonial city planning can also be used as symbols of Mexico.
The Mexican flag, with the golden eagle crest and three vertical stripes in red, white, and green, is arguably the best symbol of the concept of Mexico because of its origin with and use by natives of the country. However, Mary Blair doesn’t suggest the colors and crest of the Mexican flag in her concept painting. Instead, she used visual cues that suggest the indigenous civilizations of Mexico: the background of a dark jungle, the full moon above a step pyramid, two small dwellings constructed from clay and grasses, and brown-skinned children. Of course, she chose to symbolize Mexico with children because she was designing a fundraising attraction for UNICEF. However, she chose to dress the children in ancient traditional clothing instead of contemporary traditional dress. She also sets the children in a jungle village, not a Mexican ranch or modern city. The subject matter combined with Blair’s visual symbolism communicated Mexico as primitive and decentralized to Americans in the 1960s. This concept painting could even be construed as propaganda, given Mexico’s communication with Nazi Germany in the 1940s and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. This semiotic analysis of Blair’s concept painting reveals that her message to American audiences was one of pacification toward an inept Mexico.
POSTCOLONIAL ANALYSIS
Postcolonial theory is a critical approach to the arts pioneered by Edward Said, a Palestinian-American literary critic and activist. Said wrote in his 1978 book Orientalism that the division of the world into the imagined categories of East (Asia and the Middle East) and West (continental Europe and England) through imperialism justified colonization. The subaltern—meaning colonized peoples subject to imperial power—were often stripped of their cultural identities, made to mimic their colonizers, and forced to integrate with western culture. To conduct a postcolonial analysis of a piece of art or design is to accept that western colonizers dominated and restructured the cultures of numerous places, then deprived the residents of their own cultural voices. While most western countries have relinquished their antiquated empires in the twenty-first century, colonization continues to be practiced through the globalization of trade and culture.
Mary Blair played no direct role in the Spanish colonization of Mexico and the country’s independence, but she benefited from colonial systems and participated in colonial legacies. Blair was a white woman who lived in Oklahoma, Texas, California and New York—lands stolen from Native Americans by white colonizers. Her 1960s concept painting of Mexico for the “It’s a Small World” attraction can be read to reveal her prejudice against indigenous Americans. Muhammad Khalid Yousaf, a graduate student at Minhaj University, wrote that colonialist literature written by colonizers for an audience in their home country “is an attempt to replicate, continue, equal, the original tradition, to write in accord with British standards.” Postcolonialist literature, by contrast, is “often… self-consciously a literature of otherness and resistance, and is written out of the specific local experience.”
A clear indication of Blair’s colonist perspective is the fact that she painted visual representations of indigenous Mexican culture—the background of a dark jungle, the full moon above a step pyramid, two small dwellings constructed from clay and grasses, and brown-skinned children. Her clients, Walt Disney and UNICEF, informed her choice to symbolize Mexico with children in ancient traditional clothing instead of contemporary traditional dress. She also sets the children in a jungle village, not a Mexican ranch or modern city. Although the two figures in the painting aren’t imitating Spanish colonizers in dress or manner, the significance of their cultural symbols has been erased. Blair omits storytelling in this concept painting, meaning the viewer has no idea who these children are, if they normally wear this clothing, or whether they live in the buildings pictured. Blair’s representation of Mexican culture feels like a performance, not like a way of life with a rich heritage.
Perhaps the most convincing evidence for Blair’s prejudice is the purpose of this painting: concept art for a boat ride attraction at the UNICEF pavilion to raise funds for children at risk during the 1964 New York World’s Fair. UNICEF, an acronym for United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, was created at a United Nations General Assembly in New York City on December 11, 1946. The United Nations was attended by fifty-five countries at the time, with seventeen Latin American countries represented (including Mexico). The fund started as a resource to help children victimized by World War II. But by 1964, UNICEF had expanded its focus to children’s education, community agriculture, and family medicine all over the world. Their advertised motto at the 1964 World’s Fair was “every child’s right to security, good health and education,” with all ticket sales benefiting UNICEF. Although UNICEF wasn’t an imperialist power, it still exercised colonist power over the subaltern’s children by forcing them to participate in western education, agriculture, and medicine.
The simple primary colors, flat background, and stylized figures in Mary Blair’s concept painting of Mexico show that she didn’t paint this scene from her travels in Latin America, but rather as a staged collage of the attractions that make Mexico unique and “exotic”. The children greeted their audience at the World’s Fair with smiles and outstretched arms, ready to accept their financial support. They look happy enough there in the jungle, but they desperately need Americans’ donations to UNICEF to give them shoes, send them to school, and teach them to grow crops. Blair succeeded in displaying indigenous Mexicans as “individuals without an anchor… a race of angels.” The painting communicated Mexico as primitive and decentralized to Americans in the 1960s.
While I acknowledge the prejudice and problems inherent to Mary Blair’s concept painting of Mexico, I think her artwork is redeemable. The attraction “It’s a Small World” was made racist and colonialist in the context of 1960s UNICEF and Cold War tensions with Latin America, but I question whether Blair’s concept art is inherently racist. Compare the “It’s a Small World” attraction at the 1964 World’s Fair with the attraction currently installed at Disney theme parks worldwide. Now that the attraction isn’t operated by UNICEF, patrons can enjoy Blair’s colors and concepts sans private interests or implicit messages. The smiling children who represent Mexico now celebrate cultural diversity across the globe instead of pleading for American donations. A sensitive twenty-first century viewer can enjoy Blair’s artistic skill even if the concept painting served originally to communicate negative stereotypes about Mexican people.
PERSONAL RESPONSE
I think Mary Blair herself is even redeemable as a modern role model for women in the arts. As a feminist, I can appreciate the way that Blair’s gender experience intersected with her artistic career. During her childhood in Oklahoma and Texas, Blair’s mother and two older sisters often spent less money on food so they could afford to buy her art supplies. She escaped her alcoholic father by enrolling in San José State College, then won her scholarship to the Chouinard Institute of the Arts. She was one of the few women members of the California Water Color Society during the Great Depression, and then the only woman on the Disney research tour of South America in 1941.
Having been driven from her previous animation job over a case of sexual harassment, Blair frequently voiced her dissatisfaction with gender inequality at Disney. Men got access to the most creative and prestigious animation work, where Blair was frequently relegated to the Ink and Paint department with the other “girls.” Most of these women who handled every frame of animation were never given on-screen credit for their work. Blair’s male coworkers had trouble with her promotion after the South American research tour, and their disrespect let to her departure from Disney in 1953. I am a woman who can empathize with Blair’s struggle for professional legitimacy in an industry that favored white men.
I personally admire Blair’s strong personal style that remained apparent throughout her career. She took her designs for children as seriously as the fine art created during her education. She never disguised her femininity in her artwork; Blair cited feminine arts like quilting and high fashion among her inspiration, sources which would have been ridiculed by her coworkers. Hints of Blair’s trauma also come through in her work. Certain scenes between the mother and baby elephant in Dumbo were inspired by Blair’s own experience with miscarriage; she drew the dark landscapes of Sleeping Beauty at the height of her husband’s alcoholism and domestic abuse. Understanding the outside forces that worked on Mary Blair has led me to read her concept painting of Mexico less as a backwards caricature and more as a triumphant assertion of her femininity and childlike style at the end of her successful career.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, Mary Blair’s 1964 concept painting of Mexico communicates American nationalism, ineptitude of colonized peoples, and respect for feminine artists. The painting lifts the curtain on shifting relationships and tense alliances between the United States and Latin America after World War II and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The painting uses visual symbols to indicate the dependence of “exotic,” culturally rich peoples upon their “civilized” colonizers. The painting also communicates Blair’s self-confidence, successful perspective, and integrity to her own creative voice after a career full of harassment by male coworkers.
Ironically, the concept painting of Mexico is more of a snapshot of the complexity of America in 1964. It is also a window into the psyche of Mary Blair herself, a woman who overcame great obstacles to live her childhood dream of being an artist. Wilfred Jackson, one of Blair’s coworkers at Disney, wrote in 1967, “there is much more to Mary’s designs than just the surface look, or unique appearance of them. Contained, also, within her designs is an expression of Mary’s own response as a sensitive artist, to what the thing is—or the create or the person is—not just how it looks.” Technique and emotionality combined beautifully in Blair’s 1964 concept painting of Mexico, along with the rest of her portfolio, preserving her empathetic visualization of the world around her. To this day, millions viewers can personally identify with Mary after just moments spent with her artwork.
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