Note on Barks paintings

[Donald D. Ault]

No one who was not there at the inception of the Duck oil paintings can
appreciate just how important they were to Carl and to those of us who
participated in the excitement of those early years with him. Remember that
this was the first time he was allowed to sign his own Disney work, and he
felt greatly flattered that Disney would grant him (royalty free) permission
to do the paintings and sell them. From the beginning, he took them very
seriously. When I saw Carl's first Duck oil, the Sept. '49 cover for Glenn
Bray, I was literally stunned. It was as though I'd never quite seen the
Ducks before--or that these were the Ducks "fleshed out" as perhaps they
were in his mind when he was writing his stories. When we held the first
public showing of his early oils in Berkeley, California, in 1971, he
brought two Sheriff of Bullet Valley paintings and his first money lake
painting (the cover of Scrooge #1). You could still smell the turpentine and
fresh paint, and the glow on  his face was priceless when one person (the
WIFE of one of the Duck fans who had come to the dinner) bought one of the
Bullet Valley paintings on the spot for $150 (he was afraid no one except
fanatics like Glenn Bray, Tom Andrae and I would pay such an "outrageous"
price for his paintings). Remember that just a year earlier when I first met
Carl he had been giving away his "scrap" drawings and ink pages to his late
stories (which were literally saved from incineration in Poughkeepsie by
Chase Craig and presented to Carl as his retirement present) but had finally
decided to try to sell them for $25 each. I told him they were worth a lot
more than that--apparently I was the first person ever to offer Carl more
for a piece of art than he was asking--and soon the price was $100 per page.
The paintings were in color, so he hoped $150 would be reasonable, but he
had doubts. He hadn't had much luck selling paintings at the art shows where
his wife's work sold easily. One little anecdote: about a eight months
before the first Duck oil, I asked him if he thought it would be "legal" for
him to make a painting of the money dam explosion from Scrooge #1 since it
didn't have any Disney characters in it. He agreed to do it, but he said
he'd need some practice at drawing lots of little things (i.e., eventually
coins) before he would tackle it, so he did a very nice painting of a young
girl standing in a field of (what looked like) thousands of flowers and
blades of grass, some painted with single sable-hair brushes. I don't have
the letter here in France where he talks about that, but Geoff Blum included
it in one of his "Letters from the Duck Man" in the CBL in color (I also
don't have the issues here, so I can't give you the number). The idea that
he would spend months practicing and trying to figure out how to deal with
masses of small images in a painting before he would take on the money dam
explosion consignment is a perfect example of just how important his
painting was to him--remember, this was BEFORE he had any painting license.
When he eventually got such a license, I told him to forget the money dam
(which he eventually painted [with Ducks] for Another Rainbow's lithograph
series) and just paint me a money lake from the cover of Scrooge #1. At the
celebration at the Berkeley house, I told Carl that my brother-in-law would
like a "Golden Helmet" cover painting, but with a stormy sky behind the
Ducks. His face lit up with the idea, and for the rest of the evening, you
could tell he was really thinking about how he was going to organize that
Golden Helmet painting, and what the color scheme would be. The fact that he
never duplicated a color scheme exactly in multiple paintings of the "same"
cover scene indicates how completely unto themselves he hoped the paintings
would be. In the early painting years he liked doing them best when he was
doing something for an individual. He liked the idea of having a personal
contact with the purchaser of his paintings. When the painting order list
hit around 150, and he realized he'd "never live long enough" to do them
all, he started selling them at auction through Bruce Hamilton and Russ
Cochran. That's when the prices began to skyrocket and when he began to lose
the feeling of a "personal" relation with the buyers. He had to imagine
scenes for his paintings that would attract multiple buyers into competition
with each other, and this changed the nature of his paintings somewhat.

Regarding their "quality": My firm belief is that we do not yet know how to
"read" Carl's paintings. When I saw that first painting, I felt I was
looking at something that was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. If you
look at the paintings Walter Lantz did of Woody Woodpecker after he
retired--slapdash, two-dimensional, almost sketchy acrylic drawings of the
character with almost no background--you'll see that Carl was doing
something unlike anything that other cartoonists would likely do in painting
"funny animal" characters. And he felt he could never do the kinds of
"beautiful" paintings that Horvath and others did at the Disney Studio for
the feature animated cartoons. He was trying to get the feeling of the
Ducks' characters and the feeling of a depth of narrative sequence that's
almost impossible to capture when it's condensed into single scene instead
of spread out into panels, of which he was, for course, a master. I think
it's pretty obvious that people all over the world know how to "read" Carl's
stories (though often not in his original words). In a sense the paintings
should be easier to read and judge, in part because they don't need to be
"translated" into different languages (even though the titles or captions
may be). But I really believe that art historians and critics (and fans)
have not yet developed an aesthetic theory that can actually account for the
kinds of painting production Carl did--just as they have not yet really been
able to figure out what to do with (how to judge) William Blake's
"illuminated printing" after two hundred years of trying. I definitely
"like" looking at some of Carl's paintings more than others, but quite often
the ones I like to look at(especially cover paintings that are very close to
the original comic book covers, and a few of the early money bin paintings)
are the least valuable in dollars, and those I like least are the most
valuable in selling price--like the spectacular, complex compositions that
he did the way he did them because he knew that, like his comics,these
images would be reproduced in quantity as lithographs. He never imagined
that he would ever see his early paintings reproduced (because of Disney
copyright), just as he never expected to see any of his ink pages again
after he mailed them off or took them into the Western Publishing office. As
he once said to me, "I just sold them so many pounds of paper for so many
dollars." He didn't consider that the original ink pages had any value
beyond their being photostatted for reproduction.

Sorry for this long note. I have a bit of time on my hands here in France,
but not for long!

Donald Ault
Professor of English
University of Florida
http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~donault/