This Swedish-American artist had a long and prolific career in the United States and left a legacy as one of the outstanding visual interpreters of fantasy literature in the 20th century.
GUSTAF TENGGREN’S success has been variously attributed to his rare combination of originality, uncommon versatility, brilliant sense of composition and mastery of many genres. What is more, he had an entrepreneurial spirit that would serve him well when he immigrated to the United States in 1920 at the age of 24. It was a time when commercial art and book publishing were on the verge of new and unprecedented growth. For a visual artist equally adept at painting portraits and illustrating fairy tales the timing couldn’t have been better.
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Tenggren’s work for Walt Disney and, later, Golden Books would eventually catapult his art into widespread public consciousness. At a glance, there appears to be little resemblance among the characters populating Disney’s—and the world’s—first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which premiered in 1937, and The Poky Little Puppy, the beloved children’s classic first published as one of the Little Golden Books in 1942. But all of them share the same lineage. It was Gustaf Tenggren who brought the characters to life.
WALT DISNEY RECRUITED TENGGREN IN 1936 TO WORK AS a concept artist on Snow White. Preliminary work on the film had stalled because Disney felt it needed new direction. He had become convinced that the success of the film, and other stories the studio planned to produce, “depended heavily on the design of the old European fairy-tale tradition,” author Lars Emanuelsson wrote in Gustaf Tenggren— en biografi, a meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated book, published in Sweden by Kartago in 2014.
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