Executed in 2010, Paul McCarthy’s White Snow Dwarf (Bashful) is an example from the artist’s celebrated series of works which re-interpret fairy tales, revealing their more macabre antecedents. Renowned for his appropriation and subversion of childhood nostalgia, the present work belongs to the artist’s exploration of the 19th century German folk tale Schneewittchen (Snow White) and its modern interpretation with Disney’s 1937 animated classic film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Begun in 2009, McCarthy’s reinterpretations place us at a distance from the saccharinity of Disney’s rendition as the more sinister elements of the original fairy tale come to the fore. Typical of an artist whose career has transcended the boundaries of any single medium, McCarthy’s exploration of the Seven Dwarves first manifested in a series of drawings, then through sculptural interrogations, and finally culminated in an epic installation in 2013.
“McCarthy’s dwarfs have no Snow White…they are the wreckage, the remains of inspiration metamorphosed into damaged artifacts—a glimpse into the artist’s mind. Paul McCarthy has never been better.”
—Alfred Mac Adam
The starting point for these silicone sculptures were figurines from the Disney film, which McCarthy took as inspiration to create small-scale clay models which underwent various degrees of destruction and addition. With his characteristic embrace of taboo themes, McCarthy notably incorporated sex toys to construct a more provocative and psychologically complex interpretation of the saccharine figure of the dwarf. In the present work, Bashful retains his innocence-implying eyelashes and bulbus nose—which now reads with phallic undertones. With a phallus in hand, the bubble-gum pink figure embodies both innocence and perversion in a provocative social commentary.
“He knows the archetypes of Disney are exhausted and limited, buy by wrenching and abusing these familiar scenes even further [...] he pulls us toward reality."
—Laura Owens
Creating large-scale fiberglass molds from these clay models, McCarthy then cast these figures in silicon in an array of bright colors. McCarthy has noted of the process: “casting… liberates the literal through a kind of unifying monotone, a different representation of the original thing that lets me explore where reality and abstraction intersect."i
