Happy Friday! Today we learn about Kay NEESUM (kneel-son) and everything we learn is absolutely wrong. Because of course it is.
Disney Should Have Never Fired Kay Neilsen, Evil. They Never Hire The Best Artists Or Fire Them
Description:
Disney has lost billions of dollars because of Covid 19. Millions of people have boycotted Disney due to promoting lude, inappropriate entertainment for both children and adults. http://inventivesuns.com/music.html. I am a composer, you can support me too.
I've been working on a writeup of this guy for a bit, haven't finished it yet but Virgo's full of shit. He did die in poverty, yes, but he didn't go willingly. He was not "forgotten" and Disney was NOT the highlight of his career (though it was definitely the end of it.)
Kay Neilsen was a Danish* illustrator born in the late 1800s to a pair of actors. He began his career by helping his parents with stages, studied art in Paris and ended up going to England and working with MOTHERFUCKING OSCAR WILDE! Seriously, he illustrated for him! Huge! He also illustrated many other books and tomes and was highly renowned throughout Europe for his work.
Each time he was about to make a huge leap in his career a world war happened, but he always found a way to get by and support himself and his wife.
Americans mostly know him as the main idea man behind Fantasia, in the 90s when Disney was making The Little Mermaid they looked back 50 years at his storyboards for inspiration. He worked with Disney during what's known as their "musical era", but by the time the war heated up Disney was ramping up production to full speed on more modern projects and Kay was a perfectionist, needing more time to make things just right. So they let him go (and a load of others go as well, they were streamlining the operation), not because they couldn't appreciate talent, but because they were going in another direction.
Kay was extraordinarily recognized in not only the field of illustration, but also in printmaking. He pioneered techniques that pushed forward the world of printmaking, revolutionary ideas that artists still use today.
When things didn't work out at Disney he went back to painting stages and, as he was much older, ended up raising chickens and dying broke. His family (mainly his wife) and some friends did help support him but he didn't sit around feeling sorry for himself collecting foodstamps and demanding his family pay his rent. He raised chickens, painted stages, took little jobs here and there and his wife worked.
He wasn't a solitary figure, he wasn't thrown away. He had an amazingly long career but like most artists today he lived off a steady stream of commissions. He was a talented prolific individual that contributed a lot to the world, his friends and his family. Virgo is a giant asshole for selling this bs narrative that he was a nobody until the day he died to justify her grabbly handed behaviors.