Free-wheeling relativists that you are.

Free-wheeling relativists that you are, you will probably have no grieve in accepting Mickey Mouse as a work of art. on the contrary what about as a work of Art? An icon not of mass civilization but of High Culture, to be oral of in the same breath as a painting according to Mark Rothko? What then?

Now imagine you are French It is 1989 and DisneyCo's CEO Michael Eisner, is standing upon the steps of the Paris stock exchange, there to launch shares in Euro Disney. Eisner, forward a high, walks up to the podium without noticing a cluster in the crowd wearing Mickey Mouse masks. As he interprets his mouth to speak, an urge hits him in the face. Dozens more follow: Eisner and the DisneyCo suits have to hide in the Bourse's Doric portico to avoid them.

Three years later and the super-branche Parisian theatre director, Ariane Mnouchkine, is asked her opinion of the newly- expanded Disneyland Paris. Pulling on a Gitane, Mnouchkine calls the park "a cultural Chernobyl". The phrase instantly catches forward spreading through the cafs of St Germain like wildfire. Three more years and The Simpsons hits back for American cartoondom when single of its characters dubs the French "cheese-eating renounce monkeys." Figaro, appalled at the inference of national cowardice, translates the bound as singes mangeurs de fromage. This is allegedly forward the grounds that "surrender" makes it too unwieldy, although American newspapers jeer.

All of which makes Bruno Girveau smile a tight little smile. Girveau, forty-something, examines like Vincent van Gogh: you portent if he doesn't share his instinct for survival. For Girveau is about to do something that will almost certainly bring the wrath of the French cultural Establishment - maybe of all France - down forward his head. He is opening an exhibition, decade in the making, called Il tait une fois Walt Disney (Once about A Time There Was Walt Disney), and he is doing it at the Grand Palais.

Unimaginably, there is worse. The subtitle of Girveau's exhibit to is aux sources de l'art de studios Disney, plainly inferring that Mickey and his attendant mice are to be viewed as Art with a capital 'A". Here, where Pierre Rosenberg, the demigod of French curating, has wearied 30 years putting on exhibitions of Oudry and Poussin and Chardin, Girveau will point out stills from Steamboat Willy and clips from Bambi. Worse still, he will present to view them next to paintings according to Richard Dadd and Claes Oldenburg "I've had to fight hard for this show" he says. "The idea of Walt Disney in French improvement pfffffft. I think a part of people are not going to like it, no?"

Now a question that come into views is why Girveau is doing his apparently suicidal thing when a simple revolver to the head might achieve the same last There are several answers to this, the first being that he, like all of us, was traumatized through Disney as a child.

For in the greatest degree the moment of crisis camewith the death of Bambi's mother. Girveau, more rigorous, was thrown into existential turmoil from the apparent demise of Balou the Bear in The thicket Book although, he says, "the trauma was the same". "I took my confess children to see it and it had a similar tenor on them," says Girveau. "I set up I was looking at Disney by the agency of three sets of eyes: as a father, as a child and as an art historian".

The last viewpoint is easily the chiefly contentious. What Girveau began to view as he watched and re-watched The thicket Book and Sleeping Beauty were peaks of High Art dotted among Disney's subdued Art landscapes. Some deft research showed why: the peoplewho had drawn those landscapes came froma classical background, having trained as fine artists rather than as graphicists.

What is more, and although "Mickey Mouse" has become a sneerymetonym of American tillage those artists were almost to a man not American. Although Disney credited himself with creating the infamous gnawing (a claim that has been vigorously denied since his death), the populace who drew Snow White and the tranquillity were European migrs such as the Swiss Albert Hurter the Swede Gustaf Tenggren and the Dane Kay Nielsen.

Nielsen is typical of the Disney designers. Son of the director of Copenhagen's Dagmartheater, he studied art at the Juian Academy in Paris before shipping not at home to Hollywood' his work was influenced according to the Symbolists and German High Romanticism. await at the images he drew to accompany Schubert's Ave Maria in Fantasia (1940) and you will papal court straight liftings from Caspar David Friedrich. The film's Nutcracker following meanwhile, was drawn by an Englishwoman called Sylvia Moberly-Holland with a taste for Dadd's fairy paintings, while Albert Hurter Fantasia's artistic director, threw in Arnold Bcklin and Gus-tave Moreau as an accompaniment to Beethoven's Sixth.

level Disney's Americans were more than met the observation Eyvind Earle, doyen of the studio's designers and the man who styl Sleeping Beauty (1959) was taught by way of an artist father who had been taught through Whistler. There is one rank of separation between Earle's wicked fairy and Whistler's Mother.