A WONDERFUL
TOY COLLECTION
G'day folks,
Welcome to a collection to beat all collections.
What is it that makes
someone start a collection which alters the course of their
entire life? For Mel Birnkrant, it was an iron Mickey bank he saw at the
Paris flea market in 1958. His hotel room rent was $30 a month and the toy was
$10. It was in that moment, at the one and only Marché aux Puces, Mel was
first bitten by the collecting bug. It would take him many more
years to understand how that toy had such power over him.
The purchase spurred a lifetime of toy collecting,
turning objects not intended to be “art” and elevating them to that very
level. “This simple act of recognizing that this object I had found was art, in
1958, when to all the rest of the world, it was not, and standing behind my
conviction by paying what was, then, a painful price, I experienced all the
emotional satisfaction that I would have if I had actually created this
powerful object myself,” writes Mel. “Recognizing the visual merits of humble
works, intended merely to amuse children and later be discarded, became, for
me, an act of creativity. I could sense my entire body tingling, and, ever
so slightly, levitating.”
Mel’s private collection in
his home in upstate New York doesn’t seem of this earth. It’s impossible to
wrap your brain around the idea that this “Mouse Heaven”, as he calls it, a
mind-boggling museum of Mickey Mouse and other toys of pre-World War
II comic characters, was created by just one man. It is a genius work of lost
art, a museum of dreams.
There is no doubt Mel Birnkrant is an artist in the
same way that Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein are artists– Andy with his
supermarket products and Roy with his old comic books. Mel also
made toys himself over the years and invented the iconic Baby Face doll as
well as The Outer Space Men action figures. From 1964 to 1986, Birnkrant
designed toys for the Colorforms Company.
Here are some more pictures of this grand collection.
Clancy's comment: Mel is obviously a big kid at heart, but there's nothing wrong with that.
I'm ...
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