Paperback(First Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520298149 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2019 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Postwar Precisionism
ORDER IN AMERICAN MODERNIST ART AND THE MODERN CARTOON
FROM JUNE 22 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 27, 1955, the Museum of Modern Art ran a show titled UPA: Form in the Animated Cartoon. Devoted to the studio's output during the previous ten years, the exhibition was in many ways exactly what one would expect from a museum show about an animation studio: it offered to the public sketches, character drafts, animation loops, background paintings, cels, and photographs — assorted documentation of the kind of work the studio did and the ways, and places, in which they did it. These materials seem designed to give attendees the kind of "behind the scenes" experience one might expect from a show about a beloved, popular, and multiple-Oscar-winning animation company.
But MoMA's show also complicated the public's perception of a studio whose output they had likely only encountered in the movie theater. The preliminary notes for the exhibition reveal the breadth of the studio's output in a way that is largely lost to popular memory: "Here, in separate gallery sections of varying sizes to be determined by content, exhibition technique and available space, the five major branches of UPA activity would be symbolized." These five sections are "Entertainment," "TV Commercials," "Industrial," "School," and "Military." This deemphasizing of UPA's most public-facing work, and the elevation of the sponsored films and training films made for niche, nonconsumer audiences, speaks to an underlying ethos of usefulness in the studio's cartoons — note the way "entertainment" becomes merely one of a number of functions animation is capable of performing, and how prosaic the other four are.
In addition to the cartoons' usefulness, MoMA's exhibition focused on their artfulness. Another, much less preliminary document (dated May 9) outlines the supporting material to be collected for the upcoming show, and an entire section is devoted to UPA's artistic influences and to "choosing drawings, cels and frames which demonstrate general references to well known styles." The anonymous (and clearly frazzled) author of the internal memo notes:
The purpose of this section is to indicate creative borrowing from modern art, E.G., the use of collage in the newspaper clip in Christopher Crumpet and the photograph of Fitzsimmons (or whoever) in The Wonder Gloves could be paired with Bellmer and other Dadaists. ... I'd like the Christopher and Wonder Gloves examples, the international telephone machinery (spiral and zigzag, plus) scene in How Now Boing [Boing] (to go with Dada Picabia or Duchamp), the overlapping profiles of commentators talking about the Fudgets (to go with Klee), and ask Jules [Engel, background artist] to find a good UPA interior to go with the Matisse The Red Studio. ... There are also Picasso references in my notes but I can't place them in specific UPA pictures at the moment. Sorry to have to put the burden of choice on you people, but haste dictates. (about 20 examples if possible.)
The range of UPA's magpie modernism is clear here, but what stands out most in this account of UPA's artfulness is also one of animation history's most common assumptions about the studio: that it trades on "creative borrowing from modern art." This assumption is not entirely untrue. UPA sits at the center of a web of influences closely linked to European modernism, including Cubism, Fauvism, and the Bauhaus. In their professional correspondence — including correspondence with MoMA about the 1955 exhibition — the studio's artists are outspoken about their interest in, among others, Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Raoul Dufy. (Their debt to Dufy is directly acknowledged in their MoMA-commissioned 1955 short The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy, drawn in the style of his paintings.)
Yet in addition to explicitly importing stylistic innovations from Europe, UPA also reopened a struggle with modernity that had already occupied American artists in the early decades of the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on postwar animation's relationship to Precisionism, a Cubism-inspired strand of American modernist painting that first appeared in the late 1910s, proliferated in the 1920s, and continued, albeit at a declining rate, throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, turning to greater abstract experimentation after the war and finally falling off the radar as Abstract Expressionism took shape. It is in connection with this earlier American modernism that MoMA's two central determinants of the importance of UPA's cartoons — their usefulness and their artfulness — come together. UPA's relationship to the American art scene is a striking omission in the MoMA exhibition; by restoring the aesthetic and conceptual links between midcentury cartoon style and interwar modernist American painting, we can achieve a clearer view of the work cartoons were doing in the postwar period. Moreover, we can see that this work extends beyond the simple borrowing of stylistic influences, offering a theoretically engaged response to prevailing questions of vision and order.
The aim here is not to "dethrone" Abstract Expressionism as a key component of American midcentury modernism, or even to argue that UPA's animation style owes nothing to the Expressionists' innovations, but rather to fashion a more complex account of the development of modern animation by highlighting this earlier current in modernist art infrequently discussed in cultural histories of American modernity and modernism. Viewed alongside postwar cartoons, the theories and practices of Precisionism reveal these cartoons as a renewal of the energies and concerns of an earlier twentieth-century modernism. Midcentury modernism, like its interwar iteration, was a complex affair. As a response to a new postwar modernity, it proposed various sets of solutions to variously defined social, philosophical, and aesthetic problems. A close examination of UPA's style reveals striking similarities to the work of the Precisionists, and a close examination of the writings of and about Precisionists and UPA confirms that they were indeed occupied by similar problems and proposed similar aesthetic solutions to those problems: abstraction and simplification.
At stake is a fuller understanding of how, and when, a pervasive American modernism came to be. UPA is commonly discussed as an explosion on the animation scene, a revolution in cartoon aesthetics that wowed highbrow critics and confused lowbrow audiences with its innovative, entirely new approach. While the bold, stylized forms of midcentury animation may have seemed new in the previously Disneyfied terrain of cartoon naturalism, many Americans had seen them before, in the Precisionist paintings that proliferated in the interwar years. In fact, in 1946, when UPA creative head John Hubley and cofounder Zack Schwartz published "Animation Learns a New Language," their attack on slapstick, sentimental, animal-centered cartoons, they were rehearsing in animation a feud that had been simmering in American art since the 1913 Armory Show and had already come to a boil once, in the twenties, and was in the process of boiling over once again in a newly prosperous post-WWII America.
This is not a story of direct influence; to my knowledge, UPA cartoonists have never acknowledged Precisionist art. Rather, it is a story of a series of homologies across two different fields of cultural production in two different historical moments, bringing the combined disciplines of art history and film studies to bear on a singular visual problem that animated American modernism across much of the twentieth century. UPA's artists did not consciously situate themselves as the successors to Precisionism, but they nevertheless recreated Precisionism's gestures in the face of postwar modernity. My intent here is therefore threefold: a revaluation of Precisionism within the pantheon of American modernist art; a more precise description of UPA's visual style; and, through the meeting of these two ideas, a clearer picture of UPA's place within a multifarious midcentury modernism. Authorizing the merger between these two mediums is a shared language of design — specifically the language of design advocated by a figure central to the midcentury modernism of which UPA is a part: György Kepes, a Hungarian émigré whose Bauhaus sensibility offers a meeting point between the rarefied surface of the Precisionist canvas and the madcap spaces of the postwar cartoon.
This interdisciplinary approach, an iconographic survey of two moments of rupture in ideas about representation and vision, adds a new dimension to our understanding of UPA's cartoons and the work they were expected to perform in the public arena. As such, this chapter engages significantly with Precisionist painting — its aesthetics, its theories, its practices. If it does so at length, it is because examining Precisionism from an interdisciplinary standpoint can shift our current art-historical understandings of it, and also because the introduction of animation studies to the understudied phenomenon of Precisionism can help us learn something new about animation. Ultimately, this account unites the movie theater and the art gallery as spaces of sensory adjustment where artists and audiences reckoned with the rapidly changing world around them; it provides a key theoretical context for the style of animation that dominated the American cartoon in the 1950s and 1960s; and it introduces the language of design as an essential component of midcentury modernism in all its forms.
SQUARES AND CUBES, ARCS AND CYLINDERS: THE PRECISIONIST AESTHETIC
Precisionism occupies a liminal space in the history of American modernist art, squeezed between the European Cubism that brought modernist painting to America's attention in the 1910s and the Abstract Expressionism that would come to define American modernism after World War II. The interim between these two periods was marked by a search for a uniquely American art, one that could be modernist without being European and that could address changes in the experience of time and space without merely copying Cubism. In addition to this "anxiety of influence" dilemma, another impetus for the development of a native modernism arose in the wake of the crash of 1929: New Deal programs, including the Public Works of Art Project (1933–1934) and the Federal Art Project (1935–1943), invested in the arts as a means of rebuilding the struggling nation's sense of identity.
In this climate, the nationalistic duties of art, frequently couched in terms of competition and the maintenance of cultural relevance, assumed greater importance, often ballooning into debates over the relative patriotic loyalties of various schools of painting. Roughly speaking, a long-standing rivalry solidified on two opposing sides: on one, the "American Scene" painters, whose naturalistic representations of rural and urban life leaned toward the romantic and the narrative; on the other, the abstractionists, whose activity dates back to the 1913 Armory Show, where European modernism first entered the American lexicon. To their detractors, the American Scene painters offered aesthetically retrograde, jingoistic pap out of sync with the realities of modern life and modernist art, while the abstractionists were accused of sleeping with the (communist!) enemy, forsaking American exceptionalism in favor of dangerous — and worse, pretentious — European influences. Within this politicized arena of art, the question of how best to artistically represent American life became distilled into the far more controversial question of what was American life, and what was America.
One of the most significant abstract movements of this period, Precisionism was particularly outspoken in its efforts to redefine the subject matter of American art in the twentieth century. Years before the rancorous debates that characterized the New Deal–era art world, artists were adapting European modernism to the American landscape, seeking a way to make it relevant to the peculiarities of their own geography, history, and culture. As early as the late teens, painters such as Morton Schamberg and Charles Demuth embraced the mechanistic art of French artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, attracted to both their technophilia and their wide-eyed declarations that America would be the new center of artistic innovation. Throughout the 1920s, as industrialization and urbanization were reaching the peak of their influence, these artists and others, including Charles Sheeler, Louis Lozowick, Niles Spencer, Peter Blume, and Joseph Stella, turned their attention to industrial and architectural imagery, and found receptive audiences for their work in New York spaces such as the Whitney Studio Club and the Daniel Gallery. By the end of the decade, Precisionism was a vital, if not yet officially named, presence in the American art world.
Precisionism's search for the expression of a core American identity must be balanced by the recognition that there was no "Precisionist School" to speak of, but only a loosely defined group of artists whose membership varies with the commentator discussing them. There were no jointly written manifestos, no claims of a shared project; while they were overwhelmingly painters, some of Precisionism's practitioners made lithographs and drawings as well. Even the "Precisionist" moniker wasn't a universally accepted term, vying with designations such as "Immaculate," "Mechanist," and "Cubist-Realist," all of which were imposed from without by critics and scholars. Martin Friedman, director of the Minneapolis Walker Art Center for three decades and perhaps the seminal chronicler of the Precisionists, characterizes the center of gravity around which their style revolved as "extreme simplification of form, unwavering, sharp delineation, and carefully reasoned abstract organization." Art historian Gail Stavitsky is more specific: "The essence of the Precisionist aesthetic was an objectivist synthesis of abstraction and realism, manifested by hard-edged, static, smoothly-brushed, simplified forms rendered in unmodulated colors." The Precisionist mode of representation rested on a reduction of peculiarly American subject matter to flat planes of solid color, partaking in the materials of abstraction while still remaining yoked to representation, but a representation starkly opposed to the naturalist renderings of the American Scene painters. Remarking on this abstracted realism, museum curator John I.H. Baur, writing in 1951, called the Precisionists "the backbone of our second period of abstract art in the 1920s" and "the first important bridge between native tradition and the modern vision."
As their sometime designation as "Cubist-Realists" attests, the Precisionists owed much of their "modern vision" to the Cubists painting in the early decades of the twentieth century. Their practices of breaking up pictorial space into planes and of reducing objects to precise geometric forms echo the tenets of Cubism. However, in adapting it to the American landscape, the Precisionists did not stick entirely to the Cubist script, instead making use of its innovations to lay a foundation for further experimentation. As art critic Edward Alden Jewell notes, "Cubism played its part, though it does not anywhere survive as such." In their catholic and idiosyncratic approach to modernist precedent, they drew on other sources of European modernism as well. In fact, it is arguable that they developed their style by rummaging through the storehouse of modernist techniques, taking what they liked and jettisoning the rest — from Cubism, the dismantling of the object into planes (but not its extreme distortion of form); from Dada, the focus on industrially produced objects (but not its confrontational sense of humor); from Surrealism, the assemblage of everyday things (but not its penchant for the fantastical); from Fauvism, the nondescriptive use of color (but not its forceful, visible brushwork); from Constructivism, the use of solid colors and simple shapes (but not its pure abstraction and radical political commitments); from Futurism, the engagement with the machine (but not its celebration of speed).
The Precisionists infused these elements of European modernism with distinctly American characteristics, foremost among them the representation of American industry, land, and architecture. While some artists in the group, including Demuth, Sheeler, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Niles Spencer, nodded to American folk art by painting barns, New England cottages, grain silos, and domestic interiors, others directed their attention to the industrial cityscape, a subject widely deemed the ideal raw material for the art of the future. In a statement printed in the catalogue for the 1927 Machine-Age Exposition in New York, Louis Lozowick, one of the central figures of the Precisionist period, rhapsodizes, "The skyscrapers of New York, the grain elevators of Minneapolis, the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the oil wells of Oklahoma, the copper mines of Butte, the lumber yards of Seattle give the American industrial epic in its diapason." Tellingly, the city of this modernism is not just the city center, but its outskirts as well, and the smaller outposts scattered across the country, even farms; wherever there is machinery and industry, there is America.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Cartoon Vision"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Dan Bashara.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.