TY - JOUR
AU - Taylor, Alex, J
AB - Cartoon Vision offers a nuanced account of the relations between modern art and mainstream culture that helps reveal their fundamental interconnectedness. ‘Cartoonists, artists, architects and designers were working with the same materials – vision, space, and abstract form – to fashion a new way to experience a new, modern America’, writes Bashara (p. 2). His subject is the pared back, linear animation style of United Productions of America (UPA). ‘As UPA’s house style became, broadly speaking, the dominant style of animation in the 1950s and 1960s’, he explains, ‘this growing simplification becomes part of a larger history, resonating outward into other areas of culture’ (p. 120). Building on Lynn Spigel’s landmark TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television, Bashara positions UPA as a node in the web of influences that connected midcentury art, design, film, and television.1 Established by ex-Disney employees, UPA became a giant of fifties short-form animation, their spare, stylized work winning several Academy Awards and earning a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. For Bashara, UPA was thus ‘a central element in the growth (and resurgence) of a uniquely American modernism’, and animation was at the centre of an integrated aesthetic sphere that spanned and connected genres regardless of artistic prestige (p. 7). Originally a left leaning commercial film outfit, Bashara explains the shifting politics of the company’s turn to institutional clientele as representative of a broader tendency. ‘The consolidation and dissemination of midcentury modernism’, he writes, ‘is a story of artists and designers with revolutionary and utopian aims linking arms with larger systems of social control’ (p. 16). Here, Bashara draws on John Blakinger’s recent Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus, another persuasive effort to provide more nuanced frameworks to understand the frequently contradictory ideological positions of modernist creators.2 In the book’s first chapter ‘Postwar Precisionism’, his most sustained engagement with art historical material, Bashara explores the ‘homologies’ between UPA and Precisionism, the sphere of American cubism he stretches to include the ‘cartoonish’ cubism of Stuart Davis. This is compelling, even if Bashara gives slightly short shrift to the stenographic style of Raoul Dufy and the fashionably curlicued drawings he inspired. A paired illustration of Davis’s oil Rue des Rats No.2 and a still from a John Hubley’s Rooty Toot Toot is one of several suggestive comparisons, but a more detailed formal analysis might have strengthened his case. Later in the book, Bashara’s descriptions of animated sequences are as vivid and lively as the works they describe. The paintings he includes merit equivalently close attention. Bashara cites a range of other examples where the UPA idiom surfaces in the practices of other American modernists. Charles and Ray Eames, for example, were not only fans, they had stock in the company. Bashara’s second chapter suggests that their The Expanding Airport (1958), promoting Eero Saarinen’s redesign of Dulles Airport, aligns with UPA’s experimental treatment of modern space. ‘Often space is not delineated at all: floor and wall lines are invisible, perhaps suggested only by a desk or a floating window… A blank, brightly colored background may signify extension into infinite space or, conversely, a wall directly behind a character’, he says of their work (p. 73). Such spatial ambiguities became essential to a variety of efforts to capture the perceptual variability of modernity. Drawing on Siegfried Giedion and Rudolf Arnheim, Bashara explains how the use of linear trajectories and vectors in UPA animation finds its architectural equivalents in the upward sweep of the butterfly roof and the transparency of the glass curtain wall but achieves an even more confounding dematerialization than possible in real buildings. Reducing space to just a door or a window, this invisible architecture achieves a fantasy of modernism: as Bashara cleverly writes of the house in Christopher Crumpet (1953), it is ‘the ultimate in modularity, its absurdly flexible design the conceptual destination of prefab architecture’s starting point’ (p. 113). Subsequent chapters turn to UPA’s techniques of visual communication through ‘condensation’, drawing connections between midcentury graphic design and Freudian psychoanalysis. For Freud, the dream-work condenses and fuses thoughts into simplified temporal and visual form. Bashara demonstrates that John Hubley understood animation in strikingly similar terms, but also notes that condensed visual form also saved labour – and therefore money. ‘If the unconscious is a cheap skate, it is also savvy in its frugality’ (p. 129), he writes of this archetypally modernist alliance between reduced form and productive efficiency. Bashara’s account of Fidget’s Budget (1954), a tale of family budgeting gone wrong that unfolds within the ledger grid itself, is an especially strong account of the collapsing spatial scales and narrative metamorphoses that UPA achieved. Bashara’s account concludes by exploring how UPA animation infiltrated live action cinema. In this final chapter, he also goes further in revealing the methodological stakes of his project for the study of film and, more broadly, modernism itself. But for all the book’s cross-disciplinarity, he might have been even more venturesome in his engagement with other forms of commercial visual culture. To explain, for instance, the cartoonish qualities of midcentury movie musical scenery in relation to animation alone surely elides their further references to the scenery of the burlesque and variety stage. It would also be interesting to know, for instance, how the UPA style related to other forms of commercial illustration. Still, Bashara mounts a focused account of UPA aesthetic innovations across a variety of forms without ignoring their practical differences. Perhaps it is telling that, alongside Bashara’s Cartoon Vision, the ruthlessly cross-disciplinary treatment of midcentury modernism in design historian Jeffrey Lieber’s Flintstone Modernism, or the Crisis of Postwar American Culture also turns to animation as its titular lietmotif – in his case, the Stone Age sitcom of Hanna-Barbera. ‘Historians of modern art and architecture have long privileged the avant-gardes, focusing on art’s oppositional capacity in relation to bourgeois society’, writes Lieber in his introduction to a book that, like Bashara’s, seeks to move beyond the limitations of this framework.3 Bashara’s Cartoon Vision treats animation with all the seriousness it deserves, and in so doing captures a messier modernism that rightly brings avant-garde practice into contact with a more diverse field of popular taste. American modernism at midcentury was the making of Jackson Pollock but also Gyorgy Kepes, and extends not just to Charles and Ray Eames but also to Dr Seuss and Mr Magoo, all connected by their engagement with and responses to the modern sensorium in all its fantastic strangeness. Footnotes 1 Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 2 John R. Blakinger, Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). 3 Jeffrey Lieber, Flintstone Modernism, or The Crisis in Postwar American Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), p.7. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Mr Magoo and Modern Art
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcz015
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/mr-magoo-and-modern-art-zNfI2sU0c5
SP - 412
VL - 42
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -