Oskar Fischinger at Jack Rutberg - works of experimental film pioneer - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 2001 by Michael Duncan

Experimental film pioneer Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) is best known for his 1930s abstract animated films, which aspire to a kind of "visual music" through shifting geometric shapes and patterns. This centennial tribute coincided with the release on video of a second compilation of the German-born. artist's films, produced and distributed by the iotaCenter, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving abstract film and video. Along with newly restored versions of Fischinger's zippy kinetic color shorts--Composition in Blue (1935) and American March (1941)--Oskar Fischinger Volume 2 contains the astounding Walking from Munich to Berlin (1927), a short film consisting of single-frame images of people and places which the young artist passed during a 350-mile hike. In this breezily narrative framework, as gorgeous farmlands and peasant portraits flicker by, prewar rural Germany comes to life. The work is a surprising antecedent for a range of art to come, from the photographs of Walker Evans and the Bechers to films by Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

Fischinger's filmmaking slowed considerably after his 1936 relocation from Nazi Germany to Los Angeles, due to frustrating experiences at Disney (where he worked on Fantasia for a year) and other Hollywood studios. His experiments in geometric abstract painting and drawing, however, continued unabated. This exhibition offered a selection of 40 oils and works on paper, demonstrating the playful inventiveness of Fischinger's hard-edged forms. He developed his own quirky symbols to convey spiritual interests. In Three Yellow Triangles (1946), in a setting of squiggly crisscrossed lines, three triangles are pierced by lines and skirted with circles--reportedly stylized renditions of Tibetan prayer wheels.

The fluid juxtapositions of geometric shapes in works such as Square Symphony (ca. 1943), Musical Notes (ca. 1929-33), Guitar (ca. 1953) and Musical Sound (ca. 1961) imply larger harmonic relationships. A diptych, Circles in Circle (1949), resembles a cutaway view of stereo speaker cabinets. Color animates the paintings' compositions in unpredictable ways. A conflux of layered, curvilinear trapezoidal shapes in Abstraction (1950) is illuminated by sections rendered in bright blue, red and white. Perhaps most surprising are the hip-looking, space-age paintings of the 1960s. Molecular Study (1965) displays a solar system of orbs, most with lines indicating irregular elliptical orbits around a small central white disk.

Fischinger's clean-lined compositions are important precursors for the hard-edged '60s school of Los Angeles painting represented by Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley and Karl Benjamin, and offer a local historical context for contemporary L.A. works by John McCracken, John M. Miller and even Monique Prieto. Fischinger's multifaceted career also provides a crucial link between hard-edged geometric painting and nonobjective experimental filmmaking. This exhi- bition whetted one's appetite for the full retrospective planned next year at the San Jose Muse-um of Art.