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Sound and Light

Molecular Study, 1965, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
© Estate of Oskar Fischinger Courtesy Sullivan Goss

Oskar Fischinger’s achievements as an abstract painter stem from his bold experiments as an avant-garde filmmaker.

By John Dorfman

The painter and filmmaker Oskar Fischinger has long been a well-kept secret of the midcentury Southern California modern-art scene—itself a rather well-kept secret of the American art world in general. The German-born artist, who was active in Los Angeles from the 1930s through the 1960s, made abstract paintings in the European “non-objective” tradition of Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian, but his greatest passion was for abstract film, a genre that he had a large part in inventing. While Fischinger missed out on fame in his lifetime and even now is hardly a household name, he had substantial behind-the-scenes influence on a surprising array of creative people in various fields, from John Cage to Harry Smith and Harry Bertoia. To call him an “artist’s artist” could be accurate, if you take the word “artist” in its broadest sense, because Fischinger fully embraced the Germanic concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art,” comprising elements visual, musical, and dynamic.

Optical Ballet, 1941, oil on paper, 19 x 25 in.
© Estate of Oskar Fischinger Courtesy Sullivan Goss

Fischinger has been getting more attention recently. He has been the subject of two books in the 21st century, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, by William Moritz (2004), and Oskar Fischinger 1900–1967: Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction, by Cindy Keefer and Jaap Guldemond (2013). In the fall of 2020, Sullivan Goss–An American Gallery in Santa Barbara, Calif., exhibited Fischinger’s work in conjunction with that of two other non-objective artists,  Werner Drewes and Sidney Gordin, in “Drewes/Fischinger/Gordin: The Invention of American Abstract Art.” Six years earlier, Fischinger had been prominently featured—alongside Emil Bisttram, Raymond Jonson, Lawren Harris, and Agnes Pelton, among others—in a museum exhibition titled “Enchanted Modernities: Mysticism, Landscape, and the American West,” at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University.

In the exhibition catalogue, scholar James Mansell explained that the curators’ goal was “to put Fischinger, and others, back into the historical context in order to evidence our argument that there were deep bonds of connection between modern ways of being spiritual and modern ways of making art in the twentieth century, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the American West.” Fischinger belonged in the “Enchanted Modernities” exhibition because, like a good number of the early abstractionists, he was powerfully motivated by mysticism and a belief that the purpose of abstract art was to reveal to the viewer realms of vision and experience that are not otherwise accessible to the senses or the intellect. Vasily Kandinsky was among the first to articulate this view and embody it in his work, and many other artists in Europe and America adopted it to one degree or another. Among the traits of the mystical school of modernism was a belief that there is no firm dividing line between visual art and music, that colors and tones are congruent with each other and can express the same things. So Fischinger’s long-term experimentation with animated color abstraction and soundtracks makes perfect sense in this context.

Oskar Fischinger, Moving Organisms, circa 1959, oil on masonite, 17.5 x 13 in.
© Estate of Oskar Fischinger Courtesy Sullivan Goss

In fact, for Fischinger, painting was almost an afterthought, a skill that he started out practicing as a means of creating other works and decided to concentrate on only after he realized that it was going to be financially impracticable to be an avant-garde filmmaker. Also, it should be noted that his original training was in music and engineering, not visual art. Born into a working-class family in Gelnhausen, Germany, on June 22, 1900, at 14 he was apprenticed first to an organ-builder and then to an architect. At 17 he went to Frankfurt to study architecture but switched to engineering, putting himself through school by working as a tool designer for a turbine manufacturer. As Susan Ehrlich notes in her 1985 Ph.D. thesis on Southern California modernists, these early training experiences had a profound effect on Fischinger’s art, which “would display a draughtsman’s surety of hand, an engineer’s penchant for geometric form, and a musician’s sense of harmonic proportion.”

When he was in his early 20s, Fischinger got interested in the fledgling medium of film, but he knew that he didn’t want to make narrative movies with human actors and scenes taken from real life by a camera. Right from the beginning he was focused on using motion picture film to create abstractions and came up with some original devices to do so. In 1921 he invented a machine with a revolving blade that sliced a multicolored block of wax in such a way as to create random chromatic swirl patterns, which served as inspiration for animated shorts. In later years, these very wax patterns became the basis for some of Fischinger’s paintings. In 1922, he moved to Munich, then a major center of artistic endeavor, and set up his own film production studio. His first efforts involved animation with the wax slices, and paper cutouts, and then a series he called Absolute Films, which were abstractions created with charcoal.

In 1925 he co-created a “Color–Light–Music show” with the Hungarian-born composer and painter Alexander László, prefiguring some of the sound and light work he would later do in America. When “talkies” came in in 1929, Fischinger pioneered a technique of creating new sounds by photographing his drawings directly onto the sound-track portion of the film strip. During the late 1920s he did special-effects work for other filmmakers, including Fritz Lang, and for the advertising industry, and by the ’30s he was well established as a filmmaker in his own right, acclaimed for his abstract works. There was even a “Fischinger Film Festival” in Munich, and in 1935 his Composition in Blue won first prize at the Film Festival in Venice and Brussels. He moved to Berlin, where he became friends with the Bauhaus design guru László Moholy-Nagy and the non-objective painter Rudolf Bauer. Before long, his reputation had filtered down to Hollywood, and in 1936 Paramount came calling with an offer to come work at their studios.

Molecular Study, 1965, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
© Estate of Oskar Fischinger Courtesy Sullivan Goss

Despite all his success, it was an opportune time for Fischinger to leave Germany. The Hitler regime was in full sway, and avant-garde art was in the crosshairs. Under the Nazi worldview, Fischinger was considered a “degenerate artist,” and both his livelihood and life were in peril. He and his wife (and creative collaborator) Elfriede arrived in L.A. with high hopes for success, but Fischinger would find that his vision and Hollywood’s weren’t compatible. He quit Paramount after six months, and a plans to work with Orson Welles fell through when the director lost his funding. In 1938 he did release one abstract film, Optical Poem, through M.G.M., but that did not lead to further successes as an auteur. In 1939–40, Fischinger got a job working on Disney’s animated feature Fantasia, but he was enraged by creative interference, and when the studio altered his designs, he quit and demanded that his name be taken off the credits. “The creative artist of the highest level,” he wrote, “always works at his best alone, moving far ahead of his time” and “should be “unobstructed through realities or anything that spoils his absolute pure creation.”

A source of encouragement and funding came along in the form of Galka Scheyer, a German-born art dealer and promoter living in L.A., who had been an early ally of European modernists including the “Blue Four”—Kandinsky, Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexei von Jawlensky. Scheyer befriended Fischinger and introduced him to Hilla von Rebay, a German baroness who was the guiding spirit behind Solomon Guggenheim’s collecting and his Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York (the predecessor institution of the Guggenheim Museum). Rebay was a passionate champion for artists (in particular Rudolf Bauer), but she could also be manipulative and difficult to get along with. A firm believer in the spiritual potential of art combined with music, she was enthused by Fischinger’s projects in this line and funded his development of a “color organ” he called the Lumigraph, which used a keyboard to direct colored beams of light onto a screen. Rebay also encouraged him to do easel painting and exhibited his paintings in her museum, while simultaneously deriding his work verbally and writing him letters punctuated by what Fischinger’s biographer Moritz calls “hysterical underlined shrieks.” By around 1950 she had ceased funding Fischinger’s work, and this dysfunctional relationship came to an end.

Hide and Seek, circa 1950, 17.5 x 13.25 in.
© Estate of Oskar Fischinger Courtesy Sullivan Goss

While Rebay was eccentric at best and toxic at worst, she did give Fischinger one very solid piece of advice—to devote himself to painting. In the U.S., with its ultra-commercialized film industry, there would be no Fischinger Film Festivals, and color organs and sound and light shows would amount to little more than curiosities. Ever resourceful, Fischinger found ways to incorporate the visual and theoretical concerns of his film and sound work into painting, creating works that at their best communicate a vivid sense of luminosity, musicality, and transcendental vision. In oil on canvas or oil on board, Fischinger could convey something of the glow and motion of his abstract films, and many of the actual motifs from those films were reincarnated, as it were, in this medium. Discs, orbs, and spirals predominate; the multicolored discs often recall the work of Frantisek Kupka, one of the earliest color abstractionists. The spirals suggest dynamism, as if a disc were spinning and releasing its energy out into space. In many of his paintings, there is a strong palette preference for sky blue and white, which in Theosophy, a mystical-occult movement in which Fischinger had a strong interest, signify human consciousness expanding to take in the celestial spheres. In the earlier phase of his painting career, Fischinger used a sharp-edged, precise technique emphasizing geometry, in keeping with his engineering and architectural background; in the ’50s and ’60s, as his health weakened, he worked with a looser touch, creating softer forms that at times resemble biomorphic abstraction.

In Los Angeles, Fischinger showed his work at the prestigious Stendhal Gallery and fell in with a stimulating and congenial community of creative people in various fields, such as Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and Arnold Schoenberg, and fellow artists such as Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Peter Krasnow, Harry Bertoia, and Knud Merrild. Among his artist friends was Stanton Macdonald-Wright, one of the first pioneers of color abstraction, co-creator, with Morgan Russell, of Synchromism in Paris just before the First World War. Synchromism had been built on the idea of a parallelism between color scales and musical scales, and Macdonald-Wright and Fischinger held long discussions about the possibilities of the Lumigraph color organ.

Fischinger continued to experiment with film into his later years, and some of these, as well as his older works, were occasionally screened at art schools such as Chouinard and the Otis Art School. Young filmmakers like the Whitney brothers, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, Curtis Harrington, and Kenneth Anger visited him. Harry Smith was inspired by meeting Fischinger to paint directly on film, and as a mystical enthusiast and budding anthropologist, saw the abstract imagery in Fischinger’s paintings as akin to the Native American symbols he was studying. Harry Bertoia very likely got some of his ideas for moving metal sculptures that emit sound from his long friendship with Fischinger. And John Cage was inspired by Fischinger’s idea that, as Mansell puts it, “all objects contain a spirit that can take the form of sound by being set into vibration.” While he had difficulty realizing all of them, Fischinger’s ideas seem very much of today, when multimedia art has become a very attainable goal thanks to new technologies. Fischinger was reluctant to expound at length on his ideas, whether philosophical or technical, preferring to say, “My statements are in my work,” but there is no doubt that he was a true visionary, a man ahead of his time.

 

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