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...