Mary Ellen Bute Biography

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Mary Ellen Bute

In the mid 1930s, Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983) was the first American to make abstract motion pictures, and in the early 1950s along with Norman McLaren and Hy Hirsh was among the first to explore electronic imagery in

film. Starting as a Rosa Bonheur-style painter in Texas, she came east at age 15 to study painting in Philadelphia (where she first saw Kandinsky’s work); later she studied stage lighting at Yale (in the first class to which women were admitted); made a round-the-world dance and drama tour as a teacher-lecturer; worked with Joseph Schillinger on his mathematical projections and with Leon Theremin on his electronic musical invention. Her first attempt with abstract film was in collaboration with Joseph Schillinger and Lewis Jacobs on the unfinished Synchronization in 1932. Bute’s introduction to Ted Nemeth (who became her husband in 1940) led to a partnership that produced 12

short musical “seeing-sound” abstract films, several commercial TV ventures, a live-action featurette and a full-length film version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

-Cecile Starr, in Articulated Light