Oskar Fischinger: Artist of the Century

KINETICA 2 Catalog, 2000.

Oskar Fischinger: Artist of the Century

Dr. William Moritz

Born in 1900, Oskar Fischinger must count among the greatest artists of the 20th century, a century of astonishing achievements in technology, and horrific torments and upheavals that hindered his career at every turn. Despite all this, his films and paintings achieved the status of cult icons, influencing a whole generation of younger artists, and providing anonymous models for the music-videos and computer graphics of the last quarter of the century.

Oskar Fischinger was born in the idyllic medieval village of Gelnhausen (near Frankfurt am Main), in the same room that had born the great 17th-century writer Grimmelshausen, author of Simplicissimus. Oskar’s family owned a brewery with a popular bar, and a drugstore that carried a complete range of goods including art supplies which many painters purchased before they went wandering in the neighboring romantic Spessart forests and mountains (site of some of Grimms’ fairy tales). Oskar early learned the fundamentals of oil-painting, as he would earn extra spending money by acting as guide for these painters, leading them to choice picturesque vistas or moody obscure corners of the woods, waiting attentively while they painted, then leading them back to Gelnhausen in the evening. At the same time, he took violin lessons, and apprenticed himself to an organ-builder in order to learn the mathematical principles of musical harmony.

When World War I began, the owners of the organ factory were drafted into military service, and the business closed down. Oskar then found employment as a graphic artist in the Municipal Architectural Office, preparing blue-prints and technical building designs, as well as fine drawings of houses, streets and landscaping. Although he was exempted from military service because of delicate health (mostly undernourishment), he was required to participate in a war-related activity, and went to work at a turbine factory in Frankfurt, where his natural mechanical genius was soon discovered, and he earned an official diploma as an engineer by 1922.

While working in the factory, Fischinger never lost sight of his artistic ambitions. He attended lectures and museums assiduously and joined a literary club devoted to the study of the dramatic arts, where he met the influential critic Dr. Bernhard Diebold, who, in March 1921, took him to a dress rehearsal for a 13-minute abstract film hand-tinted in multiple colors by Walther Ruttmann, an abstract painter who had renounced oil-painting in favor of a new/modern living visual-music made possible by film. Ruttmann also played the cello in a string quintet that would perform the specially-composed soundtrack for the film. Fischinger was thrilled by the complex, dynamic film, and attended the public performance the following day, at which he admired the film even more, and regretted that he might never be able to create something like that. Later that year, however, Oskar delivered a lecture at his literary club, on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and an avant-garde anti-war theatre piece Generations by Fritz von Unruh. To illustrate the dynamic structure of the two plays, Oskar drew abstract patterns on long rolls of blue-print paper. Dr. Diebold pointed out to him that this sequence of flowing imagery constituted an independent artwork, a kind of “storyboard” for an abstract film, and urged him to follow in Ruttmann’s footsteps. Oskar, however, was reluctant to do anything exactly in Ruttmann’s style (and he felt that animating the play scrolls would probably be just that). He began experimenting with other techniques, such as modeled clay and wax. Quite by accident he discovered one. He had prepared some fifty small wax geometric figures which he hoped to animate by substituting one for another. He had arranged them in sequence on a tray and left them on a table by his bed. When his sister Maria cleaned his room while he was away at work, she placed the tray by a window, where the sun melted the wax figures together. As Oskar tried to scrape away the wax from the tray, he saw that some shapes were preserved and as he would scrape off each layer, subtle variations in form occurred in perfect animation style. He set about engineering a precision slicing machine (such as butchers used to make thin cuts of ham or cheese) to connect with a film camera in such a way that each time a slice would be removed, the camera would film a single-frame of the remaining block. By inserting a cone of different-colored wax in the center of a square block, one could make a circle appear or disappear, depending on whether the point of the cone faced toward or away from the camera. So soft supple organic shapes could mingle with hard geometric forms. In order to keep the consistency under the hot film lights, Oskar learned to mix the wax with fine porcelain clays. While still working at the factory, Oskar had developed a machine that he sold to a Dutch company for a substantial sum, which allowed him to quit working a job, and he moved to Munich to be near the film industry there. He shot a good deal of beautiful imagery with his “Wax Machine”, some of the voluptuous shapes alluding to alchemical symbols such as the ouroboros snake and the multifoliate rose, which shows that already in his early 20s he was fascinated by the mystical concepts which would remain in his work until the very end. Oskar sold a wax machine to Ruttmann, who used it to create some special effects for Lotte Reiniger’s animated feature The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, which Ruttmann worked on from 1923 until 1925.

As the crippling inflation of German money began in 1923, he also made a number of conventional animated cartoons for a producer Louis Seel, whose series Munchner Bilderbogen (Munich Comics) was distributed internationally. These offered a sophisticated animation for adults, including parodies of classics like “Gulliver’s Travels”, caricatures of women’s fashion, and commedia-del-arte bedroom farces. In response to the huge success of Prince Ahmed (for which Oskar’s wax imagery was uncredited), Oskar also made a dazzling silhouette film, Spiritual Constructions which used the flexibility of his wax-clay mixture to make pliable opaque shapes on a glass plate so that the mental state of the two drunk protagonists (surely a reminiscence of the family brewery/bar from his childhood) could be expressed in constant metamorphosis.

Oskar also continued to prepare pure non-objective films of his own -- films of swirling spirals, floating circles, and intricate layers of parallel bars -- all still carefully differentiated from the supple painterly imagery of Ruttmann. And also different from the sparse linear forms that the Swedish painter Viking Eggeling had drawn on scrolls of paper, and when Oskar visited him in Berlin, the Bauhaus student Erna Niemeyer (later the famous photographer Re Soupault) was painstakingly animating them by cutting the shapes out of tinfoil.

In 1926 the Hungarian composer Alexander Laszlo presented a “Color-Light-Music” concert, in which his musical compositions (performed by himself on the piano) were synchronized with projected visual imagery that tried to recreate pure synaesthesia. At his first concerts, Laszlo used primarily painted slides and ordinary stage spotlights with color filters to produce somewhat static color effects. When initial reviews criticized the imagery as too static to approximate music, Laszlo commissioned Oskar to arrange a film projection with another tour of Color-Light-Music. Oskar edited together footage from several of his earlier experimental films, arranging them for five 35mm projectors, three side-by-side to form a triptych, and two overlapping these to provide additional color effects. Painted slides were also used to blur the edges of the projections. The reviews changed to the exact opposite: the light-show (not credited to Oskar in the program) was much more dynamic and futuristic than Laszlo’s genteel chopinesque music. Laszlo called off the arrangement after a few performances. But Oskar recreated his multiple-projector performance several times, including a piece titled Fever I II III which reportedly had a musical score composed by Erich Korngold, and a screening at the prestigious Munich State Theatre in 1927, with the title R-1, a Form-Play, using a percussion ensemble as the music (which could drown out the noise of the several projectors). By that time, the rampant inflation (and a business partner’s shady dealings) had completely impoverished Fischinger, despite considerable success with his various projects, including elaborate special effects for a feature Noah’s Ark (with landscapes modeled in wax and silhouette animals trudging toward the ark). He owed money to many, especially his landlady, who kept his wax machine and other equipment hostage. In the summer of 1927 Oskar took one of his 35mm cameras in a backpack and set out for Berlin, walking on less-traveled country roads so that no bill-collectors could find him. He shot single-frame images of people and landscapes he encountered on the way, and the resulting 4-minute film Walking from Munich to Berlin preserves a delightful glimpse of a vanished rural life.

Oskar found a variety of commercial film work in Berlin from an advertising film about yoghurt and a promotional film for the Socialist party to elaborate special effects on Fritz Lang’s science-fiction extravaganza Woman in the Moon, which put him in touch with rocket scientists, which fed his dual fascination with the parallel between ancient spiritual cosmology (he subscribed to a Buddhust magazine) and new scientific discoveries of atoms and cosmic space phenomena. He also met Dr. Diebold again in Berlin, and Walter Ruttmann, who had given up abstract films in favor of intricately edited live-action films. While working at the UFA studio on the Lang film, Oskar tripped and broke his ankle, and while in the hospital he discovered a form of animation that seemed perfect for abstract films. He drew with charcoal on white paper, then filmed it and used the positive as negative, so that light figures would float around in a black background. Now that Ruttmann had retired from the field, Oskar felt free to design fluid choreography to music. He used his engineering skills to synchronize the drawings to phonograph records: scratching an “X” on the disc and calculating the resulting clicks with a slide-rule. Since he had made most of his money on advertising films, he arranged for the first five of his Studies to have a title at the end reading: You have heard Electrola Record Number EG1663, “Vaya, Veronica” -- buy it at your local phonograph shop! But as the optical sound-on-film process took over in the 1930s, the matter of music rights became more problematic. Oskar failed to get the rights for the music to his Study 6 since the composer wanted too much royalty money. His friend Paul Hindemith and two of Hindemith’s students at the College of Music (Oskar Sala and Hans Gensmer, both of whom became prominent composers later) wrote alternative scores for the film, which were recorded onto phonograph discs, but never transferred to optical sound-tracks. Fischinger went ahead with Study 7 and Study 8 since his sound shorts became an international hit, from Japan to Argentina -- and Universal Studios bought some as shorts for their programs in America. They also received a special Prize at the Brussels Film Festival.

At the University in Hamburg Dr. Anschutz organized a Color Music Conference once every third year, drawing together scientists and artists to investigate synaesthesia, perceptual psychology, notation and the interface of painting/dance/music. At the 1930 conference Oskar’s Study No. 5 was the subject of a special lecture, followed by three performances on Color-Organs by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack of the Bauhaus, the Czech Zdenek Pesanek, and the Austrian Baron Vietinghoff-Scheel. Oskar’s participation in the lively discussions spurred him on to explore the theoretical basis of sound and its visual correspondences in his 1932 experiments with Ornament Sound, for which he drew hundreds of shapes onto the soundtrack area of movie film to find out how the outer form (triangle, star, zig-zag, rhomboid, etc.) would vary the tones produced -- and if the chosen ornamentation styles of various epoques and cultures might correspond with the favored musical style of the same people. All of this experimentation, however, ceased with the Nazi coup d’etat in 1933. Abstract art was declared “degenerate”. The media were carefully censored and controlled: all filmmakers had to appear at bi-weekly audits with an official from the Ministry of Culture, and must show some work. Oskar found that advertising films were not as closely scrutinized for style, mainly for social message content, so he was able to prepare such sensational films as Circles, using the new 3-color process Gasparcolor, in which the message “Advertising reaches all circles of society” was accepted as a suitable excuse for a dynamic flow of colorful circles. The black-and-white Muratti Privat cigarette commercial similarly used white cigaretttes dancing about in front of a black background, synchronized with Mozart music -- a perfect simulation of the forbidden Studies. The color Muratti Gets in the Act commercial, picturing cigarettes parading into an arena and performing feats (in anticipation of the Olympic Games), was a huge success that brought him commissions from several countries, and ultimately led to a contract with Paramount in the United States. While making the commercials for formal film requirements, and profit, Oskar secretly made Composition in Blue on the same animation table as the walking cigarettes. Small models of geometric shapes move about a stage in tight synchronization to Nicolai’s “Merry Wives of Windsor” overture -- enchanting, funny and dazzling in its dynamic passages. The film could not be legally screened in Germany, but Oskar risked a few test screenings that proved wildly successful. An official from the Venice Film Festival took a print to Italy, but the German government refused to let it be screened as an official German film in competition -- though it met with wild applause at its one show in the secondary informational screenings. Oskar received a furious letter from the censorship board castigating him for illegal activities. He was already in trouble, having been arrested several times (for scorning a Nazi poster, refusing to fly a Nazi flag from his window during a parade, etc.). Fortunately talent scouts from MGM and Paramount also saw Composition in Blue and Muratti gets in the Act, and Oskar was able to leave Germany in February 1936 for Hollywood. His wife Elfriede disposed of all their goods -- they were not allowed to take anything with them -- and followed to Hollywood a month later with their 2-year-old son Karl. Fortunately Elfriede stored most of the films, artwork and documents in the cellars and attics of the Fischinger relatives in Gelnhausen, and in 1961 Karl was able to bring them with him to America after serving in the American occupation army in Germany.

The dislocation to America was very difficult for Oskar. He spoke no English (it took him several years to learn to speak fluently), did not drive a car, and understood the Hollywood milieu very poorly. At first he integrated into the large emigrant community, mosty of whom were political leftists -- but Oskar alienated them by announcing that he thought Stalin was just as bad as Hitler (which historical hindsight has proven true) and most of them shunned him after that. Although he had a bilingual secretary at Paramount, he still did not understand how the studio worked. He was told to make an animated episode to fit in the feature Big Broadcast of 1937. Since Paramount had an animation unit, they employed union in-betweeners and inkers and painters who must do all the repetitive work -- but Oskar wanted to paint his own cels, and even worse, wanted to paint in color, although the feature was to be black-and-white. Oskar naively assumed that if they just saw it in color, they would be overwhelmed and allow his color sequence to be spliced into the black-and-white feature. He was wrong. The studio people printed his abstract designs in black-and-white and used them as background for some of Oskar’s special effects, including walking cigarettes. The resulting montage was eventually cut from the film.

After a mere six months, Paramount terminated Oskar’s contract, so he went over night from a salary of $1,000 per month (quite a handsome sum in those depression years) to having nothing at all. Oskar began devoting himself more to oil painting, since he could do it quietly at home without special equipment, and he would continue this until his death, leaving some thousand fine canvases. Fortunately a European Relief Fund spearheaded by film industry people like agent Paul Kohner and Director William Dieterle provided emergency expense money, and also arranged for Oskar to get a cotract with MGM in 1937 to produce an abstract color film for distribution in their theatres as a short. Oskar built a special set with a framework from which thin strings could suspend geometric paper cutouts, allowing them to be moved in tiny increments along a specific trajectory. He hired a young man named John Cage as an assistant -- primarily to move the cutouts, and to steady each one with a chicken feather taped to a broomstick before the single film frame could be shot. During the tedious days of this exacting, exhausting labor, Cage and Fischinger discussed Oskar’s theories of Ornament Sound, making a new music from everyday objects and sounds -- discussions which had a decisive effect on Cage’s life work.

When the MGM short Optical Poem was finished and on its way to screenings worldwide, Oskar traveled to New York in hopes of getting a commission to prepare an animation feature based on Dvorak’s New World Symphony for the upcoming New York World Fair. Unfortunately he did not manage to get enough backing for the feature, but he did have two shows of his oil paintings in galleries, and he met the Baroness Hilla Rebay, curator of the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Painting and the Guggenheim Foundation which offered grant money to help support worthy abstract artists. She urged Oskar to move to New York, and offered him stipends and purchased some of his paintings for the museum -- and urged him to abandon his family (now three children) because true artists should be unfettered. But Oskar was recalled to Hollywood to work on Walt Disney’s current project -- Fantasia, a feature-length visual-music extravaganza.

Oskar had met Leopold Stokowski already in Berlin, when he purchased the rights to use one of his musical performances for a film soundtrack. Oskar also proposed to Stokowski at that time the possibility of their collaboration on a feature-length concert feature, though nothing came of it then. When Oskar arrived at Paramount a few years later, Stokowski was also working on Big Broadcast and Oskar again spoke to him about the concert feature. Now when Oskar went to work at Disney and found Stokowski a major partner in Disney’s concert feature, he could not stifle the feeling that Stokowski had betrayed him by selling Oskar’s idea to Disney, and basically leaving Oskar out, except as a lowly employee (due to Kohner and Dieterle, actually). This gnawing resentment soured Oskar’s time at Disney, but it was only one factor. Oskar still did not speak English perfectly, and could not understand when people spoke very quickly or used slang. All of the staff meetings were recorded by a secretary, so Oskar took them home and deciphered them with Elfriede’s help each evening, after the fact -- and he never spoke at any of these conferences. He made many designs for totally non-objective visual representations of the Bach “Fugue” that he was assigned to, but day by day he saw each one of them altered, changed slightly to be representational by adding a cloud, a ripple of water, or such. Oskar’s actual motion phases were preserved, but he hated what they became. He was further angered that the section in which the film’s soundtrack was shown -- an idea he had worked on scientifically in Berlin -- became a series of gags and jokes with no correspondence to actual sound or film technology. But desperate for the money, Oskar held on at his job until the sad day when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II. That day as a joke someone painted a swastika on Oskar’s door, and he formally quit his job. Each day Oskar’s films had been projected for the entire staff during lunch hour, so everyone at the studio became familiar with his works, and traces of his inspiration occur in most of the Disney films of the early 1940s.

Baroness Rebay extended Oskar a grant to make a patriotic film which would presumably show that both he and she were pro-American. The resulting American March manages to be more than mechanical. When the U.S. entered the war, Oskar officially became an “enemy alien” since he did not yet have American citizenship. This meant that he could not work at any job connected with the media. Rebay offered Oskar another grant to buy back Radio Dynamics, the film Oskar had made at Paramount. Oskar was able to have it printed and released in color for the first time, and at Rebay’s insistance, changed the title to the “more serious, more musical” Allegretto. Orson Welles alone among the Hollywood people offered Oskar employment despite the ban. Welles had two films in progress, one a semi-documentary about jazz, and one a film about South America commissioned by the government to improve relations in the hemisphere. Oskar worked for a while designing animation for jazz by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and then was switched to the Brazilian Samba. And he also worked on a film of his own, a purposely silent meditation film to which he would attach the title Radio Dynamics left over from the Paramount Allegretto. But Welles’ company finally went broke from the pressure of trying to do too much, and Oskar was again unemployed. Elfriede managed to support the family (now five children) with jobs including fashion design, hand-knitted clothes for Bette Davis’ family, baby-sitting and such. Baroness Rebay continued to offer Oskar some stipends, but her demands were severe: she required him (and his daughter) to attend a religious group Institute of Mental Physics in whose guru she believed; she required him to go spy on Charles Dockum whose MobilColor color organ was also being purchased by the Guggenheim, etc. Fortunately Oskar also enjoyed a rich acquaintanceship with local artists ranging from Man Ray and painter Helen Lundeberg, sculptor Harry Bertoia, to filmmakers such as Maya Deren and the Whitney brothers (who had first met him at a gallery showing his paintings in 1939).

Baroness Rebay commissioned Oskar to prepare a film synchronized to Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto No. 3, since she believed that only Bach had produced truly abstract music (and played recordings of Bach music in the galleries of the Guggenheim museum). Since Oskar was ever more concentrated on his oil painting, he created the film Motion Painting by setting up a camera behind him so that each time he made a brush stroke, he could shoot a single frame of the new alteration -- so the resulting ten-minute film documents his making a typical Fischinger painting (though he himself is never shown). Unfortunately Rebay hated the film because it was not really synchronized tightly -- one shape or movement for each note of music -- as some of Oskar’s earlier films were. Although Motion Painting enjoyed acclaim everywhere (including a Grand Prize at the Brussels Experimental Film Competition in 1949), Rebay never offered Oskar any further aid.

Fortunately he enjoyed a gradually increasing celebrity, both for his films and his paintings, which received one-man shows at several museums. In 1946 the San Francisco Museum of Art began a series of Art in Cinema screenings, and invited Oskar to come show his films, including the new Motion Painting. A first generation of European artists including Norman McLaren, Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Mary Ellen Bute and Len Lye had been inspired by Oskar’s work in the 1930s. Now a second generation of young artists including painters Jordan Belson and Harry Smith, saw his films and turned to abstract animation. Oskar also invented a color organ, the Lumigraph, and performed with at at the San Francisco Museum in the early 1950s, inspiring Belson anew to work with soft flows of color rather than hard-edged geometrics.

Fischinger made no major films after Motion Painting. He experimented with 3-D stereo film in the early 1950s (as did Harry Smith, Norman McLaren, Hy Hirsh and Dwinell Grant), but never got to screen his 1-minute piece much, nor make a longer one. He also made a few starts for a Motion Painting II, but never carried it through. But he painted hundreds of canvases, up to his dying days when he completed a large serene painting entitled Nirvana. He died in 1967, but a third generation of his followers have already emerged among the practioners of the new computer arts (such as Larry Cuba and Vibeke Sorensen) and video art (Michael Scroggins). So Oskar Fischinger remains the man of the century of Visual Music.

"Oskar Fischinger: Artist of the Century." Exhibition catalog. KINETICA 2. Los Angeles: The iotaCenter, 2000.