ANM0010.1177/1746847715587421AnimationBashara 587421research-article2015 Article animation: an interdisciplinary journal Cartoon Vision: UPA, 2015, Vol. 10(2) 82 –101 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: Precisionism and American sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1746847715587421 Modernism anm.sagepub.com Dan Bashara DePaul University, Chicago, USA Abstract Postwar animation studio United Productions of America (UPA) is credited with bringing a modern art sensibility to the American cartoon, a simplified, abstract style that transformed the look of studio animation throughout the 1950s and 1960s. This article examines UPA’s signature style alongside that of Precisionism, a little-discussed school of modernist American painting peaking in the 1920s. In so doing, it complicates our understanding of UPA’s relationship to modern art, and to modernism more broadly. Precisionism sought to bring order to a chaotic modern environment by reducing the visible world to a semi-abstract form in which urban and industrial scenes are built from geometric shapes, hard-edged lines, and solid color fields – precisely the traits defining UPA’s style. Through an analysis of the animation studio’s cartoons in the context of its beginnings in wartime training films, and of the written statements of its artists, this article positions UPA as a resurgence of the particular modernist energy driving Precisionism’s visual style: a theoretically engaged attempt to develop a new mode of vision capable of navigating the sensory overwhelm of modern life. It thus draws a line between these two periods in American cultural history, enabling a clearer understanding of mid-century modernism as a cultural phenomenon, and of postwar animation’s place within a decades-long current of modernist experiment. Keywords animation studies, art history, design, György Kepes, mid-century modernism, postwar animation, Precisionism, UPA, visual language Introduction After World War II, a new kind of animation captured the American cartoon marketplace, different in style, content, and technical construction from what had come before. Historical accounts attrib- ute this shift to United Productions of America (UPA), an independent studio that grew out of a 1941 labor strike at Disney Studios and was incorporated in 1945.1 By the early 1950s – and due Corresponding author: Dan Bashara, College of Communication, DePaul University, 5537 N. Kenmore Ave #2B, Chicago, IL 60640, USA. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 Bashara 83 Figure 1. Hard-edged, minimalist style in Gerald McBoing Boing (dir. Robert Cannon, 1951). DVD frame grab from UPA: The Jolly Frolics Collection (2012). in large part to its Oscar-winning 1951 short Gerald McBoing Boing, a Dr Seuss-narrated tale in which a boy cannot speak in words but only in disruptive sound effects, and its widely popular Mr Magoo series following the misadventures of a catastrophically near-sighted elderly man who is too stubborn to acknowledge his blindness – UPA, as Michael Barrier (1999: 537) notes, was ‘the reference point, the studio with which every other studio automatically compared its cartoons’. This reference point featured a distinctive look: hard-edged, simplified forms; bold, unmodulated colors; an evacuation of detail; a minimalist environmental surround often reduced to geometric patterns or even a flat color plane; the avoidance of rounded, centerline character design; and a relaxed (at best) implementation of Renaissance perspective. The UPA style spread throughout the American animation industry throughout the 1950s and 1960s, comprising the mid-century rise of the ‘modern’ cartoon (Amidi, 2006) (see Figure 1). In many accounts, this modern animation style is folded into the larger penetration of modern- ism into the American consciousness after World War II. Extending across various fields of cultural and material production, currents in film, television, art, architecture, and design converged to render each development a manifestation of a general approach to a new postwar modernity. This overarching aesthetic we now look back on as mid-century modernism, a bold, visually striking design ethos suited to life in the atomic age. In this formulation, the modern cartoon is a symptom of the increasing popularity of modernism, a shift in style designed to capture the eye of a freshly receptive public with increasing amounts of disposable income. Yet cartoons were doing more cultural work in this period than such a history implies; while certainly part of a modernist design boom aimed at a burgeoning postwar consumer culture, UPA style was also an echo of an earlier modernist moment. UPA sits at the center of a web of influences closely linked to European mod- ernism, including Cubism, Fauvism, and the Bauhaus; they have been outspoken about their Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 84 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 10(2) interest in, among others, Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Stuart Davis, and Raoul Dufy (Daggett, 1954: 2).2 (Their debt to Dufy is directly acknowledged in their 1955 short The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy, drawn in the style of his paintings.) However, in addition to importing stylistic innovations from Europe, UPA also reopened a struggle with developing modernity that had already occupied American artists in the early decades of the century. Here I focus on postwar animation’s relationship to Precisionism, a Cubism-inspired strand of American modernist painting that first appeared in the late teens, proliferated in the 1920s and continued, albeit at a declining rate, throughout the 30s and early 40s, turning to greater abstract experimentation after the war and finally falling off the radar as Abstract Expressionism took shape. In placing postwar cartoons in dialogue with this earlier current in modernist painting infre- quently discussed in histories of modernity and modernism, I position them as a renewal of the energies and concerns of early 20th-century modernism. Mid-century modernism, like its earlier iteration, was a complex affair, containing many different strands and many different approaches; as a response to a new postwar modernity, it offered 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 solutions to those problems. Rather than hitching a ride on a popular multimedia style, I argue, UPA was firmly engaged in the work of solving particular problems of modern vision through abstraction and simplification. This is not a story of direct influence; to my knowledge, UPA cartoonists have never acknowl- edged Precisionist painting.3 Rather, I am interested in tracing a series of homologies across two different fields of cultural production, bringing the combined disciplines of art history and film studies to bear on a singular visual problem that animated American modernism across much of the 20th century. While UPA did not consciously situate itself as the successor to Precisionism, I argue that it nevertheless recreated Precisionism’s gestures in the face of postwar modernity. My intent here is therefore threefold: a revaluation of Precisionism within the pantheon of American modern- ist art, a more precise account of UPA’s signature visual style, and, through the meeting of these two ideas, a clearer picture of UPA’s place within a multifarious mid-century modernism. I begin with the Precisionists, defining their vision of American modernity and the work their form of modernism does to assimilate it. Outlining their response to the question of visual order in a disordered modern world, I then explore the ways in which this approach resonates with the con- cerns of the cartoonists who founded UPA as a response to the supposedly outmoded realism of contemporary cartoons. In conclusion, I discuss the similarities and differences of form between Precisionism and UPA animation, highlighting the continuities across their two modernist moments and the gaps between them that give UPA’s resurgent modernism its unique character. This inter- disciplinary approach, a synoptic survey of two moments of rupture in ideas about representation and vision, adds a new dimension to our understanding of UPA’s cartoons and the work they were expected to perform in the public arena. Moreover, it enables a clearer view of American mid- century modernism as a cultural and artistic phenomenon, revealing a line of continuity between the concerns of the 1920s and those of the 1950s. Finally, it unites the movie theater and the art gallery as spaces of sensory adjustment where artists and audiences reckoned with the rapidly changing world around them. Squares and cubes, arcs and cylinders: The Precisionist aesthetic Precisionism occupies a liminal space in the history of American modernist art, lost between the European Cubism that brought modernist painting to America’s attention in the 1910s and the Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 Bashara 85 Abstract Expressionism that would come to define American modernism after World War II. The interim between these two periods was marked by a search for a uniquely American