ANM0010.1177/1746847715587421AnimationBashara research-article5874212015

Article

: an interdisciplinary journal Cartoon Vision: UPA, 2015, Vol. 10(2) 82­–101 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: and American sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1746847715587421 anm.sagepub.com

Dan Bashara DePaul University, Chicago, USA

Abstract Postwar United Productions of America (UPA) is credited with bringing a 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 , 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, , 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]

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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 perspective. The UPA style spread throughout the 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 , 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 , , and the ; 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, , and (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 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 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 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

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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 art, one that could be modernist without being European, and that could address changes in the experience of time and space without merely copying Cubism or reverting to the naturalist practiced by their chief rivals, the American Scene painters.4 As one of the most significant abstract move- ments of this period, Precisionism was particularly outspoken in its efforts to redefine the subject matter of American art in the 20th century. Painters including Morton Schamberg, , , , Niles Spencer, George Ault, and Louis Lozowick began to adapt European modernism to the American landscape, seeking a way to make it relevant to the peculiarities of their own geography, history, and culture. Throughout the 1920s, as industrializa- tion and urbanization advanced, these artists turned their attention to industrial and architectural imagery, finding receptive audiences for their work in influential New York galleries. By the end of the decade, Precisionism was a vital, if as yet unnamed, presence on the American art scene. As their sometime designation as ‘Cubist–Realists’ attests (Brown, 1943–1945), the Precisionists owed much of their style to the Cubists painting in the early decades of the 20th century. However, in their catholic approach to modernist precedent, Precisionists drew on other sources of European art as well, adopting isolated elements from major schools of modern art while leaving others untouched: from Cubism, the dismantling of the object into planes (but not its extreme distortion of form); from , the focus on industrially produced objects (but not its confrontational sense of humor); from , the assemblage of everyday things (but not its penchant for the fantas- tic); from Fauvism, the nondescriptive use of color (but not its forceful, visible brushwork); from , the use of solid colors and simple shapes (but not its pure abstraction and radical political commitments); from , the engagement with the machine (but not its celebration of speed). The result of this modernist synthesis was a body of paintings marked by a shared style, what Martin Friedman (1960: 14) calls an ‘extreme simplification of form, unwavering, sharp delineation, and carefully reasoned abstract organization’. Gail Stavitsky (1995: 35) is more spe- cific: ‘The essence of the Precisionist aesthetic was an objectivist synthesis of abstraction and realism, manifested by hard-edged, static, smoothly-brushed, simplified forms rendered in unmod- ulated colors.’ The Precisionist mode of representation rested on a reduction of the modern American landscape to flat planes of solid color, partaking in the materials of abstraction while still remaining yoked to representation, but a representation starkly opposed to the naturalist renderings of traditional American realism (see Figure 2). The precision with which the Precisionists executed their art, Friedman (1960: 12) argues, was a symptom of their era: ‘Today the localized boundaries of the gallery loyalties seem less urgent and it is clear now that we are dealing with a much broader, pervasive idea whose inspiration was in the air of that time.’ This pervasive idea underlying the form and content of Precisionism is order, a concept that was indeed ‘in the air of that time’, apparent in the acceleration of mass-scale industry and in the scientific management experiments of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Elegantly synthesizing this organizational impulse and the visual forms it engen- dered, Precisionist painter Louis Lozowick (2001[1917]: 50) argues:

The dominant trend in America of today, beneath all the apparent chaos and confusion, is towards order and organization which find their outward sign and symbol in the rigid geometry of the American city: in the verticals of its smoke stacks, in the parallels of its car tracks, the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arc of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks.

In their attempt to reflect and refine this order and organization, Precisionists rationalized the American scene, using abstraction and reduction to mitigate perceptual overload, to strip away

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Figure 2. Flat planes of solid color in Louis Lozowick’s Chicago (1923). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Mary Ryan Gallery, New York.

Lozowick’s ‘apparent chaos and confusion’. Stavitsky (1995: 34–35) observes: ‘Precisionism pro- posed a fundamental reordering of experience, a clarifying search for architectonic structure under- lying the chaos of reality.’ In using static, geometrical forms as their tools for representation, these artists identified the traces of an inherent order in the world and amplified it; Stavitsky calls them ‘selective realists who variously distilled the essential forms of a highly refined reality’. The phrase ‘selective realists’ testifies to the extent to which the Precisionists blurred abstrac- tion and representation, even at their most photorealistic, as in Sheeler’s work in the late depicting close-ups of machine parts (see Gerstner, 2006; Heilpern, 1983). Lozowick (2001[1917]: 49) offers a clear statement of this process of selection – at the same time distancing himself from the American Scene realists – declaring:

The artist cannot and should not, therefore, attempt a literal soulless transcription of the American scene but rather give a penetrating creative interpretation of it, which, while including everything relevant to the subject depicted, would exclude everything irrelevant to the plastic possibilities of that subject.

Stavitsky (1995: 35) describes what was to be excluded: ‘Transitory superfluities of expressive painterly process, time, atmosphere, and anecdotal details were removed to varying degrees as

Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 Bashara 87 barriers to the essential integrity of the object and its direct apprehension.’ In a sense, the Precisionist project thus entails the undoing of the work of the modernists who came before them, repudiating Baudelaire’s invocation of the fleeting and the contingent as one of modernity’s two faces,5 deny- ing the temporal complexity of Cubism and the irrational dream life of Surrealism in favor of a stable, concrete certainty unbound to impressions, passions, or tricks of the light. Art historian John IH Baur (1951: 7) calls this disciplined engagement with the external world ‘the first important bridge between native tradition and the modern vision’, a project of sensory mastery that makes Precisionism ‘the backbone of our second period of in the 1920s’. As chroniclers of an emerging machine culture, the Precisionists are often simplistically por- trayed as cheerleaders of industrial modernity; Friedman (1960: 44), for instance, refers to their ‘reverence for modern technology’ as a defining feature, and Zabel (1974) has linked them with the ‘urban optimism’ of the 1920s. However, the scholarship on Precisionism occasionally hints at an element of discomfort in Precisionist views of the city, from the ‘hauntingly immobile’ cast of ’s New York, Lower Manhattan (1921) to the paranoid, oppressive ‘melan- choly’ of George Ault’s Sullivan Street, Abstraction (1924) (Stavitsky, 1995: 35, and Friedman, 1960: 35, respectively). Likewise challenging the general tendency of Precisionist historiography, Sharon Corwin (2003: 152) identifies ‘elisions and, perhaps more important, tensions and ambiva- lence’ in Precisionist painting that suggest a sustained critique across artists’ bodies of work. Even the seminal Precisionist Charles Sheeler’s work, Mark Rawlinson (2004: 483) argues, offers a veiled critique of urban–industrial modernity in its ‘imprecise precisionism’, a faint but definite skewing of perspective and regularity that ‘highlights im-precisely the irrationality … that hides behind the facade of rationality’. This discomfort, the seat of Precisionism’s critical edge in the face of accelerating modernity, comprises ‘the true strangeness and uncertainty of the Precisionist visual project’, the acknowledgement that Precisionism is not a safe imposition of order so much as a hopeful search for it (Corwin, 2003: 151). These imprecisions and insecurities in Precisionist painting offer a useful lens through which to examine UPA’s mid-century output, and the ‘true strangeness’ of Precisionism links this supposedly stoic artistic practice with the decidedly less stoic arena of the post-World War II cartoon.

‘A new visual language’: Building a more communicative cartoon During and immediately after World War II, animation did indeed become embroiled in rather stoic discussions. The need to efficiently prepare for and engage in war, and to make sense of the tech- nologically and socially transformed peacetime that followed, reinvigorated the questions of order and perception circulating during the 1920s. As Lynn Spigel (2008: 11) notes, at mid-century ‘transformative developments in science, art, technology, and consumer/media culture required new theorizations of visual experience in the postwar world’, a ‘concern with visual perception [that] was a continuation of – rather than a break with – earlier forms of modernism’. This need was promptly filled by a contingent of émigrés associated with the German Bauhaus, many of whom fled to America to escape Nazi persecution and established themselves at the art and design schools that were rapidly proliferating in the US in the 1940s. Seminal, widely distributed textbooks used in these schools, such as György Kepes’s Language of Vision (1944) and László Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion (1947), placed vision at the center of a utopian campaign to help a grandly- defined humankind readjust to an irrevocably changed – and still changing – world. Kepes, who reportedly had particular purchase with UPA ,6 was most vocal about the plight of vision at mid-century; steeped in the high-flown rhetoric of utopian reform and collabo- rating with luminaries in art, science, and design as part of a voluminous publishing campaign, he stands as a representative of the larger currents of which he was a part, a clearinghouse of

Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 88 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 10(2) mid-century modernism. Just as Lozowick identified ‘order and organization’ as the dominant trend in America, and thus in Precisionist art as well, so did Kepes (1944: 67) figure art as a method of containing the chaos of the outside world, declaring: ‘In the last hundred years technological practice has introduced a new, complex visual environment. The contemporary painter’s task is to find the way of ordering and measuring this new world.’ In seeking an artistic solution to this mod- ern problem, Kepes finds fault with naturalism for failing to respond to a changing environment, as well as with pure abstraction for retreating too far from a productive engagement with the visible world (p. 109). His solution is a midpoint between these two extremes, a simplified representation that makes use of the forms and principles of abstraction developed by modernist art. However, it is only with advertising and graphic design that he sees America as coming into its own on the modern front; in these media, Kepes finds his favored artistic principles being put to use in every- day life, a key criterion in his conception of a properly modern art form (p. 221). By stepping out of the rarefied space of the art gallery, Kepes’s favored examples of advertising and graphic design supplement Precisionism’s simplification of vision with a concern for popular and mass meaning-making, a concern that also animated UPA creative heads and Zachary Schwartz in their manifesto for a modern cartoon. Hubley and Schwartz’s ‘Animation learns a new language’ (1946: 361) – an article that nods to Kepes’s Language of Vision in calling for ‘a new visual language’ – builds a case for animation as a medium of education and communication rather than of mere amusement. The war had intro- duced new possibilities for visual communication through the necessity of training films aimed at large groups of unskilled recruits responsible for learning large amounts of information in small amounts of time. In demanding a new, more efficient form of mass communication, the Armed Forces’ film training programs brought two wildly disparate modes of address, the workmanlike educational film and the zany theatrical cartoon, into conversation with each other – or, as Hubley and Schwartz put it, ‘Because of wartime necessity, pigs and bunnies have collided with nuts and bolts’ (p. 360). Moreover, the low budgets and minimal oversight of high-turnover government projects both required and enabled the aesthetic innovation ‘Animation learns a new language’ called for. Outlining the development of the modern animated training film, the cartoon- ists, writing just after the war’s end, advocate the redirection of a former wartime necessity into wider public culture, and the repurposing of the efficient cartoon short not for military training but for public education and communication. For Hubley and Schwartz, animation is an ideal medium for mass communication not because it is entertaining, but because of its unique symbolic properties: ‘Within the medium of film, ani- mation provided the only means of portraying many complex aspects of a complex society. Through animated drawings artists were able to visualize areas of life and thought which photography was incapable of showing’ (p. 361, original emphasis). In other words, animation, as an alternative to photographic representation, could perform a kind of conceptual abstraction that live-action film could not. And if this independence from concrete reality enhanced the cartoon’s ability to convey ideas, its capacity for movement also differentiated it from the other contemporary form of training document used to visualize knowledge, the drawing or diagram, by adding a temporal dimension. Through animation, ‘processes we know, we can now see’ – a new language of vision indeed (p. 362, original emphases). If Hubley and Schwartz got their way, a suitably modernist animation could render visible the inner reality of things more accurately than any previous imaging technology. Thus, in establishing and promoting its unorthodox house style, UPA staked its reputation not merely on its flatness, or its boldness, or its , but on the condition within which these traits were contained: UPA became famous for its modernism, specifically its proposal of a modern way of seeing. Much attention has been paid to the article’s call for a shift away from ‘pigs and

Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 Bashara 89 bunnies’ (p. 360), a move constructed as central to postwar animation’s greater focus on character psychology and everyday modern life; and rightly so (Bongard, 1953; Penney, 1953; Rosenberg, 1957). However, equally important is Hubley and Schwartz’s insistence on this new visual lan- guage divorced from ’s pursuit of a naturalist ‘illusion of life’, an insistence that recalls Precisionist opposition to the naturalist styles of the American Scene painters in favor of a visual style more aligned with the new experiences of modernity.7 Echoing Kepes’s mission of using art to reconcile vision with the conceptual shifts modernity had wrought, UPA replicated his goal of mass meaning-making in the newly revitalized medium of the informational cartoon.

Better living through graphic design: From training to entertaining However, UPA’s quest for a mature, streamlined, uniquely communicative cartoon outlived both their wartime training films and their postwar sponsored informational films. As political opinion shifted in the transition to the Cold War and UPA’s left-leaning reputation began to deprive the studio of government and industrial contracts, Hubley and his colleagues brought their new visual language into the theatrical market, focusing their modernist, goal-oriented sensibility on the entertainment, rather than the education, of theater audiences.8 UPA’s graphic approach to the training film – stylized, simplified figures that are both more readily legible and freighted with symbolic and conceptual rather than representational meaning – lent itself to a new kind of char- acter design for the popular cartoon. ‘We went for very flat stylized characters’, Hubley (1980[1973]: 185) remembers of the 1945 United Auto Workers-sponsored film Brotherhood of Man, ‘instead of the global three-dimensional Disney characters. It was greatly influenced by Saul Steinberg and that sharp-nosed character he was doing at the time.’ Carrying this practice over to the commercial screen, UPA traded squash-and-stretch, centerline-drawn character design for off-kilter, geometrical shapes whose abstract forms and unnatural transformations reveal their invisible, inner psychology in their very physical form.9 For example, in Rooty Toot Toot (1952), a retelling of the turn-of-the-century murder ballad ‘Frankie and Johnny’, the slinky, seductive femme fatale Nellie Bly twists her arms around each other like snakes, condensing into one image both the promise of bodily intertwining offered by her sinuous vocals and the potential danger of succumbing to such temptation; meanwhile, the sad-sack bartender is a plain brown oval whose color alternately runs outside and falls short of his outline, indicating in graphic form his ability to blend into the background, to transform into a blank screen for his patrons’ projected problems (see Figure 3). The choice to dispense with mimetic realism opened the way for a more symbolic, psychological realism descended not from pastoral painting, illustration, and cinema, as in Disney films, but from the spare, minimalist symbolism of modernist graphic design. This making visible of the invisible – ‘processes we know, we can now see’ – descends directly from the communica- tive innovations of the earlier training films. In ‘Two premieres: Disney and UPA’, David Fisher (1980[1953]: 182) acknowledges the cen- trality of perception in UPA’s approach to animation, observing, ‘Most UPA films reveal a preoc- cupation with visual reality unusual in any cartoon.’ Yet as hand-drawn, consciously composed artifacts, nearly all cartoons are preoccupied with visual reality; it is merely their stance toward it that differs. Disney is preoccupied with preserving and mastering traditional notions of visual real- ity – Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional naturalism – while UPA is preoccupied with mak- ing sense of the new, modern notions of visual reality that were asserting themselves over the course of the 20th century and, if Kepes (1944: 13–14) is to be believed, were coming to a head in the middle decades. Fisher (1980[1953: 182) espouses a curious contradiction: first, speaking of Gerald McBoing Boing, he notes, ‘He exists in a never-never land of flat-colored backgrounds and outline people.’ Then, in the same paragraph, he argues, ‘[UPA] rejects the traditional never-never

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Figure 3. Nellie Bly’s entwined arms in Rooty Toot Toot (dir. John Hubley, 1952). DVD frame grab from UPA: The Jolly Frolics Collection (2012). land of the film cartoon in favor of human reality, even though its style is less realistic on the sur- face.’ How might we reconcile these competing claims, that UPA fashions never-never lands even as it rejects them in favor of human reality? At the heart of Fisher’s paradox, and of Hubley and Schwartz’s manifesto and of various interviews with UPA staffers and modernist cartoonists from other postwar studios (Amidi, 2006), is the conviction that the superficially ‘less realistic’ visual style of the modern cartoon enables a clearer view of the realities of modern life, a conviction that is inseparable from the assorted developments in American modernism leading up to mid-century. These developments grew out of the belief, propounded by influential texts like those of Kepes (1944) and Moholy-Nagy (1947), that old models of vision were inefficient and inaccurate, and that a new vision must be cultivated if humankind was to properly see the world in which it found itself within the chaos of modernity. Gerald McBoing Boing thus shows us a never-never land in its stylistic foreignness, but it rejects never-never lands by remaining tied to modern human life and to contemporary theories of human vision. Discussing the modernism of the cartoon form, Norman M Klein (1993: 204) argues: ‘Cartoons constantly adjust to media, perception, and marketing. They are constantly “redrawn” by the crises of modernity.’ Esther Leslie (2002: 299) concurs, emphasizing the serious work cartoons perform for the sake of vision and space: ‘Cartooning was the place where research into flatness and illu- sion and abstraction was most conscientiously carried out.’ This curious term, ‘research’, recurs often in the writings of modernist art and design theorists, including, of course, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes. It positions the artist’s canvas – or the cartoonist’s – as a laboratory, a place where art seeks solutions to scientific problems. And in the postwar context, it implicates the arts in the explosion of better-living-through-science rhetoric as wartime technological developments were redirected toward the consumer market.

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Cartoon therapy Yet the cartoonist’s research into visual representation carried a cultural component as well, one that should be familiar to the student of Precisionism; Wells (2002: 45) calls post-Disney animation ‘a response to and a development of a variety of “modernities” and a consistent commentary upon America as a machine culture’. This commentary, whether couched within the rhetoric of wartime training, education, or entertainment, was aimed at facilitating the adjustment to and understanding of modernity and its accompanying forces on a mass scale, particularly after the war, when, as with other technologies, developments in animation were aimed at the broader public rather than solely at soldiers or trainees. Film producer and Army officer Leonard Spigelgass (1944: 129) speaks tellingly of the use of cartoons as what he calls ‘therapy through films’, an enlistment of animation in the service of calming fears and easing anxiety. While he is referring specifically to fear engen- dered by wartime misinformation, the work of his colleagues in animation studios points to other applications for cartoon therapy, easing anxiety caused not by rumors and falsehoods, but by dis- ordered vision. Among these applications is a seminal element of 1950s American technological and visual culture: television. UPA’s sparse, minimalist style was particularly well suited for the small screen, having developed in the often ad hoc and improvised exhibition spaces of the war, where, as Ted Giesel (better known as Dr Seuss) famously noted in defense of the Signal Corps’ stripped-down visuals (quoted in Abraham, 2012: 57), ‘Our films have to be legible projected on the side of a dead cow.’ Likewise, graphic designer John Halas (1959: 490) touts the appropriateness of the modern- ist approach for home viewing: ‘Television, with its limiting size and tone range, provides a natural trend towards simplification and abstract characterization.’ UPA took advantage of this new medium, producing animated ads for products such as Piel’s Beer and Jell-O, as well as the ill-fated Boing Boing Show.10 These forays into the middle-class American living room did more than raise the studio’s cultural and financial profile, however. As Spigel (2008: 64) observes: ‘for the general public, the abstract animated commercial came to be an everyday form of modernism, a way of looking at ordinary things through visual and audio engagements with cutting-edge graphic and sound design.’ UPA’s visual style, both in theatrical films and in television production, thus dis- seminates Hubley and Schwartz’s new visual language on multiple fronts, exposing broad audi- ences to their attempts at perceptual adjustment. Wells (2002: 66) speaks at length of the visual work carried out by UPA cartoons, noting: ‘The UPA studios were instrumental in recovering animation from the structures and limitations that sought to define it, returning the form to the proper embrace of perceived reality and its place within artistic and cultural contexts’ (emphasis from original text). UPA style, he argues, ‘required the fresh-sightedness of artists versed not merely in progressing art traditions, but in artists who would embrace a philosophical approach to perception, and to the possibilities of synaesthetic cinema, and ways of “post-styling” … the real world’ (p. 67). This ‘post-styling’ of the real world is, perhaps, a central feature of modernism in many of its incarnations; what needs elaboration is the ways in which UPA’s ‘post-styling’ is consonant with that of the earlier generation of American modernists, the Precisionists.

UPA and Precisionism: Homologies of form, differences of style UPA cartoons have never, to my knowledge, been called ‘Precisionist’; what they have been called, however, is ‘Cubist’ (Amidi, 2006: 10; Butler, 2006: 356). Yet these films are not quite Cubist, at least according to the understanding of Cubism as the condensation of multiple perspectives into a single image and the segmentation, analysis, and reassembly of space in the quest for a fuller view

Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 92 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 10(2) of the object. What they are is ‘cubistic’, in Friedman’s (1960: 22) sense of ‘ready-made “cubistic” forms – , bridges, docks, grain elevators, turbines, cranes’ – that is, UPA cartoons engage with geometry, and they reduce objects to shapes and forms that resemble the results of Cubist process, but they take a different route to get there. They look nothing like, for instance, Ballet Mécanique, Fernand Leger’s 1924 attempt to construct a Cubist cinema in the form of rapid montage and the establishment of abstract visual rhythm. If that can be called cinematic Cubism, UPA engages with Cubism in a very different way, closer to Precisionist appropriations of the form. Mid-century modernity, as Kepes argues, called for an artistic response to a salient perceptual question, and UPA answered in a Precisionist voice, echoing Precisionism’s practice of joining abstraction and representation in the service of establishing a kind of simplified visual order. This shared abstract-representational style is also the vital difference that complicates a consid- eration of UPA as being merely ‘of its moment’, a beneficiary of an artistic trickle-down effect originating with the postwar explosion of . UPA’s modernism is different from that of Abstract Expressionism’s nonrepresentational depiction of inner states; it is a variation on the modernism of Precisionism, the meticulous and ordered engagement with vision and the outer world.11 The similarities – and differences – of form between the two reveal the ways in which cartoons reenacted Precisionism’s modernist gestures in their mid-century moment.

Depth through flatness Perhaps UPA cartoons’ most defining characteristic is their supposed flatness. Klein (1993: 230) remarks upon their ‘flat graphics’, Leslie (2002: 293) notes that they ‘emphasized the two-dimen- sional plane’, and Amidi (2006: 115), defending UPA from this charge, reveals just how central flatness is to common assumptions about the studio’s style. Composed of simple planes of bold, unmodulated color, the worlds depicted in UPA animation eschew the rounded, three-dimensional approach of Disney illusionism. Yet to call this space ‘flat’ is a misrepresentation; it would be more accurate to say that UPA’s artists constructed new models of spatial representation through the use of flat shapes. Precisionism, for its part, is not often discussed in terms of a perceived flatness of the picture plane; rather, commentators tend to discuss it in terms of the creation of space and depth. This depth, however, is frequently suggested through the strategic positioning of Stavitsky’s (1995: 35) ‘hard-edged, static, smoothly-brushed, simplified forms rendered in unmodulated colors’ – that is, flat shapes. Yet Precisionism as a whole shows a range of approaches to space: Louis Lozowick’s American city series, for instance, often layers planes of geometry directly on top of each other without suggesting the space in between; Charles Sheeler’s Church Street El (1920), on the other hand, employs a forced overhead perspective to suggest extreme depth through the same abstract geometry. UPA’s continuum is likewise extensive, spanning both Punchy de Leon’s (1950) closely layered abstraction and The Jaywalker’s (1956) vanishing point-oriented perspective (see Figures 4 and 5). UPA was in fact overwhelmingly concerned with the creation of deep space, and its artists believed that this supposedly flat aesthetic was the way to create it; animation designer Bill Hurtz (quoted in Amidi, 2006: 133), speaking of Gerald McBoing Boing’s design, notes:

We decided to dispense with all walls and floors and ground levels and skies and horizon lines … If you put a doorway in a room with no boundaries, way, way back, that’s a vast hall, far more vast than if you added the walls and the ceiling; there’s nothing to contain the space.

As the preliminary notes for UPA’s 1955 MoMA exhibition confirm (Anon, nd: 2), this simplifica- tion of form enhances the perception of spatial depth, especially through the studio’s use of

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Figure 4. Closely layered planes of depth in Punchy de Leon (dir. John Hubley, 1950). DVD frame grab from UPA: The Jolly Frolics Collection (2012).

Figure 5. Vanishing point-oriented perspective in the Jaywalker (dir. Robert Cannon, 1956). DVD frame grab from UPA: The Jolly Frolics Collection (2012).

‘diminishing perspective – not a UPA invention, but especially effective in UPA because of the elimination of inessentials in the scene’. The quality that leads to the designation of flatness as a hallmark of UPA style is, I suspect, actually a different aesthetic marker that these cartoons also

Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 94 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 10(2) share with Precisionism: the unification of background and foreground design. This too is a signifi- cant departure from cartoon tradition. Barrier (1999: 506) observes:

In American Hollywood cartoons of the thirties, the characters – composed of lines and flat, bright colors – typically stood out from the background paintings like actors performing in front of stage sets. The backgrounds were realistically modeled and painted in muted colors, and so the characters ‘read’ against them as color accents.12

Adam Abraham (2012: 90) cites UPA’s challenge to this tradition: ‘As David Hilberman put it, the “nineteenth-century English watercolor background simply didn’t belong with these flat char- acters”… The solution, of course, was to make the backgrounds as flat as the characters.’ This practice resulted in foreground figures that were, as Howard Rieder (1969: 19) describes them, ‘part of the overall design of the frame’, exhibiting an allover reduction to abstract form, as in the 1955 short Christopher Crumpet’s Playmate, in which all objects, whether at the front or the rear of the frame, are composed of solid colors with no outlines. Precisionists worked in a similar mode, evacuating both foreground objects and background environment of extraneous detail, often reducing both building and sky to equally flat color planes, as in Niles Spencer’s 1926 painting Landscape, Cape Cod. The ‘highly restrained surfaces of the Precisionist canvas’ described by Corwin (2003: 154) and the ‘clean and unencumbered surface’ described by Brown (1943–1945: 158) received much attention from those attempting to define the style, positioning Precisionism as a proponent of this kind of painting governed by a unified design, a concern that UPA likewise shows in its cartoons (see Figures 6 and 7).

‘An understatement of movement’ The unified foreground and background of the UPA cartoon, combined with the reduced, abstract nature of that unified design, evokes another bridge between mid-century cartoons and Precisionist painting. Klein (1993: 237) characterizes UPA animation as consisting of ‘blocks of color that sug- gest a great stillness’, and Barrier (1999: 528) describes UPA Bobe Cannon’s approach as ‘a yearning for stillness and order’. In the production notes for Gerald McBoing Boing, Cannon himself (nd: 2) refers to the cartoon’s ‘understatement of movement as opposed to dynamic move- ment’, a slowdown that ‘would be more effective because there has been a traditional excess of movement in cartoons produced at other studios’. Likewise, much of the discourse surrounding Precisionism latches onto its stillness as a means of understanding its unique mode of representa- tion (Friedman, 1960; Stavitsky, 1995). As with the matter of outer-directed vision, this stillness sets postwar animation apart from its Abstract Expressionist moment, and its detour into stasis while became one of the standard practices of mid-century modernism links it again with that other American modernism, Precisionism. This feeling of stasis in mid-century animation is of course partially attributable to its actual, budget-directed stillness, that is, the literal reduction of movement within the frame of . Much has been said about UPA’s embrace of this stripped-down form of cartooning that began during the World War II years of the First Motion Picture Unit and reached its zenith in the Saturday morning cartoons of the 1960s. Unfortunately, the discussion tends to conflate UPA’s reduced animation process with its simplified graphic language, and to lump both under the desig- nation ‘limited animation’. My aim here is not to rescue UPA’s pristine artistic legacy from the taint of budgetary constraints; Schwartz, Hilberman, Hubley, and their colleagues innovated based on a mixture of creativity, ideology, and financial necessity, and those lines, I believe, should remain blurred.13 At the same time, I also believe that we should be clear about what we mean when we talk about UPA style, and about what we mean when we talk about limited animation.

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Figure 6. Unified foreground and background design in Christopher Crumpet’s Playmate (dir. Robert Cannon, 1955). DVD frame grab from UPA: The Jolly Frolics Collection (2012).

Figure 7. Unified foreground and background design in Niles Spencer’s Landscape, Cape Cod (1926). Oil on canvas. Private collection. Source: Richard B Freeman, Niles Spencer (1965).

To replicate the smooth movement of photographic cinema, a cartoonist draws 24 images per second of film, the same number of frames that produces the sensation of lifelike movement in live-action cinema; this is ‘full animation’.14 At bottom, limited animation means drawing 12 frames per second of film, or 8, or 6, or it means redrawing only the parts of the frame that have to

Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 96 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 10(2) be moving. It reuses frames or parts of frames in an effort to cut back on labor and thereby save money – for instance, a character’s mouth may move while the rest of its body remains unchanged, or a figure may alternate between a series of easily readable positions rather than progressing through the full sequence of ‘in-between’ positions necessary for a fluid, lifelike motion.15 In short, movement is limited to essentials. Central to this definition of limited animation is that it is a kind of animation; that is, it refers to the way a cartoon moves, not to the way it is drawn. When John Hubley states in a 1973 interview (see Ford et al., 1980[1973]: 187): ‘The simplified nature of the UPA style was due to the fact that we were working on lower budgets. We had to find ways of economizing and still get good results’, he is speaking specifically of the animation process, not of graphic stylization. He continues:

So we cut down on animation and got into stylized ways of handling action … There’s no substitute for full animation. What the character can do if you make use of full drawings is really irreplaceable. You just can’t fake it.

While this half-lament explains UPA’s use of limited animation, it says little about the graphic innovations for which the studio is famous today, which, in the same interview, Hubley refers to as ‘very advanced graphics for that period’ (p. 185). It is true that graphic abstraction and limited animation are often fellow travelers, and that both are responses to the same budgetary pressures; the financial need to restrict character move- ment to essentials also asks for simpler character design and more abstract background design. But this is only true to an extent, and it is most certainly not true to the extent that UPA’s cartoon- ists built their reputations by agitating for a simpler, bolder graphic approach to animation not because it was less expensive, but because it was better suited to its time, and to the social, cul- tural, and visual concerns of America in the postwar era than was Disney’s three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood naturalism. As Barrier (1999: 512) notes: ‘For [Zack] Schwartz, a great advan- tage of working with a limited budget … was that there was so little to distract him from making the kind of design-dominated film he had longed to make since his Disney days.’16 To conclude that UPA’s graphic style developed under the same budgetary duress as its practice of skipping frames in its animation is to engage in economic determinism at the expense of the historical record, which indicates that the demand for a spare, abstract visual style predates the opportunity to forge it. There is more at work here, then, than UPA’s limited animation; the feeling of stasis for which UPA is known comes as well from an element of conscious aesthetic choice that suggests great stillness through visual design itself. The evacuation of extraneous detail and the reduction to essential forms, the aesthetic credo running through both Precisionism and UPA animation, as well as the writings of Kepes, convey a stance toward modernity that all three figures shared, and that directly facilitates the establishment of visual order. Simply put, the task of artistic representation was to give the eye less to do at the moment of perception so that the mind could carry out its work of meaning-making, enabling a fuller, more sophisticated dynamism built on the backs of modern- ism’s simplified constituent elements. This evacuation of detail creates the feeling of an actual vacuum running through this particular strain of modernism, from Barbara Rose’s (1975: 103) identification of Sheeler’s ‘structures [that] are further simplified to a few straight lines and rectan- gles set squarely and directly in the middle ground, coolly floating in an anonymous setting’ to Klein’s (1993: 237) description of Gerald McBoing Boing as ‘a world that seems floating in a void’. This still void, this designed emptiness, rests at the heart of the search for visual order in a modernity that provides too much perceptual detail in too much motion, and it functions as a gov- erning aesthetic that Precisionism and modernist animation share.

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Figure 8. Precisionism’s crooked cartoon space in Francis Criss’s Jefferson Market Court House (1935). Oil on canvas. Gift of William H and Eloise R Chandler, Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida.

A playful Precisionism Yet, for all their similarities, UPA style differs from Precisionism in important ways. Most notice- able is the playfulness with which UPA approaches its art. While Precisionism is perhaps not as cold and humorless as its commentators suggest, it is also nowhere near as rambunctious as its animated counterparts. Precisionism’s straight lines and perpendicular angles look positively rigid next to the wrenched perspectives and skewed geometries of Magoo’s world – and the Mr Magoo series is perhaps the most realistic and representational of UPA’s output, what Rieder (1969: 247) describes as ‘about a halfway point between the extreme literalism of Disney and the stylized ani- mation of the more offbeat UPA films’. Francis Criss’s work, with its bright colors and distorted perspective, perhaps marks one of Precisionism’s closest passages to UPA’s crooked cartoon space, especially Jefferson Market Courthouse (1935) and Rhapsody in Steel (1939); however, as a whole, UPA strikes a different position on modernity, perhaps bemused and affectionately mocking where Precisionism is disciplined and constructive (see Figure 8). Fisher (1980[1953]: 180) hints at the novelty of UPA’s critique, positioning its brand of cartoon as mischievous cultural criticism: ‘For

Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 98 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 10(2) them visual eccentricity reflects the oddities of life. They appeal to that something inside us whose reaction to politics, for instance, manifests itself in a desire to paint mustachios on public statues.’ This shift from cautious optimism and tentative critique to gleeful irreverence recalls Stavitsky’s (1995: 35) assessment of Precisionism’s decline, according to which ‘the end of Precisionism can be linked to the devastations of World War II, which effectively destroyed the machine-age beliefs in industry as a beneficent force.’ In a sense, UPA was well adapted to the new cultural marketplace in which Precisionism failed, employing humor to accommodate a widespread disillusionment with the promises of modernity. In its quest for a more efficiently communicative modern cartoon, UPA thus shows a lesser devotion to rationalism than did Precisionism, still interested in establishing visual order, but doing so in a post-World War II world that could no longer make such unproblematic use of the specific kind of order proposed by the industrial logic of interwar America. In fact, as Precisionism ceded the mantle of painterly modernism to Abstract Expressionism in the mid-1940s, the postwar output of Precisionist painters veered ever closer to a cartoon aesthetic, indicating that this reevaluation of Precisionism took place not only within the field of animation, but within its original context of the art gallery as well, though on a much smaller scale.17 In employing the same formal elements Precisionism used, but in a less naive postwar culture – or, to be more generous, a postwar culture that had seen Precisionism’s hints of critical darkness borne out in political and technological reality – UPA directed its own aesthetic of geometrical efficiency to different ends. When the sharp lines, simple geometric forms, and unmodulated colors found in Precisionism appeared again in animation in the mid-1940s, their relationship to the vis- ible, outer world changed. Precisionism looked the way it looked because it pictured precise objects – machinery, architecture, industrial materials. In contrast, modern animation applied this reduced aesthetic across the board, not only to modern architectural environments, but also to organic objects, most notably the human form, with which Precisionism dealt by simple exclusion. Essentially, UPA style answered the question that Precisionism left hanging: what happens to peo- ple in a rationalized, industrially efficient world? Narratively, they become avatars of neurotic modernity: Gerald McBoing Boing cannot communicate without technological mediation, the elderly Mr Magoo disastrously relies on a premodern understanding of a modern world his failing eyesight cannot assimilate, and the protagonist of the James Thurber adaptation The Unicorn in the Garden is threatened with Freudian psychoanalysis because of his overactive imagination.18 But, more importantly, they reveal the effects of this modern neurosis in their very visual form – human figures living in a Precisionist universe, turned Precisionist themselves, but wrenched out of shape by the upheaval of technological and cultural change. Where Stefan Hirsch and George Ault subtly intimated the disturbing implications of industrial modernity in brooding, dark tones and eerie, desolate urban landscapes, John Hubley and his cohort found themselves in a world where Hirsch and Ault’s suspicions had come true, and, as their cartoons made perfectly clear, the only thing to do was laugh.

Conclusion In developing its modern cartoon style, UPA participated in the resurgence of an earlier, home- grown modernism that, in the 1920s, had been where the cartoonists were in the 1940s and 1950s, attempting to craft a simplified form of abstracted representation to establish a sense of order in tumultuous times. Underlying these two presences on the art scene – Precisionism and UPA – is an ethos of efficiency, in representation and communication. In their work, a fusion of reductive abstraction and selective representation offers an efficient way to direct perception of the external world and to make sense of its chaos. This mediation of the outer world, clearing away extraneous

Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 17, 2016 Bashara 99 detail and leaving the spectator with the most basic constituent elements of the observable world, facilitates an order and a visual simplicity that the Precisionists and the UPA artists, and Kepes and his cohorts in mid-century modernist design schools, believed that the human mind craved but that the eye, unaided and untutored, could not provide. This concern, as vital in the industrial America of the 1920s as in the postwar America of the 1940s and 1950s, unites these two modernist moments, revealing the continuity between these two periods in American history and the durabil- ity of this central question of modernism, the question of visual order.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge Scott Curtis, Lynn Spigel, Jacob Smith, Jocelyn Szczepaniak- Gillece, Beth Corzo-Duchardt, and Jason Roberts, whose support, guidance, encouragement, and feedback through various stages of this project were invaluable.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. For a fuller discussion of the strike and its role in UPA’s formation, see Wells (2002), Amidi (2006), and Abraham (2012). 2. In fact, Stuart Davis is often, though uneasily, grouped with the Precisionists; commentators note simi- larities of style, but hold him apart based on, among other qualities, his whimsy and his embrace of ‘low’ popular culture. He thus may constitute a central term or point of ideological contact between Precisionism proper and UPA. 3. That said, Barrier’s identification of the Disney strikers as, in part, out-of-work art students frustrated by their inability to put their education to use at the tradition-bound studio, coupled with UPA’s direct reference to other schools of modernist art, suggests that the UPA cartoonists might have had at least a passing acquaintance with Precisionism (Barrier, 1999: 506–507). 4. For an extensive treatment of these trends in interwar American modernism, see Corn (2001). 5. ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’ (Baudelaire, 1972[1863]: 403). 6. For discussions of the connection, see Amidi (2006: 16), Barrier (1999: 15), and Jenkins (2007: 112). 7. For more, see Barrier (1999: 506–509) and Wells (2002). While the UPA-vs-Disney narrative is reduc- tive and incomplete, it is the narrative by which both the public and UPA itself understood the studio to be operating at the time. Likewise, while other studios, such as John Sutherland Productions and Terrytoons, were practicing what is now often called ‘UPA style’, none were as vocal as UPA about the necessity and modernity of its approach. 8. For a detailed account of the Cold War’s effect on UPA, see Barrier (1999: 518–519 and 533–535) and Abraham (2012, chapter 6). 9. ‘Squash-and-stretch’ refers to a style of based on the maintenance of a consistent bodily volume, like a water balloon. According to Klein (1993), this type of animation, which gives the figure a feeling of bouncy fleshiness, was a significant step in the transition from 1920s graphic anima- tion to 1930s Disney-era realism aiming for the illusion of life (this argument runs throughout his Seven Minutes, especially chapter 3). ‘Centerline animation’ is a part of this same process, referring to a char- acter design based on circles and ovals, bisected down the center with features distributed symmetrically across these center lines, another nod toward realism. 10. For more on UPA’s television work, see Abraham (2012, chapter 8). 11. For a contemporary artistic parallel to UPA animation, see Colpitt (2007). Colpitt discusses the west- coast school of Abstract , associated with the work of Calfornia painters including Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin.

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12. This is not to say that Disney used only this approach; as mentioned above, Adventures in Music and ’s Pink Elephants sequence introduce graphic elements to the Disney canon; however, they con- stitute notable departures from the studio’s house style. 13. For a discussion of the ideological imperatives for simplification that bypassed economic concerns, see Klein (1993: 209). 14. However, that is a standard which most animation need not meet; even Disney, the king of full animation, averaged 18 frames per second, which looks good enough to the naked eye. 15. Before this became standard practice in the brutal economic space of the television cartoon, the clear- est example of this kind of animation would be UPA’s Jamaica Daddy (1957), a musical short in which whole sequences consist of two drawings alternating back and forth – perhaps the most limited of limited animation. 16. Many Disney animators, particularly during the Depression, were classically trained artists who turned to cartooning in the absence of work in the fine arts; straight academic realism, for many of them, was not what they signed up for in art school. For an account of Disney animators’ frustration toward the studio’s relentless pursuit of the illusion of life, see Barrier (1999: 506–507). 17. For examples, see Niles Spencer, Erie Underpass (1949); Ralston Crawford, Net (1952); and Charles Sheeler, Architectural Cadences (1954). 18. For more on UPA narratives as cultural allegories, see Fisher (1980[1953]), Rosenberg (1957), and Wells (2002).

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Author biography Dan Bashara received his PhD from Northwestern University’s Screen Cultures program in 2014, and is cur- rently an instructor at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on animation, media and cultural theory, science fiction, and the city in film. His work explores animation in connection with other fields of visual culture, including architecture, graphic design, and cartography. His primary scholarly interest is modernism in all of its forms, particularly as it engages with questions of vision, abstraction, and the city.

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