Sullivan Goss is proud to represent the Estate of Oskar Fischinger – a master of early non-objective painting, an inventor of the music video, a pioneer in multimedia immersive environments, and a prophet of both Op Art and contemporary computer-generated motion graphics. 

While Fischinger’s contribution to the development of cinema and animation have been well documented in two thoroughly-researched books, OPTICAL POETRY: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, 2004 by Dr. William Moritz and OSKAR FISCHINGER 1900-1967: Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction, 2012 edited by Cindy Keefer and Jaap Guldemond, the project to properly historicize – and thus celebrate – his contribution to American painting remains ongoing.

Oskar Fischinger was born into a middle-class family on June 22, 1900 in Gelnhausen, Germany near Frankfurt. He took violin lessons as a child and apparently enjoyed drawing. At age fourteen, he was an apprentice to an organ maker for a year before working as a draftsman in an architect’s office at age sixteen. His familiarity with mechanical tools and drafting were to prove important to his later work. Subsequently, he walked to Frankfurt, where he worked as a tool designer while earning his engineering license. Art historian Susan Ehrlich noted in her PhD thesis that, “Fischinger’s early training in music, engineering, and architecture would profoundly effect his later art which ... would display a draughtsman’s surety of hand, an engineer’s penchant for geometric form, and a musician’s sense of harmonic proportion.”

Through a lecture at “The Friends of Literature Club” in Frankfurt, Fischinger met Dr. Bernhard Diebold, an influential theater critic who called for a new blend of fine arts, music, dance, and cinema. In 1921, Oskar joined Diebold for a run-through of a new film called Lichtspiel Opus I [Light-Play, Work 1] by Walther Ruttmann – a 13 minute film of non-objective color effects with a musical accompaniment. Entranced by the work’s possibilities, Fischinger’s life took a decisive turn.

Using his engineering background, Fischinger created a machine called a “Wax-Slicing Machine” for expediting the creation of abstract imagery on film. He then licensed it to Ruttmann in November of 1922 and delivered it in February of 1923, where it was used for a special effects sequence in a film called The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Ultimately, Ruttmann was unable to use the machine to much effect, but Fischinger made at least ten minutes of film using the machine.

By 1929, Fischinger was a recognized innovator in his field. Fritz Lang used him to produce special effects for his Woman in the Moon film that same year.

In 1935, his animation Composition in Blue won the King’s Prize at the Brussels International Exposition held that year. In 1936, he was hired by Paramount to bring his advanced ideas and techniques to the U.S. According to Ilene Fort, he began painting “non- objective” paintings the next year, although there are illustrations of non-objective paintings by Fischinger dated 1936 in Martina Dillman’s PhD dissertation, “Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) The Painterly Work.” 1936 was, coincidentally, the same year the nation’s most advanced and aspirational abstract artists formed the American Abstract Artists group.

By 1938, MGM released Fischinger’s An Optical Poem – a seven minute, hand painted and hand cut animation of circles, triangles, squares, and comet shapes set to “Second Hungarian Rhapsody” by Franz Liszt. It was screened across the world. It preceded Solomon R. Guggeheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Art by a year and Disney’s Fantasia (on which Fischinger also worked) by two years. Remarkably, it was Fischinger’s 43rd film project.

1938 was also the year that Fischinger showed with Karl Nierendorf in New York. They knew each other from Germany. Fischinger had, in fact, secreted a good deal of Nierendof’s inventory of abstract art out of Nazi Germany as a favor. The exhibition was important to Fischinger’s future in two respects. First, Nierendorf was able to sell one of Fischinger’s paintings to Katherine Dreier – co-organizer of the Société Anonyme with Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Man Ray (1890-1976). They were dedicated to teaching the American public about the latest trends in European and American Art through a series of exhibitions and lectures across the U.S. Secondly, the Nierendorf exhibition introduced Fischinger’s work to Hilda Rebay, doyenne of the future Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art (today’s Guggenheim Musem). The Guggenheim, in turn, helped support Fischinger through the War Years with three grants – one of which helped finance his film Radio Dynamics of 1942.

Fischinger’s last major film Motion Painting No. 1 of 1947 followed. Alternatively exciting and meditative, the eleven-minute film showed the artist’s abstract paintings take shape. It was shown to standing ovations at both the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1949, the film won the International Experimental Film Competition in Brussels. Subsequent films showing Jackson Pollock (1950) and Pablo Picasso (1956) in the process of creation won over many who didn’t fully get what the whole “modern art thing” was about.

Fischinger was certainly a committed figure of the L.A. group of avant-garde artists in the 40s. He was friends with art dealer Galka Scheyer, architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, the musician Arnold Schoenberg, and artists like Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978), Peter Krasnow (1886-1979), Knud Merrild (1894-1954), and Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973). He continued to have important exhibitions at the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills, the San Francsico Museum of Art, and the Pasadena Art Museum (today’s Norton Simon) and to show in important group exhibitions at the Guggenheim, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but he never quite became a household name. In part, his generation’s success in convincing the public of modern art’s imperatives paved the way for the more successful generation of Abstract Expressionists that followed.

Since then, his reputation has grown and grown. Two monographs have been published. His painting was on the cover of a pivotal 1990 exhibition, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, and he was given a full essay in the Smithsonian’s book on the subject. Within the last decade his film work has been featured at the Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2017, he was the subject of a “Google Doodle”–a Google home page link celebrating a person’s cultural and technical contributions to the world. It seems that Fischinger’s work was simply too far ahead of its time.