Mr Magoo and Modern Art
2019; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/oxartj/kcz015
ISSN1741-7287
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoCartoon Vision offers a nuanced account of the relations between modern art and mainstream culture that helps reveal their fundamental interconnectedness. ‘Cartoonists, artists, architects and designers were working with the same materials – vision, space, and abstract form – to fashion a new way to experience a new, modern America’, writes Bashara (p. 2). His subject is the pared back, linear animation style of United Productions of America (UPA). ‘As UPA’s house style became, broadly speaking, the dominant style of animation in the 1950s and 1960s’, he explains, ‘this growing simplification becomes part of a larger history, resonating outward into other areas of culture’ (p. 120). Building on Lynn Spigel’s landmark TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television, Bashara positions UPA as a node in the web of influences that connected midcentury art, design, film, and television.1 Established by ex-Disney employees, UPA became a giant of fifties short-form animation, their spare, stylized work winning several Academy Awards and earning a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. For Bashara, UPA was thus ‘a central element in the growth (and resurgence) of a uniquely American modernism’, and animation was at the centre of an integrated aesthetic sphere that spanned and connected genres regardless of artistic prestige (p. 7).
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