Artist Spotlights
Oskar Fischinger, 1900-1967
Films located at IU Libraries Moving Image Archive
Fischinger was a pioneer of Gasparcolor, a process by which film was double-coated with a cyan layer on one side and two layers of dyed magenta on the other side. This process made the resulting film brilliant in color and stable. IU Libraries Moving Image Archive’s collection has four of Fischinger's films, one of which is digitized and embedded below (Radio Dynamics 1942), and they are all done in Gasparcolor. Both Gasparcolor and Fischinger became victims of the Nazi Regime through forced immigration and economic hardship. Fischinger’s films remain as love letters to this incredible process of coloring film and experimentation in the face of adversity.
Radio Dynamics
Articles
Books
Optical Poetry by
"Optical Poetry" is a biography of the painter and experimental filmmaker Oskar Fischinger. Active in avant-garde art circles in Germany between the two world wars, Fischinger and his family would emigrate to Los Angeles just ahead of the Nazis' denunciation of degenerate art. Fischinger's pioneering experiments in Visual Music and the melding of graphic arts, abstract design, and sound were instrumental in shaping animation into an art and cinematic form and inspiring animators to pursue its aesthetic potential. An accomplished representational animator who eventually worked uneasily under contract for Paramount, MGM, and Disney, Fischinger produced numerous abstract animated films over his lifetime, invented machines such as the "Wax Machine" and the "Lumigraph" for creating images, and became an accomplished and influential abstract painter. A labor of love for author William Moritz and the product of decades of research, Optical Poetry also includes filmography and testimonials from those who knew or were influenced by Fischinger.
Call Number: PN1998.3.F57 M64 2004ISBN: 9780253343482Publication Date: 2004-05-12
Oskar Fischinger by
A richly illustrated monograph exploring the position of Fischinger's abstract film language within the international avant-garde The German-American filmmaker Oskar Fischinger is one of the main protagonists in the history of animation and abstract cinema. From the 1920s onward, this pioneer of visual music coupled abstract images with music and rhythms, long before the arrival of the music video. Fischinger was a true virtuoso who created complex animated patterns that develop dynamic rhythms, harmonies, and counterpoints. He played an important and influential role in the development of early abstraction in film during the interwar period, amid artistic movements such as Orphism (Kupka, Delaunay), Neo-Plasticism (Mondrian, Van Doesburg), Suprematism (Melevich), and Futurism (Marinetti, Boccioni). In 1926 he began working with multiple-projector performances, creating some of the earliest cinematic immersive environments. The book examines his animation and painting, his use of music, his experiences in Hollywood, and his influence on today's filmmakers, artists, and animators, and features previously unpublished documents including essays by Fischinger himself.
Call Number: PN1998.3.F57 O85 2012ISBN: 9780500970515Publication Date: 2013-09-09
Websites
Leonard Baskin, 1922-2000
Artworks located at the Eskenazi Museum of Art
Baskin was the son of a rabbi and served in the United States Army during WWII. As a result, when he returned to the US and his artistic career after the war, Baskin found himself drawn to the subject matter of the Holocaust in his art. Many of his woodcuts, as well as his Dead Men series from the 1950s, have themes of death, Jewish persecution, and peace. However, it was not until the 1990s and his Holocaust Woodcut series that Baskin explicitly dealt with the Holocaust in his art.
Articles
- "Leonard and Ted (and Me)"by Richard Michelson
- "Leonard Baskin: The Artist as Counter-Decadent"by Robert Spence
- "The Necessary Image: From the Iconologia of Leonard Baskin"by Sidney Kaplan
Books
The Complete Prints of Leonard Baskin by Call Number: NE539.B3 A4 1984ISBN: 0821215620Publication Date: 1984-07-01
Leonard Baskin, The Great Birdman: A Conversation with Judith Baskin and Kenny Helphand
This video is only viewable on YouTube. Click the photo or title above to navigate to the video.
Tana Kellner, 1950-
Artists' Books can be requested through IU Libraries (IUCAT)
Learn more about how to look up Artists' Books here.
As the daughter of Holocaust survivors and a child of communist Czechoslovakia, Tatana Kellner's artworks focus on politics, economy, environment, and social justice issues. Kellner seeks to engage the viewer through her artworks, and as a result, she primarily creates artists' books and installations. However, she also produces paintings and photographs.
Artists' Books
Unlike an art book, catalog or monograph that tend to showcase artworks created in another medium, the term ‘artists’ books’ refers to publications that have been conceived as artworks in their own right. These ‘projects for the page’ are generally inexpensive, often produced in large or open editions, and are democratically available (Printed Matter, Inc.).
- "B 11226, Fifty Years of Silence: Eugene Kellner's Story" byCall Number: N7433.4.K449 B4 1992Publication Date: 1992One of two volumes preserving the author's parent's memory of internment in several concentration and extermination camps during World War II.
- "71125, Fifty Years of Silence: Eva Kellner's Story" byCall Number: N7433.4.K449 S49 1992Publication Date: 1992
