Pixar and the Animation Revolution at Year 25

The Era of Computer-Slickness Challenges Hand-Drawn Cartoons

Different parts of the art world mark their histories by milestones along the road, such as the invention of the squeezable paint tube in 1841. For animated movies (also called feature length cartoons), that landmark was the introduction of computer generated animation.

            That came just 25 years ago. It happened in a little studio on the east side of the San Francisco Bay at a company later to be called Pixar. The name, of course, derives from the pixel, which is the tiny electronically-generated square of color that makes up computer imagery on a film or on our computer monitor screens.
            The movie-going public, especially families with children, has had no doubts about the benefits of the Pixar revolution. The company produced a raft of memorable and entertaining movies (and other studios followed suit). Pixar began with “Toy Story” in 1995 (done in cooperation with the Disney Studios). This year Pixar released its 12th feature film, the sequel titled “Cars 2.”
            When the computer animation revolution was born, Pixar was struggling to sell a small animation computer product. To promote its capabilities, one of the staff produced a (now famous) short to show at a Dallas computer-graphics conference called SIGGRAPH. That was in August 1986. Titled “Luxo, Jr.,” the computer animated short film told the story of parent and child desk lamps (Luxo brand) playing with a ball on the table. The breakthrough was noticed. However, Pixar still had to prove itself viable by first doing TV commercials.
            What Pixar had done was escape the process of producing thousands of hand-drawn “scenes.” Instead, each frame could be replicated by using computer instructions. Once the basic images are scanned into a computer, it can produce subsequent movements automatically. One artist can produce in a short time what a whole studio of illustrators turns out over weeks. It was classic technology replacing manpower; classic John Henry the “steel driver” verses the steam-powered machine. We can see how quickly a “Luxo” short gave way to vastly more complex, human-and-animation movies such as “Avatar” (2009), which ran nearly three hours.
            The days of hand-drawn animation are still in memory. When the Disney studio revived feature length animation in 1989 with “The Little Mermaid,” it was all hand inked and painted. It was shot frame by frame. “Little Mermaid” was the most expensive art-man-hours project Disney had funded. The investment was worthwhile: it launched the so-called “Disney Renaissance” (a decade of successful animation films) and got other studio going that direction also.
            Now, computer animation is the genie out of the bottle. Anyone with a powerful computer can try it out. Younger Americans, moreover, have been watching this kind of animation since 1995. A growing number of art students at the college level are now seeking degrees in computer animation. Not coincidentally, they have learned that Pixar movies grossed $7 billion worldwide.
            At one art school not so long ago, a painting major produced an animation of her grandmother. The relative had sad memories of the Holocaust. In the manner of the South African artist William Kentridge, the art student did one charcoal drawing of her grandmother and then altered it many time. She took a photo of each change and then load them into animation software on her computer. Because of Pixar, she was able to do this. However, what impressed an art professor viewing the clip was its hand-drawin quality, seen less and less, he said. “This kind hand-crafted animation is making a comeback,” he told her. “Everyone is a little tired of the slick stuff, like at Pixar.”
           In the movie business, Pixar has touted the slower pace and deeper plotting of its films. By contrast, one Pixar founder said, Disney animation feature films such as “Aladin” are all action, razzle-dazzle. It’s spectacle over story. Though Pixar films do not use musical numbers or rely on Hollywood stars for voices, it claims to keep audience attention through longer cartoons by the story itself. Pixar opened the way for animated films to receive Oscar nominations for writing, plot, and dialogue. Its creators found a way to tell stories of sadness, joy, loneliness, loss, and even death through talking toys, cars, and insects.
            For a few years now, Pixar has been owned by Disney. The lament on the 25th anniversary of Pixar’s legacy is that, yet again, a quick technology has made art slicker and slicker. Art becomes formulaic. Push-button convenience produces a slew of low quality animation. Some of it reaches theaters. Most of it floods the Internet. However, the same could be said of the tube of paint. At first it allowed painters to leave their studio and paint out of doors—a real revolution. It produced the Impressionists and other marvelous plein air (open air) craftsmen.
            It also produced all the Sunday painters and amateurs around the world. The benchmarks in any art field, whether in painting or animation, tend to have the same democratizing effect in the long run. What is left is to sit on the rare laurels of being “first,” or to take the old-hat technology and keep doing something extraordinary.

Making Way for Artists in the Science Laboratory

Do They Help Scientists Communicate, or to Make Breakthroughs?

For several years, Oxford art historian Martin Kemp has reflected on the links between art and science in his regular “culture” column in Nature, a top science journal. Recently he looked back over 15 years of proliferation of artists in scientific laboratories. He described the promise to such ventures, with no apparent perils.

            For one thing, artists in the lab might be able to alter science by infusing new ways of thinking, says Kemp, an expert on Leonard da Vinci and the history of science and art. The “artist-in-residence” may also show scientists how to better communicate their ideas to the public. As a third element, Kemp says that sometimes artists simply introduce scientists to a new notion of “process,” since much art is not goal oriented.
            Whatever the case, the art-science connection has tended so far to produce an asymmetry, he explains. Artists who have stints in laboratories often do produce interesting work, and their careers usually advance afterward (thanks to the prestige of science). However, scientists rarely discovery anything new based on art, though they enjoy playing the artist for a time. “Little, if any, kudos is to be gained by the scientist in having a [science-art] project on his or her CV,” Kemp says.
            In fact, the typically arrangement in “science-art schemes” involves an established and financially secure older male scientist with a laboratory playing host to young female artists seeking a career break. So the incentives are quite different, he says. Even so, ever since the debate began in the 1950s over the unhappy separation of science and the humanities—the "two cultures"—these schemes have been important to bridge the gap and win public trust. After all, Kemp says, “Stories in the press reinforce the perceived weirdness of artists and scientists in the public mind.” He recommends a united front.
            In his column last week, “Artists in the lab,” Kemp focused on two of the largest arist-in-the-lab funding programs: Britain’s Sciart grants and Australia’s SymbioticA research center. They represent the peak of a 15-year trend in which, he says, “The notion of artists and scientists collaborating is no longer a surprise, and is a well recognized strategy in the art world.”
            The Kemp reflections bring to mind the many areas of science where art has played a role. One of the most interesting has been protein science (which is about molecules, not eating habits). Protein science blossomed since mid-century soon after the discovery of DNA and breakthroughs in understanding protein as complex macromolecules. Based on the DNA code—another kind of art icon—proteins all the functions of life. However, to understand a protein means to decipher its complex and elegantly “folded” nature. This has become the wild frontier of molecular biology.
            Proteins are long strings of chemicals (amino acids) that fold in an almost unlimited number of ways, although a number of major patterns do show up. Proteins function by how they are folded: the folding exposes all the chemical charges that run all the machinery of biology. The folding is the target of most medicine, since an intervening chemical (namely, a medicine) must attach to a specific part of the protein to shut down something that causes an illness. Unfortunately, proteins are sub-microscopic, and that is why any help that scientist can gain in visualizing, if not exactly “seeing,” how a proteins fold, is beneficial.
            One of the first artists to come to their aid was Irving Geis, who trained in both engineering and fine arts. In 1961, he painted the first image of a simple folded protein (myoglobin in blood) for Scientific American. After that, Geis’s dramatic renderings of the variously folded ball-and stick protein chains—with a chiaroscuro effect worthy of Caravaggio—gave rise to “protein art,” some for textbooks and some for galleries.
             Today protein art continues to expand in elaborate computer modeling art-graphic programs as well as in creative paintings and fabric designs. The folded protein has taken a place alongside the other scientific image that has influenced art, the “fractal” (which led to spiral designs in fashion and poster art).
            The story of Geis and protein art proves Kemp’s point that artists do help scientists communicate with the public and each other. But does protein art, for example, change scientific thinking or lead to discoveries? One recent event suggests that, maybe so. Biologists have been trying to decipher the folds of a protein in the HIV virus. If they understood how the atoms and bonds fold exactly, they could insert a chemical to neutralize the virus. So they put what little they knew of the puzzling HIV protein on the Internet and challenged “gamers”—a kind of subfield of art—to decipher a logical folding pattern.
            In three weeks, by their collective probing, the gamers came up with a very likely solution to how it folded. They used an online game called Foldit, a kind of origami spin-off. “Remarkably, Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality for . . . structure determination,” the scientists reported in the current Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. “The refined structure provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs.”
            This kind of contribution by “art” to the actual scientific progress of a scientific problem is not common, but there’s a reason that it can still happen. As the HIV scientists said, “People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at.”

How Portraiture Can Save Nations (or Advance Careers)

Consider the Effects from the French Revolution to a U.S. Portrait Contest
 

In the days of Terror after the French Revolution, a dark-haired maiden named Thérésia Cabarrus sat in a dank prison waiting to meet the guillotine. With nowhere to turn, she painted the prison guards' portraits, persuading them to help her make urgent contact with her suitor. He was a Mr. Tallien and, desperate to save her, he led a successful overthrow of Robespierre’s terror regime the very next day.

          There’s no telling what a good portrait painter can't do.
         As the story goes, Cabarrus’s “skills as a portraitist enabled her to win over her jailers and obtain the necessary material to communicate with Tallien," writes art historian Amy Freund in the current Art Bulletin, the College Art Association quarterly. "Her draftsmanship, in other words, ended the Terror."
          The Cabarrus drama highlights how portraits help us chronicle events in history. They have always had a social role as well. After the 1789 Revolution in France, painted portraits became vehicles to present former "subjects" as “citizens.” Two years after the Revolution, the number of artists who exhibited portraits in the annual public Salon nearly tripled (to 103 artists showing 252 portraits). The portraits used new gestures, symbols, and compositions, and the so-called “prison portraits” became common enough.
            The Cabarrus story comes down to us vividly because she, shrewdly enough, commissioned her own “citizen” portrait to tell the story of her trials and recall the way her lover, Tallien, rescued the nation. Cabarrus was an astute supporter of the Revolution. She mixed politics, women’s rights and fashion. But her leniency toward the aristocracy (into which she herself was born in Spain) put her at odds with the Terror. She was thrown in prison in 1794, where she languished for several weeks.
            Once freed and upwardly mobile in the new French republic, she chose the politically astute painter Jean-Louis Laneuville to do her own citizen portrait in 1796. He used the rules of female portraiture, but added new features. “By hiring Laneuville,” Freund says, “she allied herself with the kind of male political portraiture he practiced and the kind of active citizenship he pictured." Cabarrus was portrayed in glowing white in a dark prison, sitting amid straw and chains, and (as the title said) “holding her hair which has just been cut” to aid the guillotine.
            Soon after the painting was hung at the 1796 Salon, however, it was taken down. “The portrait apparently recalled too vividly the political passions of the Terror," writes Freund. The bold portrait also inserted a woman into politics. After this, Cabarrus hardly lived the life of an ordinary citizen. She continued to marry up the ranks until she was painted in an imperial-looking portrait of the Napoleonic era.
            If the Cabarrus prison portrait offered in particular what Freund calls “ideological complexity” and an “elaboration of new models of selfhood for a new nation,” in general, it also was an example of how portraiture—and women and portraiture—can play a role in defining the visual story of any country.
            In modern times, one other woman is having an impact on portraits. Virginia Outwin Boochever, wife of an American diplomat, had traveled enough to see many of the national portrait museums and galleries around the world, especially in England, Scotland, and Australia. She noted how they kept the art form vital by holding portrait contests, such as the annual one by the British National Portrait Gallery.
            After her death in 2005, Boochever endowed a triennial portrait contest at the U.S. National Portrait Gallery. Now in its third round, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (which takes submission until October 31) has expanded to become “the first national portrait competition to be held in the United States.”
            If there is a revolution here, it’s not necessarily about women, but rather about the diverse media that today make up a portrait. “The work must be based on your direct contact with a living individual, and the human figure must predominate,” says the contest, but any medium will do (including sculptural and digital). “Portraits are created in a dizzying variety of media.” The contest's goal is to discover that variety, and by previous experience, the submissions should exceed 3,000 works.
            In the tradition of the Salon, once the jury-chosen top three artists are given their award next year (the top prize being $25,000 and a gallery commission), they and about 60 finalists will constitute a vast show at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. for most of 2013. Then it will tour.
            The contest is only the latest effort to spur a revival of portraiture in America. While once the Portrait Gallery had a “ten year rule” to control when personages could get into the elite collection, recruitment of portraits now is wider and constant. Donors can adopt one of 300 available portraits (for $10,000). Or, working with the official curators, sponsors can pay the commission to have artists do portraits of notable Americans that the Gallery still wants to add to its comprehensive collection.
            We can only imagine what Cabarrus and her painter-in-arms, Laneuville, would think of today’s American portrait revival. Actually, shorn of the Terror, the system works remarkably the same as it always has. It is driven by personages, painters, patrons, national celebrations—and exhibitions.

Finding Ways to Talk About American Art

Exhibits That Look at the “1940s” and “Now” Offer Approaches

Is there such a thing as “American art?”

            Obviously, art produced by Americans within the continental United States can fall under that heading. But what about the deeper question: is there an essence to what makes art American? Our best way out of this potential labyrinth has been to define American art in segments: by its periods, groups, or styles.
            That is the solution proposed by the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum in its new exhibit on painters in the 1940s, focused on George Ault, who did a series of scenes of a crossroad in Woodstock, NY. According to the show’s curator, Yale University art historian Alexander Nemerov, the stark and lonely Ault paintings epitomize what 22 other 1940s artists in the show also were feeling, and that is why there is similarity in their styles and their subject matter, typically bleak scenes of ordinary American life.
            What unites the sixty or so drawings and paintings in the exhibit, Nemerov suggests, is a common lament over the war. He includes paintings by Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth to show a similar mood of the times, the mood shared by Ault.
            As might be expected, some critics have questioned whether the exhibit, titled, “To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s” (soon to be traveling to Missouri and Georgia) proves that these 22 artists felt the same thing. In effect, the curator is grouping the paintings in order to point to an essence that emerged at one time in American art.
            When it comes to defining American art, this has proven one of our best approaches. Even biologists, uncertain about the exact evolutionary origins of species, group them together by similarities and with not a little speculation. It is only natural to group American art by its shared moments. If we are lucky, there was even a “school” of artists who said why they produced that particular art as part of their shared American experience. What is more, such groupings transport viewers to a different world, part of the thrill of looking at art.
            Attempts to define American art often provoke criticism. A few decades ago, Irving Sandler wrote a book, The Triumph of American Painting, which was soon attacked as favoring New York’s Abstract Expressionism. Sandler denies that, and today will say, “There’s no such thing as an ‘American art.’” Even the triumphs in America art borrow from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, or from earlier times in U.S. history.
            In any case, by consensus, we have segmented the periods of American art. It began with British imports and colonial folk art. Then came patriotic academic art to celebrate the new nation. The next topics were the vast scope of American nature and the Western frontier. With the rise of mass newspapers, illustration art boomed alongside art academies (imitating Europe). Both produced the best post-Civil War, Gilded Age draftsmen, sculptors, and painters, from Winslow Homer to John Singer Sargent, and the idyllic beaux arts as well.
            After the turn of the century, the so-called Ashcan School of gritty realist painters rejected prettiness with their urban street themes. As the Armory Show of 1913 spurred interest in Fauvism, abstraction and Cubism, Art Deco would begin to shape architecture. Between the wars Socialist politics, the Federal Arts Programs, and migration produced “regionalist” painters, urban muralists and the Harlem Renaissance. The muralists became Abstract Expressionists, seeded by wartime European immigration.
            As always, a reaction was in the wings. America’s neo-Dada and Pop artists challenged the abstract painters by 1960, and the way was open for an American pluralism that mushroomed after 1970.
            One thing is for sure about this method of defining American art in its segments. The more recent the period, the harder it is to define. The leading textbook History of Modern Art has gone through six editions since 1969, and in each, the examples of “important” contemporary art have dropped out in later editions. Our segmenting of art history probably works best with 30 to 40 years of hindsight, when all the dust has settled.
            Indeed, as art historian Nemerov surely realized, that makes the 1940s a fair target to try to present the essence of American art at a time or place. As the painter Ault’s wife later said, he went to paint his precise, austere, and eerie rural scenes to “bring order out of chaos” in his wartime and personally-troubled world. The same order-seeking applies to doing American art history in general, but it takes some passage of time to look back and gain a true perspective.
            Still, we try mightily to define America art as it is today. In the past few years, the painter Eric Fischl has recruited 150 living artists for a major traveling exhibit, “America: Now and Here.” When it is in full swing (awaiting full funding), the exhibit will seek to capture the essence of the present in American art. This will be worth seeing, but according to the test of time, it may not be until 2041 that we can truly define American art in this current decade.

Kandinsky: Does the Pioneer of Abstract Art Have a Masterwork?

Centenary of “On the Spiritual in Art” Turns Eyes to the Russian Painter

Choosing a famous artist’s “masterwork” can be a daunting task. To mark a centenary celebration of the Russian abstract painter Vassily Kandinsky, one group of curators has cast their vote. They chose his 1913 canvas “Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border” as, perhaps, his superlative work of art.
            Kandinsky has become a hot topic again.
           This winter marks the 100th year since he published his influential book, On the Spiritual in Art, considered a central document for modern art and the rise of abstract painting.
           Over the summer, the “white border” painting has been a centerpiece of a cooperative exhibit by curators at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The Guggenheim (the main repository of Kandinsky’s works in the U.S.) owns the piece, while the Phillips featured it in an elaborate summer exhibit.
            For many, the “white border” painting stands for Kandinsky’s final transition from painting objects to painting pure abstractions, in which color and line could do and say everything. In Kandinsky lore, he had his revelation about the superiority of abstraction on one particular day: he saw one of his colorful landscapes on its side, and noticed that it looked better sideways (thus, turning objects into abstractions).
            However, it is believed that the “white border” painting marked his significant shift in practice to pure abstraction.
            As an intellectual, Kandinsky began first with theory. He was an adherent of Theosophy, a metaphysical philosophy that described a spiritual universe in which distinct human emotions, meanings, and dispositions were revealed in specific colors and shapes. He explained this in On the Spiritual in Art, which is a defense of abstract art and a call for artists to play a somewhat messianic role of guiding humanity with that “truth.” Before this, Kandinsky had been a professor of law in Russia. His self-assurance as a teacher had simply been transferred to his new calling in art, which he did not take up until he was 30.
            Kandinsky moved to Munich in 1896 to be an artist. It was during his wide travels over the next many years that the “white border” painting emerged. He had returned to Moscow in 1912 to “sow the seeds of freedom among the artists.” While there, he was impressed anew by Russian folk traditions. On return to Munich, he tried to incorporate two images in particular into a new painting: the three-horse sleigh, or “troika,” and the religious image of St. George the dragon slayer.
            This project, however, produced a bit of turmoil. He did several pencil sketches and an oil sketch to try to resolve his ideas for a perfect abstract painting, but he was stuck for five months. Then, “It suddenly dawned on me what was missing—the white edge.” He put in the swishy white border and named the painting after it.
            The visual effect of every Kandinsky painting stands on its own merit. Nearly all of his paintings, however—especially his earliest ones called “Compositions”—have stories behind them. In the “white border” painting, Kandinsky points out that the long white line at the center of the painting is St. George’s sword. The curling objects in the upper left are the sleigh. He explains that the border color “white” stands for “harmony of silence … pregnant with possibilities,” and adds that some shapes in the composition are “melancholy” and some colors show an “inner boiling.” Kandinsky himself says he was guided by an “inner sensation” and “inner voice” to complete the 1913 canvas.
            This is all very subjective, of course, and has prompted not a few critics to put the overly mystical Kandinsky at arm’s length. Still, we turn to artists such as this Russian wunderkind when the question of inner subjectivity is related to abstract art. The curators for the Phillips exhibit (which ends this weekend) bring the painting down to earth as well: by x-rays, they found that Kandinsky painted over another partly finished painting by his mistress. This was also the start of Kandinsky using borders in more of his compositions.
            Despite his prolific output as a painter, Kandinsky’s greatest influence came through his teaching and organizing (he formed several short-lived art movements, such as the Blue Rider), and by his theoretical writings, typified by On the Spiritual in Art (published in late 1911, but dated 1912). In that work, he gave abstract painters the world over a rationale for their calling: he said an “inner necessity” drives them to paint feelings in colors and forms.
            The other great abstract innovator of his time was the Dutchman Piet Mondrian. Also a Theosophist, Mondrian believed that the straight line was the highest form of “pure” abstraction, contrary to Kandinsky’s more swirling, organic and amorphous shapes (though Kandinsky later became more geometrical). Hence, Mondrian believed that Picasso’s line-oriented Cubism was more “abstract” than Kandinsky’s style.
            As can be seen, the precise origins of abstract art in the early 1900s continue to be debated. The approaching Kandinsky centenary will stir that pot once again. Either way, it is a good season for anyone to look through the art books or Web sites to pick their candidate as the true Kandinsky “masterwork.” The choice is surely subjective.