Abstronic

Mary Ellen Bute was a pioneer of visual music and electronic art, producing over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Her films, set to classical music by composers such as Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shostakovich, feature rapidly mutating geometries and combine formal rigor with energetic vitality, blending elements of high modernism with a dynamic visual style. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs noted that Bute’s films were “composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute herself stated that her goal was to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music.”