{"data":{"id":"13466","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":13466,"topgoose_id":3008,"tms_id":13466,"display_name":"Mary Ellen Bute","sort_name":"Bute Mary Ellen","display_date":"1906–1983","begin_date":"1906","end_date":"1983","biography":"\u003cp\u003eTrained as a painter at the Pennsylvania\nAcademy of the Fine Arts in the 1920s,\nMary Ellen Bute identified with the dominant\nconcerns of the modernist avant-garde\nof that time: an eagerness to move\ntoward abstraction, a desire to capture\nthe frenetic pace of modern life, and an urge\nto represent movement and duration\non canvas. Bute initially sought to express\nmotion and the structures of musical\ncomposition in painted abstractions of color\nand light, but she soon grew disillusioned\nwith painting and turned to film. As she\nexplained: “I felt an overwhelming urge to\ntranslate my reactions and ideas into\na visual form that would have the ordered\nsequence of music. . . . Painting was\nnot flexible enough and too confined\nwithin its frame.”\n\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt was for her “visual symphonies”\nthat Bute ultimately gained both critical and\npopular acclaim. This work, her first color\nfilm, features animated shapes enacting a\nsimple plot against the musical background\nof J. S. Bach’s \u003cem\u003eToccata\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eFugue in D\nMinor\u003c/em\u003e. The “hero” of the story is an\norange triangle that attempts to escape\nthrough a series of scrims—a swirling\nblue-green plane, black grids that spin and\noscillate, and willowy lines that trap the\ntriangle against the blue background. In the\nfinal frames, the protagonist escapes the\npatterned prison and floats balletically\ninto a blue-and-black mist. Bute’s formally\nrigorous yet high-spirited films were\nexhibited at Radio City Music Hall during\nthe 1930s, making them some of the\nmost widely seen avant-garde films in the\nUnited States at the time.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":false,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500472645","wikidata_id":"Q3296168","created_at":"2017-08-30T17:41:53.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-31T07:02:52.529-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/13466/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/13466/exhibitions"}}}}