Robert Breer

Robert Breer is both an artist and an animator. He lived in Paris from 1949 until 1959, and it was there that he started painting. FORM PHASES (1952) was one of his first films. He used an old Bolex camera for his earlier films, which were simple stop motion studies based on his abstract paintings. He began to experiment with flip books. These animations were done on 4”x6” cards. These cards have become the standard for all of Breer’s work even today. Breer’s early work was influenced by various European modern art movements of the early 20th century. Breer was associated with the Denise Rene Gallery, which specializes in geometric art. Here he also saw the abstract films of such pioneers as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman, and Fernand Léger. Breer acknowledges his respect for this purist, “cubist” cinema that uses geometric shapes moving in time and space. In Paris, in 1955, he helped organize and exhibited in a show called “Le Mouvement.” This paved the way for new cinema aesthetics. In the late 1950s Breer returned to the U.S. He taught at Cooper Union between 1971 and 2001.