Mary Ellen Bute

Mary Ellen Bute was born in Houston, Texas, in 1906. She studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1920s, then pursued stage lighting at Yale University’s Department of Drama in 1925, followed by additional studies in art and aesthetics at the Sorbonne in Paris. She worked closely with artists and inventors including Thomas Wilfred and Leon Theremin, developing an interest in light as a medium for visual composition. After moving to New York, she collaborated with composer and theorist Joseph Schillinger and later with cinematographer Ted Nemeth, who became her creative and life partner.

Beginning in the 1930s, Bute applied her training in art, music, and technology to filmmaking, using it as a tool to explore the relationship between sound and image. Over the next two decades, she produced more than a dozen short films that she referred to as “visual music,” combining abstract forms, rhythm, and light in synchronization with classical and other music. She was among the first artists in the United States to create abstract animation and to use an electronic instrument to generate moving images, establishing a foundation for what would later be called electronic and digital art. Her early films such as Rhythm in Light, 1934, Synchromy No. 4: Escape, 1937, and Spook Sport, 1939 introduced new approaches to visualizing music, while later works like Abstronic, 1952 and Mood Contrasts, 1953 incorporated oscilloscope imagery to translate sound into electronic form. Many of her effects were achieved through custom-built setups, traditional animation techniques, and simple materials such as mirrors, cellophane, and glass, allowing her to control light and movement with precision.

Bute’s works were screened in major venues such as Radio City Music Hall and art theaters across the United States. Her films have recently become the focus of renewed attention through exhibitions including America Is Hard to See – Free Radicals at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2015, Women in Abstraction at Centre Pompidou and Guggenheim Bilbao in 2021; Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art at the Kunsthalle Prague in 2022; Art in Motion at ZKM, 2018 as well as a retrospective of her films presented by the Center for Visual Music at venues worldwide including the Whitney Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane;  and others. In 1965, she completed Passages from Finnegans Wake, her first live-action feature, and the first cinematic adaptation of James Joyce’s novel, which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. A founding member of the Women’s Independent Film Exchange, Bute remained dedicated to filmmaking, working in New York City throughout her career, until her passing in 1983.