Of all of the segments on The Boing Boing Show, no short had more of a complex production than “The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy.” The film was an idea of Sidney Peterson’s to introduce children to the famous painter Raoul Dufy, whom many of UPA’s top artists admired. While it was a well-intentioned cartoon short, it caused legal trouble with the Dufy family. The short had a history at the Museum of Modern Art and was BAFTA-nominated.
In Adam Abraham’s essential book When Magoo Flew, Abraham describes the tone and material of The Boing Boing Show as ranging from “imbecilic to the arcane.” He goes into great detail about the history of the series and talks a bit about this short, referring to it and others written by Sidney Peterson as the most sophisticated shorts on the series.
Before discussing the short, it should be noted that the UPA style was incredibly influenced by Raoul Dufy. In Jules Engel’s oral history conducted by Milton Zolotow, Engel mentions Dufy’s influence on the UPA style several times. I think Engel’s interview with Zolotow is one of the most important oral histories of any animation talent ever done. With the transcript alone being over 600 pages, it’s an essential reference. Engel, in his over 9-hour interview, talks about how Dufy was influential in the UPA style’s “divorced line,” by which he meant that UPA’s films tried to avoid separating the characters from their backgrounds and designs. Dufy’s design was particularly influential on UPA’s adaptation of Madeline.
The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy was one of the shorts that aired on the first episode of The Boing Boing Show. The other segments that appeared on the first episode were “A Horse of Course,” “Miserable Pack of Wolves,” and the original Academy Awarding Gerald short from 1950. The idea for the short came from Avant-Garde filmmaker and ex-Disney talent Sidney Peterson.
Poster for Sidney Peterson’s appearance at the Carnegie Institute featuring his film The Cage on the cover.
Sidney Peterson developed the Raoul Dufy short as part of The Museum of Modern Art’s Television Project. Peterson wanted to develop a children’s film about artists, and this is what The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy was intended for. The Rockefellers funded these cartoons. Adam Abraham pointed out that there was meant to be more films that Peterson had intended to be at the MoMA. However, the Raoul Dufy short was the only film commissioned by MoMA. It premiered in its television exhibit.
(From left to right), writer and developer Sidney Peterson, director Aurelius Battaglia, and the film’s narrator Hans Conried.
Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television stated that “The Museum of Modern Art remained ambivalent about the Television Project throughout its three-year existence.” As ambivalent about the exhibition as they were, MoMA was even less impressed with the short Peterson and UPA had developed and soon abandoned Peterson’s future projects. According to Berger, the museum demanded that the short be removed from the project because they found that the short did not “further the cause of modern art.” To learn more about the MoMA Television Project, I highly recommend this digital exhibit, available here.
After this short, UPA did two other artist-based shorts, “The Merry-Go-Round in the Jungle” and “The Day of the Fox: A Legend of Sharaku.” Both of these, along with Dufy, were part of the series that Peterson had developed for the Television Project called Meet the Artist. However, MoMA only funded the Dufy short.
The film was directed by Aurelius Battaglia and narrated by Hans Conried. Battaglia’s design and direction is very evident in the film. Battaglia grew up in Washington DC and was the son of Italian immigrants. From 1937 to 1941, he was an artist at Disney, and during WWII, he was a theatrical caricaturist for the New York Tribune. He worked on The Boing Boing Show throughout its run and later became a children’s book illustrator. Battaglia also drew on Dufy’s style and repurposed his paintings for the cartoon.
On the left is the original Raoul Dufy painting, The Orchestra (1942), and on the right is the painting as represented in the cartoon.
The Raoul Dufy short also caused a bit of legal questioning. At the time, UPA was one of the only animation studios to have its own in-house lawyer. That lawyer at the time was Dixon Dern. Dixon is currently retired after a lifetime of being one of the top lawyers in the entertainment industry. His first job in a Hollywood studio, though, was at UPA. The Television Academy of Arts and I have both interviewed Dixon before. In the rest of the article below, I’m using my own conversations with Dixon and their interview. The TV Academy Interviews are often very lacking in substance, but Michael Rosen did a good job with this one. The full interview can be listened to here.
A native of Colorado, Dixon Q. Dern graduated from Stanford Law School in 1953. After finishing law school, Dern stayed at Stanford to teach legal writing and turned his legal focus to intellectual property law. After establishing his own firm in San Jose, he flew to Los Angeles to meet Dick Hungate, who was then representing UPA. Dixon would be hired from there as the in-house attorney. He was hired due to the influx of new legal issues regarding The Boing Boing Show. Dern would stay on staff for 18 months. The cartoon he most remembered was this film about Raoul Dufy.
About the short, Dern said, “After we saw it, we realized that we probably would have to get permission from his widow to show it anywhere outside of the United States because of French international property law.” This was due to the French laws of moral rights. Moral rights in French law state that the heirs of an artist will determine how an art piece is represented. Dern and the UPA staff found a gallery owner who spoke French and knew Dufy’s widow. Even though Dern couldn’t speak French, he understood from the phone that Dufy’s widow was strongly opposed to the project. Dern continued: “So we went ahead anyways and delivered it to CBS with the recommendation that it is not shown in France.” Regarding whether or not Dufy’s widow could retaliate with a lawsuit, Dern said, “Our feeling was that she couldn’t here in the United States, but we didn’t know about anywhere else.” Despite this fear of being shown outside of the US, it was nominated for a BAFTA.
Regarding his time at UPA, Dern told me on the phone that he enjoyed working there and told the TV Academy, “I learned a lot, and I really learned animation.” He spoke in depth about his involvement at the studio, as well as the founding of the Academy of Animation Arts. After UPA, Dixon would go on to become one of the most significant lawyers in the entertainment industry and has been referred to as “The Godfather of Entertainment Law.” He went on to represent the biggest organizations and people in the industry, including the Television Academy of Arts & Sciences, Bob Hope, Desilu, and CBS. Despite this, though, Dixon never really left the world of animation. He would continue to represent many in the animation industry, including Fred Calvert, Film Roman, and, in particular, Chuck Jones.
In 2009, Dixon was awarded the Syd Cassyd Founders Award for his many years of legal service to the Television Academy.
Dixon Dern winning The Syd Cassyd Founders Award (link to the award presentation here.)
Special Thanks to Dixon Dern for his recollections.
Also special thanks to the helpful texts and interviews written or conducted by Maurice Berger, Milton Zolotow, Adam Abraham, Cinzia Bottini, Michael Rosen, and Karen Herman.
And additional thanks to Mike Kazaleh, Jerry Beck, and Strummer Cash Petersen.
Kamden Spies is an animation fan, collector, and aficionado. He received his undergraduate degree in an IDM in film history and creative writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Master’s in Library Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. He currently works in the archives at the University of Georgia.
I’m intrigued that UPA made a cartoon with the title “A Horse of Course,” several years before the debut of Mister Ed.
Dufy’s paintings are very popular with musicians; prints of them adorn the walls of many a music studio. Although highly stylised, his pictures of musicians always convey a genuine sense of motion and proper posture.
I can understand why the Museum of Modern Art was dissatisfied with this cartoon. It’s basically a biographical sketch, focusing primarily on Dufy’s decision whether to become an artist or a millionaire, and hence has little to say about his art itself. UPA rendered several of Dufy’s artworks with creditable fidelity, but this would not have come across effectively when viewed on a 10- or 12-inch black-and-white picture tube in the 1950s. The whole bit about the “invisible moustache” is silly and irrelevant. My favourite part of the cartoon was the line “His originality was rather contagious,” as the other artists slavishly copy Dufy’s canvas.
When you say “The Rockefellers funded these cartoons,” do you mean any particular members of the Rockefeller family, or the Rockefeller Foundation? The Foundation has long provided funding for the fine arts, but the family itself has little involvement in its administration. There are an awful lot of Rockefellers.
The impression I got about the mustache bit was that because a blond mustache sometimes cannot be seen clearly, Raoul wanted to use his art to show things that may not be evident at first glance.
I agree that not much of the cartoon is devoted to his art and his specific style. I love the tidbit about his art being popular with musicians.
The details of notes I had never said, but I assume it’s the Rockefeller Foundation.
This is a short I had never seen before. Who says cartoons can’t be educational and entertaining at the same time? The more I see and learn about the Boing Boing Show, the more intriguing it becomes. A series set would make a great companion piece to the Jolly Frolics set.
The UPA house style of animation works well for this cartoon as well as the narration by Hans Conreid, who despite his excellent voice work as Captain Hook could also be sympathetic and grandfatherly in his tone. While Dufy’s artistic style and intentions are only briefly touched upon, the film does provide a good sampler of his work.
I do wonder about the intended audience. Much of UPA’s work seems too sophisticated for kids yet adults might consider it too juvenile. For myself, if I had been around at the time, I was the kind of kid who savored exactly this type of edu-entertainment. Any time I could be entertained by a cartoon and learn something at the same time was a win-win. As an adult, I feel about the same regarding cartoons of this nature. So, it works for me. But for others? Hm.
It’s a very nice, well-produced short.
Thank you! This is an outstanding essay. I’m always happy to start my day with an intelligent examination of a corner of cartoon history I had never been exposed to before.
This short was included on a dollar store compilation DVD I bought several years ago. At the time I didn’t realize its source, and thought it just another independently produced film that became public domain.
This was screened in an actual theater at least one. I’ve found a listing in a December 8th 1964 newspaper in Sacramento, California that lists this short playing with 1962’s The Doll!
UPA’s final feature, “Gay Purr-ee”, had a sequence displaying paintings of Mewsette in the style of several real artists of the period, with descriptive narration in the form of a letter. Unlikely but just possible this was a conscious nod to “Meet the Artist”.
As a geeky Art School kid back in the 1980’s, I knew who Raoul Dufy was, but I never made the connection between his work and the 20th century Modernist design of many UPA cartoons, That could be, maybe, because I’d never seen this one— until now. I’ve never been a big UPA fan, but this influence is fascinating!
Another painter of the same era who seems to have influenced cartoon design is the American visual genius Stuart Davis
(!892-1964).
His work is usually much more hard-edged than the softer lines of Dufy, but both painters shared the concept of combining concrete and abstract elements. Davis would combine often severe abstract shapes with familar objects like street signs and barber poles and advertising layouts for various products such as razor blades and cigarettes.
He might have known Dufy personally, as he lived in France for several years in the 30’s, and many of his paintings from that period show a strong French influence, including French street sceens which could have easily served as UPA cartoon backgrounds.
As far as I know, Davis never had anything to do with making animated cartoons— but then, neither did Dufy. Someimes, artistic influences “travel sideways!”
This particular cartoon will always be enshrined among my happiest memories, as 10-12 years ago it was a huge favourite of my (now teenage) daughters when they were pre-schoolers – proving it did it’s job of bringing both art and entertainment to a universal audience more than admirably.
They absolutely adored this short, and I genuinely believe it’s style and message opened up many doors for them.
Would love to see an upgraded version available, or better still the whole Gerald McBoing Boing show available – such a ground-breaking, if somewhat erratic series!
Great article. Thanks Kamden