Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons, Robert Breer, 1981. Courtesy of Robert Breer.

While he was working on the film Fist Fight, he met Stockhausen, then working in Cologne on Originale, a performance piece. The composer's work soon came into vogue in American circles and he was asked to perform his piece in New York's Judson Hall in 1964. Breer presented Fist Fight as part of this performance, making the film a visual event in its own right.

Always whimsical, Breer soon developed a line technique related to the free form work of Swiss painter Paul Klee. Such short narrative pieces as A Man with his Dog Out for Air (1958) and Inner and Outer Space (1960) use the dynamics of drawing and line to capture the essence of humor and motion. Time and time again, he relies on the roots of simple techniques of pencils or 4 x 6 cards for inspiration. While Breer rarely uses conventional storytelling techniques, these films have a sense of the quick movements of a Tex Avery cartoon and the wit of an electric comic strip.

Historical Perspectives
Breer continued to search for historical perspectives in his work and discovered the color theories of Chevreul and Rood. He also began a series of minimalist pieces based on number series, which were nonfigurative and based on geometry and formal issues. 66, 69 and 70 rely on formalist images from his early research into color paintings.

The 1970s brought Breer into a more commercial world of animation and he worked for the Children's Television Workshop in 1971 doing animation for The Electric Company. His popular Gulls and Buoys relates back both to the poetry of William Carlos Williams and the early rotoscoping techniques devised by Max Fleischer back in 1916. Breer explored the latter method in order to give a live-action sense to the animated form. Disney and other commercial studios still use this method to animate reality-based scenes. With his new interest in technology, Breer was invited to Japan with other artists to work on the Pepsi Pavilion, making a set of mobile sculptures. While in Japan, he made Fuji, again using rotoscoping combined with Japanese textural imagery.

A Frog on the Swing, Robert Breer, 1988. Courtesy of Robert Breer.