Fischinger spent half a century working out a single, ambitious proposition — that the abstract painted image, set in motion in synchronization with music, could function as a complete art form in its own right — and the films and paintings he produced in pursuit of that proposition are among the foundational documents of twentieth-century abstract animation, music video, and visual music.
Fischinger came to art from inside the German technical and craft traditions. The apprenticeships and engineering training of his early years gave him the practical and mathematical foundation that would underlie his later inventions. The introduction to Ruttmann's abstract films — at that point one of the few sustained European experiments in non-representational cinema — gave him a direction, and his early Berlin years produced the first of his technical innovations and the animations that established his reputation.
The Berlin period of the 1920s and early 1930s was the decisive moment of his early career. The Studies — distributed to first-run cinemas around the world — moved his work widely through the European avant-garde of the period. The special effects he produced for Fritz Lang's Frau im Mond extended his work into the German Expressionist cinema of the late silent and early sound period.
The Nazi seizure of power and the Reich's hostility to abstract art forced his emigration to the United States. The Hollywood years that followed produced some of his most ambitious work — An Optical Poem (1937) for MGM, the contested Bach sequence for Disney's Fantasia, and the long postwar work on the Motion Painting series — but were marked by sustained conflict with the studios over creative control. He left each major studio engagement in turn and ultimately worked independently for the rest of his career.
His later work concentrated on painting and on the development of the Lumigraph, a kinetic light-and-color instrument that he invented in the late 1940s and patented in 1955. The instrument produced imagery by pressing against a rubberized screen that protruded into a narrow beam of colored light, allowing a performer to play visual compositions in real time. The Lumigraph extended his lifelong investigation of the relationship between movement, color, and music into a live performance medium, and it appeared notably in the 1964 science-fiction film The Time Travelers.
His position today is settled at the highest level of twentieth-century abstract animation. He is widely recognized as the foundational figure of visual music, his films are studied as primary documents of early abstract animation and as anticipations of music video and computer graphics, and his approximately eight hundred paintings have continued to be exhibited and collected internationally in the decades since his death.