ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

limbs could be manipulated together or separately. 206 While Bufano was correct that
some objects reflect his progressive model, he surveyed far too few to constitute
conclusive evidence of a developmental process, and neglected inconsistencies.
But Bufano was not an historian. He was a puppeteer whose apperceptions of
some representative puppets embedded his artistic principles with a progressionist
perception. He saw himself as a modern heir to a long process of development, and this
drove him to produce increasingly elaborate objects throughout his career.
Indeed, Bufano was New York’s most acclaimed puppeteer during the 1930s. 207
He began with detailed life-size and sub-life-size puppets for such high-culture
productions as Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Manuel de Falla’s opera El Retablo de
Maese Pedro. He quickly progressed to his greatest innovation, the megapuppet, or what
Bell calls the over-life-size marionette. From his thirty-five foot Jumbo for the Billy Rose
Circus Musical (1935), to his woolly mammoth and dinosaur puppets for Thorton
Wilder’s The Skin of our Teeth (1944), Bufano was “clearly the most spectacular figure
of the puppet renaissance.” 208 His Hall of Pharmacy exhibit carried the title From
Sorcery to Science. It lasted thirty minutes, playing continuously throughout the day, on
a revolving stage dressed as a medicine cabinet. It featured original music by Aaron
Copeland.
Like Sarg, Bufano regularly pushed the puppetry envelope. Unlike Sarg or
Hastings, Bufano did not pursue more detailed verisimilitude. Bufano embraced the most
206 Ibid., 499.
207
John Bell, Strings, Hands, and Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit: Detroit Institute
of the Arts, 2000), 64.
208 Ibid., 64.
159