Ahead of the Mr Bruce Conner retrospective at New York City's MoMA this July, we reflect on the impact of the pioneering American filmmaker and artist.

You think that Madonna or Duran Duran pioneered the video clip? Think again. Way back in 1958, 23 years before the launch of MTV, the American artist Mr Bruce Conner produced “A MOVIE”, a 12-minute jump-cut collage of B-movies, car crashes and war planes set to a sprightly soundtrack. In subsequent clips – 1961’s “COSMIC RAY”, in which found footage of gyrating go-go dancers is spliced to Mr Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say’, or 1976’s “CROSSROADS”, featuring spookily beautiful slow-mo shots of mushroom clouds – Mr Conner blended the dreamlike qualities of surrealist movies like Messrs Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s “Un Chien Andalou” and the breezy esprit of pop art. His combination of these movements resulted in jittery mini-masterpieces that riffed on post-war American society, from its ascendant consumer culture to its dread of nuclear apocalypse – while paving the way for Mr Simon Le Bon and co to pose decadently on luxury yachts.

Mr Conner’s 50-year career – he died in 2008 – is celebrated with his first full retrospective, Bruce Conner: It’s All True, opening next month at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It will show the full breadth of his range, from his films and videos to paintings, photographs, assemblages and performances. Mr Conner initially made his name in the burgeoning California art scene of the 1950s, and there’s a strong countercultural strain running through his oeuvre, from trippy 1960s clips like “LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS”, scored with The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”, to the punkish cut-ups of sculptures like the notorious “CHILD” – a diminutive human figure in black wax, wrapped in nylon stockings and screaming like one of Mr Francis Bacon’s popes.

But for all the objects on display, it’s likely to be Mr Conner’s innovative moving images that are the big attraction, a partiality he acknowledged when he said that “at some point, I went from an artist who dabbled in film to a filmmaker who dabbled in art”. And while he went on to make some promo clips himself – for Devo, and Brian Eno and David Byrne among others, though their typically lo-fi aesthetic was the antithesis to standard pop video high-gloss – he had a tart, three-word riposte to anyone who might dare to suggest that he was the ‘Father of MTV’: “Not my fault.”

Bruce Conner: It’s All True is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 3 July