unheralded accomplishments of Walter Tandy Murch

Monograph on Walter Tandy Murch (2021)

Recently I became aware of the paintings of an extraordinary Canadian-born artist named Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967). I am amazed to think that I had never heard of him before. I am drawn to his work in part because it has so much to do with styles and “ways of seeing” that I myself feel compatible with.

His work has the seemingly effortless charm of collages and assemblages, in which familiar components are recognizable—up to a point—yet disarmingly strange and beclouded. His paintings are not collages of course. They are unforced yet purposeful patterns of paint. The mystery that they induce comes partly from the struggle between the clarity of the thing portrayed—a bowler hat, gears and scientific tools, the backside of a manikin—and a half-rhyming, impending surrounding that threatens to merge. But it doesn’t.

Murch’s very finest works traverse a tight rope on the cusp of genuinely excellent gallery art (not easily found at the moment) and the best magazine illustration. Somehow he excelled at both, and we should not be surprised to find that his work remains formidable whether mounted on a gallery wall, or printed in full color on a magazine cover. Among his most powerful paintings are works that were commissioned as illustrations for the covers of Fortune Magazine and Scientific American.

Walter Tandy Murch / Cover Illustration

In researching Murch’s origins, I was more than pleased to find that he was student of Arthur Lismer (of the Canadian Group of Seven), one of my favorite painters, and one whose well-known works include a masterful depiction of the RMS Olympic, dressed in dazzle camouflage. As in Murch’s own paintings, Lismer is good at inviting us to participate in hide-and-seek. Murch moved from Canada in 1927 to New York, where he later studied with Arshile Gorky, another favorite artist of mine, who taught civilian camouflage during World War II. He was also greatly interested in the dream-like box collages of Joseph Cornell, of whom he painted a portrait in 1941.

While he was always prolific, Murch was never widely known, perhaps in part because he dared to be a “fine artist” when exhibiting at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and yet to apply the very same skills in illustration, advertising, graphic design, restaurant murals, the design of department store windows, and teaching. He lived for only sixty years. In the year before he died, his work was exhibited in a major retrospective at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2021, Rizzoli USA published a full-color book about his life and work, titled Walter Tandy Murch: Paintings and Drawings, 1925-1967. At the top of this post is the cover.

Walter Tandy Murch / painting

Those who are immersed in vision and art—whether fine art or design—are nearly always prone to be devotees of cinema. I certainly fall within that group. Among the films that I admire are The Conversation, The English Patient, Julia, The Godfather series, and many more. That said, as I was basking in the pleasure of having found the artist Walter Tandy Murch, imagine my further exhuberance when I also learned that Murch’s son is the celebrated filmmaker and sound designer Walter Scott Murch. Among his many remarkable films are the few that I have listed above, but there are many more of equal or greater distinction.

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus

did Frank Lloyd Wright design home for Hilton twins

Mark Sloan. Hoaxes, Humbugs and Spectacles. NY: Villard Books, 1990, p. 41—

Born in England in 1908, Violet and Daisy Hilton were perhaps the most successful of all Siamese twins [conjoined twins]…At the height of their extraordinary career the lived in a house in San Antonio, Texas, designed for them by Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Bexar County Historical Commission Oral History Program. James Moore, as interviewed by Esther MacMillan on June 30, 1978, in San Antonio TX—

JM (James Moore): …from the time they [the Hilton sisters] were very young…they built a home out on Vance Jackson Road [in San Antonio].…it was a very expensive house and a very ornate, elborate house, but a very cold house. It was built on a sort of a Japanese or Chinese style, with the curved-up corner, pagoda type. It was built out of blond, light colored brick.

M (Esther MacMillan): …in one reference, it said that the plans came from Frank Lloyd Wright, not that he built the house, but that they got plans…

JM: I don’t know about that.

M: And somebody said that it just didn’t look like Frank Lloyd Wright. …I never saw the house.

JM: I think that was a little bit of…

M: Fluff?

JM: …they didn’t exactly tell a fib, but they sort of glamorized it.

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Sideshow World website at <https://www.sideshowworld.com/>—

When Mary Hilton died, she willed the twins [Violet and Daisy Hilton] to Edith and Myer [Myers]. The Myers relocated to the United States and used part of the twins' fortune to build a luxurious, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home in San Antonio, Texas. Daisy and Violet spent the majority of the 1920s touring the United States on vaudeville circuits, playing clarinet and saxophone, and singing and dancing. The sisters were a national sensation, counting among their friends a young Bob Hope and Harry Houdini, who allegedly taught them the trick of mentally separating from one another.

Frederick Pawla / an unknown artist and camoufleur

Pawla, the surname of British-born American artist Frederick Alexander Pawla (1876-1964), rhymes with Paula. Not surprisingly, it is often incorrectly spelled. That is probably one of the reasons why his contributions to ship camouflage during World War I are largely unacknowledged, although they were considerable.

As one source claims, Pawla was a “highly important” ship camoufleur for the US during World War I, but his name is now “largely forgotten.” There are US government documents in which Pawla is credited with having produced the “dazzle camouflage” designs for various ships, but the credit is all but deflected because he is mistakenly listed as Paula, not Pawla. More>>>

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus

Juan Gris / World War One has been kind to the cubist

Above I have long believed that the truly great practitioner of Cubism was neither Pablo Picasso nor Georges Braque, but rather the all-but-neglected Juan Gris (1887-1927). Above is his remarkable Portrait of Pablo Picasso (oil on canvas, 1912, Art Institute of Chicago). In this painting, the liquidity of the background pretends to threaten the figure, but it always backs off without doing serious damage. Gris must have been prolific because he seems to have produced so much artwork of such heightened quality, and yet he died at forty.

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THE CUBISTS’ CHANCE in Ardmore Daily Ardmoreite (Ardmore OK). August 31, 1918, p. 4—

The war has been kind to the cubist artist. He has his day at last. Timid souls who dared neither to scorn nor praise the sylvan views and staircase scenes of the cubist can now burst forth in unstinted praise of these same designs when painted upon gun timbers, freight car doors and ships, to hide them from the enemy.

Camouflage would seem by divine right to be the cubist’s field. As he once successfully disguised the scenes he claimed to depict, he may now conceal the very surface on which he lays his paint. And the entrancing thing is that the layman can appreciate and enjoy the work quite as much as the artist, which he could not do in the glorious days of cubism recently passed.

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus

canoe in which there is no there / Gertrude Stein adrift

Above This is a strange snapshot of a WWI-era canoe to which someone has applied an amateur camouflage pattern. I would have sworn that the figure on the left was Gertrude Stein, sitting quietly in the back, enjoying a cigarette. Who then is the person on the right? Is that Hemingway? The caption on the original newspaper article source (long lost) suggests otherwise. It reads: "Wearing the camouflage of a war canoe on the peaceful water of Delanco NJ [home of Joe Burk, who twice won the Henley Regatta]. Note how successfully the war paint blends with the shimmering water."

camouflaged ship jokingly said to be the work of scabs

Above This is a wonderfully elegant postcard from World War I. It was presumably published near the war's end or shortly after, c1919. The dazzle-painted American ship is unidentified, but the caption states that it was built in Lorain OH, which is on Lake Erie. Public domain.

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CAMOUFLAGE: A Strange Device in The Bega Southern Star (Bega, New South Wales, AU), February 16, 1918, p. 4—

Many people visiting Sydney have no doubt noticed the peculiar manner in which some of the overseas vessels are painted, their appearance much resembling the results of the labors of a one-year-old baby to paint a summer sunset in 12 colors. The entire vessel resembles a kaleidoscope, as if a giant had thrown handfuls of various colored mud on the ship, and they had been darkened the sun, blotches of different color being painted all over the ship. The object of this strange method of painting is to deceive submarines, it being claimed that the ships adopting it are able to considerably lessen their chances of being observed by prowling U-boats. As one of the boats came up the Harbor recently, looking at it sideways on, it appeared like two rocks with a passage of water between them. The vessel has naturally created a good deal of controversy and interest, and has afforded many openings for cartoonists in a well-known Sydney satirical weekly, such as a cartoon showing a unionist and his sweetheart observing such a ship, and the girl inquiring the purpose of what she termed the “funny painting.” “Huh!” grunted the unionist, “that ship was painted by ‘scabs!’ They didn’t know how to mix the colors properly.”

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus

Wiard Boppo Ihnen / so why a duck why-ah no chicken

In 1933, the art director for the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup was a man named Wiard Boppo Ihnen (1897-1979). His German given name was pronounced as “weird,” and throughout his life he was usually known as William or Bill Ihnen. 

Wiard Boppo Ihnen

He was born in Jersey City NJ, where his father was an architect and artist. He too practiced architecture, but he also studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as well as in Mexico City. On two occasions, he won an Academy Award for art direction, but he is also remembered for other well-known productions, including two of Mae West’s films (Go West, Young Man and Every Day’s a Holiday), and John Ford’s Stagecoach.

In 1940, he married Edith Head, the acclaimed costume designer (he was 5’6”, she was 4’11”). Years earlier, in October 1918 (at the close of World War I), he had enlisted in the US Army, for which he served in camouflage until his discharge in February 1919. According to an obituary in the Los Angeles Times (June 26, 1979, p. 30) he served “in the army” during both World Wars, “as a camouflage expert.”

YMCA canteener recalls french camouflage factory

Above Photograph by Mole and Thomas (Chicago) of 8,000 camp personnel at Camp Wheeler, Macon GA, arranged to form the symbol of the YMCA. The actual dimensions of the assembled group was 385 feet wide x 315 feet high.

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Elizabeth Hart, YMCA Canteener on Active Duty with AEF in France, in a letter to her mother on December 14, 1918, as published in MISS HART CHAPARONES 12 SOLDIERS AT DINNER DANCE: St Louis Girl Canteening in France, Writes She Like Mother of a Large Family, and Her Sister, Clara, Said She Felt Like ‘Mrs. Ruggles.’ in the St Louis Star and Times, January 21, 1919, p. 11—

We first met Monsieur Chazat at Madame Gluntz’s dinner. He is the artist from the camouflage factory…

…Monsieur Chazat made three sketches in all. The men, three who happened to come into the kitchen, were delighted with them and he is coming back next Tuesday to do more. Clara and I made the cocoa as usual but did not serve it out to the Hut—however, I washed cups, opened cakes, mixed new cocoa in the studio-kitchen all afternoon, falling over the camouflage artist at intervals.

Monsieur Chazat went over to the mess with us. He seemed to enjoy it. When he makes our portraits, or rather does them, we shall send them to you. We are going down to the camouflage factory to see him some day soon. Of course, since November 11th the demand for camouflage is low, so the artist has plenty of times for guests. He seems to adore to come to camp—drank cocoa and smoked cigarettes as if he had never seen either before.

walking man camouflaged by the omission of clothes

Above John Walker Harrington, humorous incomplete drawing (n.d.)

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John Walker Harrington, HART, THE RELENTLESS SCRUTINIZER OF AMERICAN PORTRAITS. He Destroyed Some Illusions, but He Helped to Increase The Fame of Our Early Artists, in the New York Sun, 8 August 1918—

…As one who knew him [Charles Henry Hart], I am venturing to write these lines about him because nobody misunderstood him, and therefore, taken all in all, he was a most unpopular man. There is danger, owing to his decided personality, and also because in these days art has given way to dazzle and camouflage, that the great service which this man did for American art will be forgotten for a time.…

hidden pidgin / the camouflage of messenger pigeons

I should think that there are few things more amazing than the variety of birds known as “homing pigeons” or “messenger pigeons.” They were widely used during both World Wars I and II to deliver messages from the field to various behind-the-lines command posts, which they had been trained to consider as “home.” They have been known to be able to return to home destinations as distant as 1000 miles. In addition to their battlefield role, they were also used as mail carriers (called “pigeon post”) by postal services, and by newspaper reporters to deliver stories from the field to the home office.

To send a message, the information would be recorded on a lightweight paper, which was then rolled up and secured within a tube-like capsule (along with a small pencil) attached to the pigeon’s leg [see photo below]. 

Shown above is a page from the January 1919 issue of The Popular Science Monthly, which features a grocery wagon that has been converted into a “home” for a “pigeon flying corps,” consisting of seventy-two messenger pigeons. 

At the bottom is a dog which apparently has been trained to carry a pigeon (in a special container attached to its back) to the dog’s “master,” a soldier somewhere in the field. That person could then remove the pigeon, write a note, and send it “home” to the landlord of the pigeon hotel. 

A wonderfully curious aspect of this is the coloration of the wagon. Looking closely at the large photograph, it becomes apparent that the wagon has been “camouflaged” with paint so as to continue the pattern of the rock wall and the foilage above and behind it. It was of course essential to prevent ones pigeons from being killed or wounded.

Chapter One / Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

Chapter One of FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002) can now be accessed online.

first get stewed then come aboard and paint the ship

Above Anon, illustration of a World War I dazzle-camouflaged ship, from The Illustrated War News (AI colorized).

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Frank Ward O’Malley, The Widow’s Mite and the Liberty Loan, in The New York Sun, April 21, 1918, p. 12—

Astern of the gray transport steams another ship, the second vessel crazily camouflaged—as if the skipper had said to a boss painter, “Mike, you and your whole crew go ashore and get stewed to the eyes and then come aboard again and paint this ship as you see fit.”

ambiguous perspective disguises ship's course in wwi

Above is a wonderful page spread from the February 1919 issue of International Marine Engineering. The article, titled "Principles Underlying Ship Camouflage: Complementary Colors Produce Low Visibility—Dazzle System of Ambiguous Perspective Disguises Ship's Course—Special Color Effects," was written and illustrated by Alon Bement, whom we've blogged about before. He taught art education at Columbia University, was a wartime camouflage advisor, and, interestingly, had a pivotal influence on his student, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe (as claimed by her). His ship camouflage diagrams are exceptionally helpful (there are more in the full article), as is the text. I think it would be fair to say that this is one of the best WWI-era articles on marine camouflage. I have reprinted the article, in its entirety (text and images), in my anthology of ship camouflage documents, titled SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook.

WWI horse striped like a zebra to hoodwink the enemy

Above Photograph from The Illustrated News (London), April 7, 1915, p. 48, with the following caption: STRIPED TO ELUDE THE ENEMY: A PONY DISGUISED AS A ZEBRA, ON THE GERMAN EAST AFRICAN BORDER. This photograph of an officer on active service in East Africa, mounted on a pony which has been dyed with permanganate of potash to resemble a zebra, must surely be the last word in war coloration and the mimicry of natural surroundings, for purposes of invisibility. The tawny tinge of khaki—very much the tint of a lion’s skin, by the way—sufficiently serves for the rider’s concealment amidst the forest shadows. The dying of light-colored and piebald and white horses has become a regulation practice among the cavalry in Europe in particular, as it has been stated, some of the German regiments at the front. In much the same way, heavy artillery guns and wagons are sometimes painted over with broad patches and daubs of the primary colors.

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Roe Fulkerson, “An Old Man in His Dotage” in Crescent Magazine: Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Vol 12 No 3 (May 1921), p. 22—

[A Shriner] came into our village the other day…There was no place to take him so I took him to a lunch club I belong to and there we heard a navy man tell the story of what the Navy did in the war. The man was a good talker and he laid particular stress on the wonderful science of camouflgae and how marvelous it was that they had discovered that by painting a war ship in alternating black and white stripes it completely destroyed the form of it and made it invisible at a comparatively short distance. He expatiated at great length on this. Keep that point in mind.

Then as I had no other addresses worthwhile I took my visiting Noble for a ride out to the zoo so he could look at the camels and sympathize with their lack of grace and explain to them how he, too, in other days had established records for going without water.

While we were looking at the camels we looked in the next yard and there were a lot of zebras with those same black and white stripes that the Navy man was just telling us about and we recalled that a zebra lives out on the vast plains of Africa and that the Almighty had for ages been camouflaging him with black and white stripes to break up his form so his enemies could not see him at a distance! Then we went for a ride in the country and passed over a bridge and were stopped by a gate and a bridge at a grade crossing and how do you suppose they had painted that railroad gate and that bridge so I would be sure to see from a distance and not run into them?

They had striped them in black and white like a zebra!

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Below WWI photograph of British soldiers in France. At the right is a captured German sentry box, marked by alternating stripes.