celebrated Hollywood art director was US camoufleur

To my surprise, I have known about Richard Day for years. I simply hadn’t realized that a camoufleur named Richard Day was the same person whom I was aware of for other reasons. As a graphic designer, I have long been interested in the book designs of Merle Armitage, and I knew that one of the books he designed was The Lithographs of Richard Day. Foreword by Carl Zigrosser. New York: E. Weyhe, 1932. While I have sometimes collected Armitage books, I’ve never owned this particular one (it’s not among his finest designs), and in truth I haven’t had much interest in Richard Day’s lithographs (or at least the ones in this volume).

But my interest has been reenlivened—for other reasons. This same Richard Day, as it turns out, was one of Hollywood’s most famous art directors. He was a Canadian whose full name was Richard Welsted Day (1896-1972). He didn’t settle in the US until c1918. Prior to that, he served in World War I as a captain in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which may or may not have included experience with camouflage.

Following the war, having worked as a commercial artist in Victoria BC, he moved to Hollywood, in the hope that he might find work in the motion picture industry. By good fortune, he apprenticed with Eric von Stroheim, worked as a scene painter, and was soon appointed art director of the film Foolish Wives. As his career progressed, he moved on to other opportunites as a Supervising Art Director. In addition to von Stroheim, he also worked with Tod Browning, Samuel Goldwyn, and Elia Kazan.

Day’s work on hundreds of Hollywood films resulted in his nomination for forty Academy Awards, as well as earning Oscars for Dark Angel, How Green Was My Valley, This Above All, My Gal Sal, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and Dodsworth. By the mid-1930s, as a motion picture art director, he was the highest-paid in Hollywood.

When the US joined the Allies in WWII, Day became an American citizen and joined the US Marine Corps, during which he specialized in “camouflage designs and relief mapping techniques.” His final film, produced in 1970, was Tora! Tora! Tora!, which included his reenactment of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which (according to the New York Times) cost the film’s producers “more money than the Japanese had [spent] on the original attack in 1941.”

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