Georgia O'Keeffe / Her Teacher Was a Camoufleur

Ship Camoufleur Alon Bement

Above We have posted at various times about American artist Alon Bement (1876-1954). He taught art education at Columbia University, where, according to the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, he had an important influence on her when she was his student. 

During World War I, Bement was a civilian camoufleur for the US Shipping Board, in the course of which he worked with William Andrew Mackay in New York. He wrote at least four magazine and news articles on ship camouflage, in which he also talked about how camouflage could be useful in everyday life (in painting ones house, for example, or in choosing fashionable clothing to wear). 

Only recently have we found yet another article—not written by him—in which he was interviewed about people’s hands, in which he asserted that hands “reveal ones personality as clearly as does the face.” 

The article was published in The New York Sun, September 21, 1919, p. 10. It includes a portrait photograph (shown above) of Bement. At first glance, it appears that he might be holding a model of a camouflaged ship, but a closer look reveals that he is instead holding an artist’s palette.

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From LETTERS FROM READERS OF THE NEWS in Des Moines News (Des Moines IA), September, page 4—

CAMOUFLAGE AGAIN—Now, patrons, this camouflaging isn't such a new. It's been cavorting around these quarters for some time, but it's never been labeled. The butcher puts his wrists on the scale with the round steak, and the camouflaged wrists toll up also as round steak.

The grocer camouflages the berries to look like a healthy boxful by putting the big boys on top and it looks like a quart box but it’s been camouflaged; the bottom has been given a lift. The summer time is harvest time for camouflage salve among the vacation Wilburs and Tessies—y'know, around the beaches, etc.

A Wilbur hung up in noisy togs camouflages himself to some Tessie as a regular devil millionaire’s son, and she vise worser, and, when the twin weeks are went neither one lets loose on the camouflage. He hikes back to reading gas meters and she hikes back to the glove stall.

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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

 

William Andrew Mackay

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.

Stinemetz Knew Stieglitz | WWI Ship Camouflage

Alfred Stieglitz, Hands of Helen Freeman (c1920)

Everyland, an American monthly periodical published by Christian missionaries, was self-described as "a magazine of world friendship for boys and girls." Among its various activities, it sponsored drawing contests. In its June 1920 issue (Vol 11 No 6), it included the following paragraph—

Morgan Stinemetz…is our Art Editor. During the war, he was in the camouflage service of the navy. It is he who will judge the results of the drawing contests, so look out for him!

So who was Morgan Stinemetz? In addition to that page in Everyland, I've found two other sources. One is a multi-page article by Louise Davis, titled ARTIST'S RETREAT: Morgan Stinemetz, who dropped an illustrator's career to become Methodist Publishing House art editor, is a man who finds joy in country life. Published in The Nashville Tennessean Magazine on September 7, 1952 (pp. 6-7, 18-19), it was illustrated by eight photographs of the artist and his artwork, interwoven with interview excerpts. I also found a newspaper obituary that was featured in the Nashville Tennessean on August 20, 1969 (p. 23). He had died at a nursing home in Nashville two days earlier.

Stinemetz was born in Washington DC in 1886. His grandfather, Major Thomas P. Morgan, was one of the first DC police commissioners. His father-in-law was an important DC publisher. As a child, Stinemetz had been interested in animals, as well as in painting and drawing. He studied at the Corcoran School of Art in DC, the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia with Thomas P. Anshutz, a student and later a colleague of Thomas Eakins.

From Philadelphia, Stinemetz returned to New York, where (these are Louise Davis' words) "cubism and other various other 'isms' that startled the new century were taking a firm hold. He experimented with all of them and had his paintings in numerous shows, including the first International Art Show at the Armory in New York in 1913, when Matisse and Picasso were first shown in this country."

He became interested in the literary excursions of Gertrude Stein, and developed a friendship with Alfred Stieglitz, photographer, gallery owner, and the publisher of Camera Work. In 1916, Stieglitz met the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and soon after they became a pair. It is interesting to note that in the years just prior to this, O'Keeffe had studied with an art educator (and an advocate of the theories of Arthur Wesley Dow) named Alon Bement, who had been her greatest influence. During World War I, Bement was a major contributor to American ship camouflage.

As for Stinemetz, he soon became disillusioned with Modernism. Quoting Davis, he became "fed up with the artificiality of the whole movement." At gallery openings, when he mingled with those in attendance, "he overheard them 'interpreting' things into his work that he had never thought of. …They analyzed every brush stroke, he said, and he was sick of it. He gave up painting on the spot," and turned instead to a new career as a book and magazine illustrator. In subsequent years, he became a well-known illustrator for a variety of popular magazines, among them Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Outdoor Life, and others. He especially enjoyed animal illustrations, and eventually became well-known for his drawings and prints of Scottie dogs. Over the years, he moved from the East Coast to Cincinnati, then settled in Nashville TN as the art director for the Methodist Publishing House.

The US entered WWI in 1917, and soon after artists, designers and architects were encouraged to use their expertise in the development of wartime camouflage. Stinemetz was one of those who contributed to naval camouflage. The article by Davis states that "he served in the navy, capitalizing on the tricks of cubism to camouflage our ships so that enemy submarines would miscalculate their aim."  The obituary simply notes that "he designed camouflage for ships of the US Navy." But he may have remained a civilian, since the Navy and the US Shipping Board worked with both military and civilian artists in designing, testing and painting "dazzle" camouflage patterns on ships, both military and commercial (called merchant ships).

Until these references were found, I had never heard of Morgan Stinemetz, much less about his service as a ship camoufleur, so it may be wise to be skeptical of the claim (stated first in the Davis article, then repeated verbatim in the obituary) that "so effective were his distortions of perspective that a record of his camouflage patterns was filed in various museums." Obviously, if such documents still exist, it would surely be helpful to find them.

Postscript (added May 10, 2019): I was mistaken. I had heard of Morgan Stinemetz. A couple of years ago, I gained access to a list (dated September 26, 1918) of sixty-four artists who had studied ship camouflage in New York with William Andrew Mackay. Stinemetz's name is on that list of American Shipping Board camoufleurs from the Second District. This suggests that Stinemetz was a civilian, and most likely not in the Navy.

Ship Camoufleur Alon Bement—Again

Alon Bement, artist, teacher and camoufleur

We've featured American artist and teacher Alon Bement (shown above) at least three times in earlier blog posts. As happens with all of us, he would be all but forgotten today were it not for the fact of his influence on the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. During World War I, he also served as a civilian ship camoufleur, an experience he wrote about in newspapers and magazines. From 1920 to 1925, he was the director of the Maryland Institute College of Art (known then as the Maryland Institute School of Fine and Practical Arts). According to that school’s website, as its director—

[Alon Bement] brought a modernist sensibility to the school, introduced extension courses for high school students, and sent art education instructors to remote parts of Maryland. He made the public exhibitions hosted on campus an institutional priority including one of the first public shows of work by Henri Matisse in the United States.

In the 1930s, he became associated with the William E. Harmon Foundation and served as Director of the National Alliance of Art and Industry, during which he played a role in the production of two educational films, The Negro and Art (1933) and We Are All Artists (1936), both of which are now online.

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SS Aurora in a dazzle camouflage pattern (1918)

Anon, “Navy Camoufleur at Manual” in Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn NY), May 6, 1919, p. 14—

Alon Bement, a camoufleur, first class, of the United States Shipping Board, and formerly a teacher at the Teachers’ College, Columbia University, was the speaker at the Senior Assembly of the Manual Training High School yesterday. At the beginning of the war Mr. Bement, who had considerable reputation as an artist, was called to act as a naval camoufleur. He was sent to Washington DC where he worked out designs for camouflaging ships, using small models for the purpose. If the designs were found to be feasible, they were reproduced on a linen sheet, taken to a shipyard and painted on a ship.

Mr. Bement went into detail to show how portions of the ship were marked out for certain colors by means of a hand mirror when the sun was shining. The camoufleur would stand on the edge of the dry dock and reflect the light along the lines which were intended to mark the borders of the various colors. In this way the apportioning off of the ship was readily accomplished.

Mr. Bement told of other schemes which were attempted to combat the submarine menace such as the construction of an outer hull to prematurely explode the torpedo. This means was hastily abandoned because such a hull would slow down the ship to such an extent that it would fall an easy prey to the U-boats.

He also explained why only the transports, freighters and destroyers were camouflaged and not the battleships. The big fighters were not daily subject to submarine attack so that it was unnecessary to give them their “make-up” and since it costs $3,000 to paint a battleship attention was confined to the first mentioned ships.

Mr. Bement told of how in a captured German U-boat, the British found fifty-eight pages of a leaflet in the commander’s cabin, telling what methods the Prussians were taking to combat the camouflage of Allied ships. With this find, the Allied camoufleurs were able to take new steps to offset the year’s calculations of the Germans.

One of the most interesting parts of this news article is the description of the use of a hand mirror to convey to the painter—whose task it was to mark out on the actual ship the camouflage color divisions with chalk—the location of "dots" from a distance (a process that's all but identical to the use of a pouncing wheel in transferring a pattern from one surface to another). About a year ago, we posted another news account of the same technique.
 

Alon Bement, O'Keeffe and Camouflage

In earlier postings, we've talked about American artist and teacher Alon Bement, shown here in an early photograph. A follower of Arthur Wesley Dow (author of Composition), Bement was an important influence on the young Georgia O'Keeffe (see photo lower on this page), who studied with him at Columbia University.

During World War I, he was a civilian camoufleur for the US Shipping Board, in the course of which he worked with William Andrew Mackay in New York. He wrote at least four magazine and news articles on ship camouflage, in which he also talked about how camouflage could be of use in everyday life. One of those, titled "Tricks by Which You Can Fool the Eye" (in American Magazine (May 1919), pp. 44-46 and 132ff), begins with the following statement—

When you think of camouflage, you imagine it is something that belongs only to war. You probably have no idea that you can literally "use it in your business," that you can employ it in your houses, your yards and gardens, even in the clothes you wear.

He goes on to talk about how camouflage could be used to enhance the look of "a certain kind of dwelling which is as ugly as it is common." He illustrates this with "before and after" drawings (shown below) of a house whose appearance could be greatly improved merely by making some changes "in the eaves, the windows, and the door, the porch, and the placing of shrubbery."


























It is a quaint article, mostly made up of advice on how to compensate for ones physical imperfections, by using clothes and cosmetics to conceal what might otherwise be too apparent.

The article mentions the work of artist and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer, and, at the very end, Bement also talks briefly about his own wartime work with camouflage—

To keep him [the German U-boat commander] from learning our tricks we varied the [ship camouflage] diagrams, put in "jokers," discarded old ones and invented new ones continually. We kept him guessing. And while he was guessing, our ships were eluding him.

In the New York studio where this work was carried on under the direction of Mr. William Mackay there was an elaborate system of testing the designs. We had a periscope, small models of vessels, and various painted sea and sky backgrounds. Some captains of merchant vessels were skeptical about the value of camouflage and declared they wouldn't use it on their ships. But when they once saw, by means of these little models, how we could fool them, old sea dogs that they were, they became enthusiastic converts.

American painter Georgia O'Keeffe

Postscript (February 14, 2014): Since first posting this page in May 2012, we have located a news article from the Milwaukee Sentinel (April 18, 1943) titled MODERN MAGIC TO MYSTIFY OUR ENEMIES. It includes four photographs of civilian camouflage students at the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York. One of the photographs is of a classroom setting in which nine students (seven women and two men) are listening to a lecture by their instructor, Alon Bement, described as "a veteran camoufleur of World War I." Bement is standing in front of a chalkboard, on which has been written the famous passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth in which the soldiers are camouflaged by foliage from trees in Birnam Wood. He is holding a dazzle-painted ship model. The caption reads—

These hard-working students of the art of camouflage are learning how to make things seem what they're not under the instruction of expert Alon Bement, one of the World War l's ablest camoufleurs.

Roy R. Behrens, O'Keeffe Homage. Digital montage (2011).

Alon Bement | Georgia O'Keeffe's Teacher

Camouflage Article by Alon Bement in Washington Times, June 15, 1919

Alon Bement was born in Ashfield MA on August 15, 1876, and died in 1954. He studied in Paris with Leon Bonnat and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, then went on to teach drawing, painting and design at Columbia University, the Maryland Institute of the Arts, and the University of Virginia. His interest was not just in the practice of art, but in art theory and education as well. In 1921, he wrote an influential book titled Figure Construction, editions of which are still available.

He was especially interested in the design theories of Arthur Wesley Dow, whose book on Composition (1899) was widely used in art schools in the early 20th century. Bement is mostly remembered today as a pivotal influence on Georgia O’Keeffe. She met him in 1912, took courses from him at Columbia University (where Dow was Art Department Head), and was even his teaching assistant. It was Bement who introduced her to Dow’s Japanese-influenced approach to design, which O’Keeffe made use of in her work. As documented by Robinson (1989), “the encounter with Bement, and with Dow’s theories, altered Georgia’s life.”

It is less commonly known that Bement was an active participant in ship camouflage during World War I. He served as a camoufleur for the US Shipping Board, and was probably part of a New York-based camouflage team that was headed by William Andrew Mackay. In addition, in 1917-1919, he published four substantial articles on the artistic underpinnings of camouflage. His involvement in the subject is noted in the biographical entry in Behrens (2009). There is a file of newspaper clippings and other ephemera about him in the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Writings by Bement include—
Bement, Alon (1921). Figure Construction: a brief treatise on drawing the human figure for art students, the costume designer, and teachers. NY: Gregg Publishing Company.
___(1917). “Camouflage,” in Teachers College Record 18 No 5, pp. 458-462.
___(1919a). “The Report of the U-16,” in St Nicholas XLVI (November 1918-April 1919), pp. 495-498.
___(1919b). “Tricks by Which You Can Camouflage,” in American Magazine 87 (May), pp. 44-46.
 ___(1919c), “’Camouflage’ for Fat Figures and Faulty Faces,” in Washington Times. American Weekly Section, June 15.

Other sources—
Roy R. Behrens (2009). Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage. Dysart IA: Bobolink Books.
Roxana Robinson (1989). Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Lebanon NH: University Press of New England.