before camouflage / modernists denigrated as crazy

Above Full-page article on Futurism in The Sun (New York), February 25, 1912.

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WAY TO TREAT THEM in The Stanstead Journal (Stanstead, Quebec), March 25, 1926—

"The way to treat cubism and dadaism and surrealism and all the other catch-penny fads is to laugh at them," sald [Guy] Pene du Bois [1884-1958], the art critic, at a dinner in New York.

"A super-realistic painter was giving an exhibition. He buttonholed a well-dressed chap—a good prospect, as they say in the business world—and led him up to a picture and began:

"'This will show you, old man, the thing I'm after. We super-realists, you see, strive for the purgation of the superfluous, we paint esoterically and not exotically, portraying nothing but the aura or inner urge. Do you follow me?'

"'Follow you?' said the prospect. 'Gosh, I'm ahead of you. I came out of the bug house last Monday.'"

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

Olivette's mysteries | To be clasped to Flanders mud

The Mysterious Olivette (1918)

Above A photograph (with digital coloring) of The Mysterious Olivette, shown “dancing the Diablo Tarantella in the third act of The Lilac Domino at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool UK. Published in The Bystander on March 20, 1918, p. 609, the headline caption simply read Of Course it’s Camouflage!

And below is an excerpt from a column in the same issue, p. 594—

And what [for soldiers on leave if] there were no camouflage dances? For a camouflage dance, you know, is just exactly like other dances, only, for camouflage, there’s a gramophone instead of a band, and sandwiches instead of quail, and you wear, if possible, a “simple” frock, for you never quite know if someone almost straight from the trenches won’t arrive, and to be clasped close to Flanders mud in white tulle or rose-pink ninon is—well, in any case, rather nice, really.

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And alas, one of our favorite old-timey comedy lines (an exchange between dancers)—

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m a little stiff from badminton.”

“I don’t care where you’re from. You’ll never dance with me again!”

To camouflage the starkness of man-dealt horrors

WWI camouflaged troop ship loading (c1918)

Bertram Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera. New York: Stein and Day, 1963, pp. 95-96—

Cubist disputes were at the flood in Paris in 1914. The gabble was rising higher and higher, when it was stilled by the cannon’s roar. All at once, M. Bourgeois recognized that M. Artiste might be useful after all: to draw recruiting posters; to use his power of accenting and distorting and concentrating reality to make war's horrors (as the enemy waged it, of course) more vivid and, if possible, more horrible; to use brush and paint and optics to make solid forms like trucks and cannon merge with their background; to camouflage the starkness and irrevocability of unnatural man-dealt death by adorning it with laurel leaves; at the very least, he might find a lowest common denominator with all able-bodied males of proper age and exchange brush for gun, thereby becoming, at last, a “useful” member of society. Art, in one form or another, enlisted or was drafted for the duration, and reintegrated into a disintegrating society.

Diego Rivera (1910)

Cubicular camouflage | the blossoming of crazy quilts

Above Still image from a Pathé film titled Rigadin Cubist Painter (1912).

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Caught the Cubist Fashion in Baltimore Sun (Baltimore MD), June 22, 1918—

The camoufleur is having engagements at this port changing the appearance of the local fleet of steamers that enter the war zone declared by the U-boats on this coast. One arrived yesterday from the south so completely disguised by the cubist artist as not to be recognized by agents of her line. Others belonging here are being camouflaged.

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Anon in Sioux City Journal (Sioux City IA), August 29, 1921—

Little is seen or heard nowadays about the writers of vers libre ["free verse"] or the cubist artists. Maybe they have gone where they belong—to Camouflage.

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PARIS PUTS ARTISTS IN ARMY TO CAMOUFLAGE TRUCKS, TANKS, CANNON: Cubists, Surrealists and Futurists Put Fantastic Designs and Theories Into Practice in the Scranton Times-Tribune (Scranton PA), September 22, 1939—

Cubist, surrealist, modernist, futurist, realist, and naturalist painters who once cluttered Montparnasse terraces are in the army as camouflage artists.

Canvases and theories have been put aside. Long-haired, bearded, shabbily-dressed dreamers have left attics to become clean-shaven, neatly-dressed army men.

Trucks, tanks, armored cars, motorcycles, cannon and staff cars are blossoming with fantastic crazy-quilt designs done in reds, blues, greens, and ochres. Many-schooled cafe arguments have turned into a joint pooling of ideas to befuddle the enemy.

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Says "Abstractionist" Painter Should Make Camouflage Experts, in Mason City Globe Gazette (Mason City IA) January 8, 1942—

[Laszlo Moholy Nagy, founder and director of the New Bauhaus school in Chicago], addressing a Drake University audience [yesterday in Des Moines], explained:

"The cubist painters' angular pictures often are the most confusing thing in art to the layman and they are the most talented to turn out camouflage which will confuse the enemy."

"White outs," a system of confusing enemy planes by careful illumination and reflections, would be much more effective than black outs, he declared.