who cut off your tie at the Art Academy of Cincinnati?

Batchelor and Behrens / Art Academy of Cincinnati

In the late 1980s, I was living in Cincinnati OH, where I was head of the graphic design program at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. It was an interesting place at the time, the school as well as the city, and I have enduring memories of wonderful students and colleagues. After more than thirty years, I am still in contact with some of them.

Among my favorite colleagues from those days was a British-born printmaker named Anthony (Tony) Batchelor, who died a few months ago. The two of us, given the right circumstances, were prone to bursting out with Pythonesque sillyness. I still have a photograph (shown here) of Tony and myself at one of those spontaneous moments.

In 1981, I had published a book called Art and Camouflage: Concealment and Deception in Nature, Art and War. It did not sell particularly well, but it received sufficient attention (as from the Whole Earth Catalog, for example) that it acheived some small notoreity as one of the early books about the role that artists played in the study of camouflage, both in nature and in war. 

Various things happened as a result: In 1988, soon after I joined the faculty at AAC, the school succeeded in obtaining a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to host a community-wide series of activities (talks, exhibits, and other events) on the theme of art and camouflage. 

That same year I was contacted by British documentary filmmakers who were in process of making a film on the same subject, to air on television in both the US and the UK. The UK version was titled The Art of Deception, and appeared as a segment of Equinox on BBC televison (the name Cincinnati was misspelled). The American version, titled Disguises of War, was broadcast as part of NOVA on American Public Television, by way of WGBH Boston. That version can still be viewed online. 

Roy Behrens as interviewed on NOVA (1990)

 

A still frame from that program is reproduced here. It was filmed on an exceedingly hot afternoon on the grounds of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton OH. It was nearly impossible to complete the filming because (being an air force base) airplanes were constantly taking off. I was wearing a purple shirt and an especially appropriate necktie, the top half of which was a contrasting color, while the bottom half was the very same color as the shirt. 

When it aired nationally, I recall that my mother comically asked, “Who cut off your tie?” Another funny consequence is that the next day after its national broadcast, I received phone calls at the AAC, from former students in Wisconsin and Iowa, saying that they had watched the program, not knowing that I was included. One person told me that, “as the program started, I said to myself, ‘This is something that Roy Behrens would really enjoy”—and then, suddenly, I appeared on screen. Believe me, I no longer look like this.

PRINT magazine article on camouflage

Around the same time I received a call from the managing editor at PRINT in New York, the leading graphic design newstand magazine in the US. Would I be willing to prepare a major article on camouflage in relation to art and design? The resulting article was called Blend and Dazzle: The Art of Camouflage (January / February 1991). In no time, that then led to being appointed a Contributing Editor at PRINT, which I enjoyed tremendously for at least a dozen years or 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

oh dear dear der goose dung all over der trouserz

Easily, one of our favorite people is David Attenborough, whose excellent documentary films on aspects of nature we have enjoyed immensely. He will soon turn 95, yet he is still appearing in films, in some of his finest productions yet.

Most recently and of particular note is Life in Color with David Attenborough, which premiered some weeks ago on BBC, and will be streaming on Netflix as of Thursday, April 22. This new series is of particular relevance to those who research camouflage, because it uses the latest filming techniques to determine how the vision of various animals differs from that of humans. This is especially important because it has all too often been assumed that animal coloration can be adequately assessed through human vision. It is a “must see” series.

In the meantime, British zoologist Martin Stevens, whose books on animal coloration (Animal Camouflage; Sensory Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution; and Cheats and Deceits) are among the very finest, has teamed up with Attenborough and the BBC to produce a dazzling, full-color companion volume titled Life in Color: How Animals See the World.  

That said, one can hardly mention David Attenborough without also calling to mind that wonderful story in his autobiography about a “colorful” appearance by Konrad Lorenz on an earlier BBC program. It is a classic, as quoted below.

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David Attenborough, Life on Air. London: BBC Books, 2002—

[During a live interview on BBC, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz agreed to appear on camera, unrehearsed, with a greylag goose. Moments later,] a keeper from the London Zoo walked on to the set carrying a goose which he put down on a low table that stood between the professor and myself. The goose, naturally enough, was somewhat perturbed at suddenly being thrust under the bright televison lights and began to flap its wings.

“Komm, komm, mein Liebchen,” said Konrad, soothingly, putting his hands on either side of the goose’s body so that its wings were held folded down. He was holding it so that its head was pointed away from him. This was sensible in that he was not then within range of the goose’s beak which it showed every wish to use, if it got the chance. But that, of course, meant that its rear was pointing towards the professor and the goose, in the flurry, squirted a jet of liquid green dung straight at him.

“Oh dear dear,” said Konrad. “All over der trouserz.” He released the goose, which flapped off the set and was neatly fielded by its keeper, took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped his trousers clean. Then, finding his handerchief in his hand, in his embarrassment, he promptly blew his nose on it.

He completed the interview with a green smear down the side of his face…

Dazzle Camouflage Animated | Designer Joe Myers

Joe Myers, Dazzle Camouflage (2015)

Graphic designer Joe Myers, who earned his degree at Northern Illinois University, has made a delightful short animation about dazzle ship camouflage. It combines his graphic components with excerpts from a radio interview that was originally broadcast on 99% Invisible. Such fun—it's well worth a visit.

WW1 Ship Camouflage as Hughesual

Above Photograph by Steve Ibbitson of British artist Patrick Hughes, holding an Ames rotating trapezoid window. From John Slyce, Patrick Hughes: Perverspective (London: Momentum, 1998).

•••

In 2011, when British artist-writer Patrick Hughes published a book of his artwork, word play and related contrivances, called Paradoxymoron: Foolish Wisdom in Words and Pictures (London: Reverspective Ltd, 2011), we blogged about his paradoxes, both visual and verbal.

Still amazingly productive, now he's come out with a wonderful documentary film, produced by Jake West, a rich engaging memoir called Hughesually: The Art of Patrick Hughes.

At a certain point in the film, Hughes begins to talk about the rotating trapezoid window of American artist and optical physiologist Adelbert Ames II, and its relevance to his own perspective-related research. It was Hughes who devised an ingenious means (which he calls "reverspective") of painting perspective scenes on odd-shaped inverse surfaces, which causes the painting to visually bend as the viewer's point of view is moved.

In that previous post, I  talked about the link between Hughes' paintings, Ames' illusory window, and the adoption in World War I of a variety of ship camouflage called dazzle painting.

Last August, at an international conference at the Sydney College of the Arts, titled Camouflage Cultures: Surveillance, Communities, Aesthetics and Animals, I suggested an analogical link between the participant-observer's view of the various Ames demonstrations [see news pictorial below] (looking through a monocular peephole from a fixed point of view) and the periscopic point of view of a German U-boat commander (as shown in the slide illustration below).

News feature in Herald-Journal, Logan UT, July 4, 1954

Dazzle Camouflage Film Trailer

Author and designer Roy R. Behrens is interviewed in a new trailer (just posted) of Jonnie Morris' upcoming documentary on RAZZLE DAZZLE: The Hidden Story of Camouflage. The new graphics, pacing and editing are dazzling in and of themselves.

books & historic prints and photographs

Ghost Army Camouflage DVD

Good news! Rick Beyer's excellent documentary on the Ghost Army, the World War II deception unit, which premiered only last week, is already available for online purchase for only $19.95 at the PBS website here.

Jonnie Morris Film on Dazzle Camouflage

Jonnie Morris | Dazzle Camouflage Documentary

Above I've known about this documentary film project since the fall of 2011, when I was interviewed for it. But until today I hadn't realized that this "trailer" is available online at Vimeo. I'm not sure when the film is coming out, but it promises to be one of the richest, most comprehensive documentaries on the subject, and especially on high difference disruption, sometimes known as dazzle camouflage or (more fashionably now) razzle dazzle. As nearly everyone knows by now, it came into widespread use during World War I, initially as a means of throwing off the calculations of German U-boat torpedo gunners.

Spurious claims on websites state that it didn't actually work, but scientific testing at MIT (c1919) confirmed that it did (more about that in a forthcoming post). It is also commonly said that, with the introduction of radar, the practice died out during World War II. But that doesn't seem to be the case, and indeed, on the basis of contemporaneous photographs, some of the most puzzling dazzle designs were produced during WWII, by both sides of the conflict.

This photograph (from WWI) was first published in a magazine article by American artist (and a prominent US Navy camoufleur during both wars) Everett L. Warner. It shows the dazzle-painted SS Congaree (the photo is dated December 9, 1918), looking like a conglomerate of pyramids. This, like many of the best dazzle plans from that time period, was devised by marine artist (and camoufleur) Frederick Judd Waugh. If this photograph looks retouched, it's because it is. It was scanned from a black-and-white lantern slide in Warner's collection (following WWII, he gave slide talks on the subject), on which he had attempted to add translucent color tinting (not very successfully). It has always reminded me of the stage sets from the German silent horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which it predates by a couple of years.

Filmmaker Jonnie Morris will be among the speakers (along with Ann Elias, myself and others) at the Sydney College of the Arts (August 8 through August 11, 2013) at an international conference called Camouflage Cultures: Surveillance, Communities, Aesthetics, Animals.

Film Review | Rockwell Kent

Dust jacket for Moby Dick with Melville's name omitted

Rockwell Kent
by Frederick Lewis, Director
Dundee Road Productions, Athens, GA, 2005
DVD. 170 mins. Sales $39.95
Distributor’s website: http://www.amazon.com.

In 1902, as a 20-year-old art student at the New York School of Art, Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) studied with the painter Robert Henri. He was one of the top three students in the class, the others being George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Given their talents, at the time all three looked forward to promising futures.

Among Kent’s relatives was a wealthy aunt with an interest in art who had briefly been a student of the painter and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer (the "father of camouflage"). By her suggestion, her nephew became Thayer’s apprentice in the summer of 1903, at the artist’s home and studio in Dublin, New Hampshire. Kent fit in remarkably well in the Thayer household, a blissfully fanciful setting which some (uncritical) visitors called “Thayeryland.” In subsequent years, he was a close friend of Thayer’s son Gerald while “Uncle Abbott,” to some extent, was a belated surrogate for his own father, who had died when Kent was an infant. In other than the summer months, Kent also learned architectural drafting in New York, which later, whenever needed, provided a reliable way to survive financially.

Kent's self-portrait photomontage of himself surrounded by Thayers*

A decade later, Kent was dismayed when his work was ignored for the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art—now famously known as the Armory Show—while among the featured works was a controversial painting by the French artist Marcel Duchamp, titled Nude Descending a Staircase. Four years later, when Duchamp submitted an entry to an exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists in New York, for which Kent was a board member, that organization rejected Duchamp’s strange submission because (conveniently) the entry form was not properly filled out. The “artwork” that Duchamp submitted was—of course—his first, most famous “readymade,” an unaltered porcelain urinal called Fountain, signed “R. Mutt 1917.”

It was around that time that Kent grew disillusioned with the New York “art world.” He turned essentially to design, even when he was “designing” with paint on canvas. Not surprisingly, today he is especially remembered as an extraordinary book illustrator (for me, his greatest achievement may be the Random House edition of Moby Dick, which, amazingly, was published initially with his name on the front cover, while omitting the name of the author, Herman Melville); an insatiable adventurer, having lived (and lusted, both within and outside of his marriage(s)) on Monhegan Island in Maine, and in Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland and Greenland; a phenomenally fluent writer; and a person who bravely protested when he was publicly targeted by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the latter’s fabled manhunt for Communist sympathisers. Kent was openly supportive (too uncritically, in retrospect) of the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era, but he was never a member of the American Communist Party. more>>>

* Kent is the large illuminated figure in the background. The five Thayers seated in front of him are (l to r) Abbott (Papa) H. Thayer, his second wife Emma (Addie) Beach Thayer, Gladys (Galla), Mary (Je-Je, Mandarin Chinese for "big sister"), and Gerald (Gra). Kent has given himself a halo, while Abbott and Gerald have elf ears. In subsequent years, Kent and Gerald Thayer were frequent friends, but he fell out of favor with Abbott because of his unfaithfulness to his first wife, Kathleen Whiting Kent, who was Abbott Thayer's niece. For more on this and other images and information, see the Rockwell Kent Collection at Plattsburgh State University. 

Camouflage Artist | Arthur Singer

Birds of the Fifty States

There's a wonderful website called Singer Arts. It's all about the life and work of one of the best known American bird artists, a man named Arthur Singer (1917-1990). Even if people may not recognize his name, nearly everyone knows his work. He illustrated more than twenty books and bird identification guides, notably Birds of North America, and in 1982, he and his son Alan were commissioned by the US Postal Service to produce a two-set series of stamps, called Birds and Flowers of the Fifty States (shown here is the state bird series).

At the Singer Arts website, there is a 9-minute video interview of him with Charles Kuralt, numerous examples of his work, and a fairly detailed biographical page.

Oddly, it doesn't mention what may be Singer's greatest accomplishment: During World War II, he was recruited by the US Army to serve (with 1100 other men) in a top secret unit called the Ghost Army, aka 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. After arriving in Europe, they devised effective ways to deceive the German Army, using sonic and radio deception, visual camouflage, inflatable decoys and a mix of persuasive phony events. A major documentary film about this fascinating unit, titled The Ghost Army (produced by Rick Beyer), is nearing completion.

Camouflage on YouTube

Roy R. Behrens on camouflage

Ghost Army Exhibit and Screening

Fake inflatable tanks and stage production equipment have not been known as popular methods of defense within World War II history, but the University of Michigan will showcase an exhibit that shows these devices as a little-known-but-effective part of the US Armed Forces.

The University of Michigan's Hatcher Undergraduate Library will show a documentary at 7:00 pm March 17, 2010, on the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops [aka the Ghost Army], deployed in Normandy in June 1944. It will be shown along with an exhibit of textual materials and pictures of war experiences. More…