Solomon Solomon solemnized / two babies not one

Solomon J. Solomon, Self-Portrait

There were two British painters (unrelated) whose family name was Solomon. Both were well-known around the turn of the 19th century, but their reputations were distinct. Both were from Jewish families, and each faced challenges from the start.

The first, named Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. He was from a prominent family, and was an undoubtedly capable artist. But his life was ruined by a series of highly public scandals having to do with sexual licentiousness and alcoholism.

The second was Solomon J. Solomon (1860-1927), who was also an excellent painter, and one of the few Jewish artists to be elected to the Royal Academy. His personal reputation was beyond reproach, and indeed he became a hero of sorts during World War I when he was the first person to be placed in charge of British army camouflage. He was also the author of what may have been the first book on military camouflage, titled Strategic Camouflage.

Unfortunately, it was not uncommon for the public to confuse the two Solomons, so that “the good Solomon” was besmirched by being mistaken for “the bad Solomon.” There is a brief turnabout reference to this on page 103 of the autobiography of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of reveries over childhood and youth, the trembling of the veil, and dramatic personae. New York: Macmillan, 1953), in the following passage—

All [a certain group of artists] were pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon the pre-Raphaelite painter, once the friend of [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti and of [Algernon Charles] Swinburne, but fresh now from some low public house. Condemned to a long term of imprisonment for a criminal offense, he had sunk into drunkenness and misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man who mistook him, in the dim candle light, for another Solomon, a successful academic painter and RA [Royal Academician], he started to his feet in a rage with, “Sir, do you dare to mistake me for that mountebank?”

Certain contributions made by Solomon J. Solomon in the development of military camouflage are explained in a new short video titled Nature, Art and Camouflage, free and accessible online here (see frame below).

Nature, Art and Camouflage (video)

GTA Links to New Gestalt Theory Related Videos

We were recently pleased to learn that the website for the GTA (International Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications) has set up a page of online links to New Gestalt Theory Related Videos, including active links to our own short documentary films on art, design and camouflage in relation to Gestalt. This is greatly appreciated. 

There is a list of all of all our films  on our YouTube Channel here. There will soon be more.

WWI-era Scenic Film Camouflage at Lasky Studios

Above Photograph of Hollywood scenic designer Glen Dunaway (1895-1923), manager at the Lasky Studio in 1920, as published in THE SCENIC ART IN MOTION PICTURES: Glen Dunaway, Chief Scenic Artist, Explains Colorful Phase of Important Studio Work in Muncie Evening Press (Muncie IN). November 20, 1920. “Mr. Dunaway,” (not to be confused with Glenn Dunaway, a possible relative, who was a race car driver) the article states, “is a camouflage expert…” (not literally) in view of the highly deceptive effects that he creates for filmmaking purposes. Unfortunately, he died of carbon monoxide poisoning (adjudged accidental), as the result of a defective room heater, at the Lasky Studios on April 23, 1923.

Pictured in the same article is a scenic artist named Hans Ledeboer (1874-1962), described as “the most prominent” artist on Dunaway’s staff. He “was born in Holland of Dutch and French parentage and studied art and decoration in Rotterdam and The Hague. Twelve years ago [c1908] he came to America because of the wider opportunities offered by this country for his work… Since coming to America he had achieved considerable fame. In Chicago, he was commissioned to paint Holland scenes for the Onndaga Hotel in Syracuse NY, and later he also did the mural decorations for the San Francisco Exposition, and for that work [he] was awarded a gold medal. For the past three years he has decorated, each year, the great auto show room at the Pacific Auditorium in San Francisco, where the auto show is held annually.”

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Anon, MOVIE FACTS AND FANCIES in The Boston Globe. October 1, 1921, p. 12. Extended portions of this text were published (with attribution to Marvin M. Riddle) in The Photodramatist, with the title "From Pen to Silversheet." January (pp. 35-37) and February 1922—

The studio scenic artist of today is a high-class interior decorator.

In addltlon to this he is an expert camouflage artist and a perfect copyist. The controlling principal in his work, however, is the photographic value of colors. Under the eye of the camera colors are often very deceptive, and often a color which seems lighter to the eye than another color might on the screen register a darker shade of gray than that color.

Often two colors which seem to form a most artistic and beautiful combination to the human eye, will, when photographed, present a most inharmonious, discordant color scheme, which is very ugly to look upon. Only by a careful study and a perfect knowledge of the photographic values of color does the scenic artist avoid such color clashes.

The art of camouflage also is a very important phase of the studio scene painter’s art. He must make the imitation appear exactly like the real. Some of the commonest of such problems are included in the following examples: The camouflage of compo[sition] board square[s] and the proper laying of them so that when photographed they resemble a tile or stone floor; the painting of surfaces so that the photographic result[s] [are indistinguishable from] bronze, gold or other metals.

The artist can, with a few well-placed strokes of his brush, dipped in the right kind of paint, make a new brick wall like the side of a dingy tenement house. He can give to a new redwood panelled wall the effect of an oak panel, hundreds of years old.

New Film / Cook taught Gertrude Stein to drive / 2022

Duplicated from an identical posting on my alternative blog, CAMOUPEDIA , but important enough to deserve it—

I am pleased (albeit exhausted) to say that, as of yesterday, I completed what may be my most ambitious undertaking in recent years. It is a sixty-minute documentary voice-over film biography of the life of William Edwards Cook (1881-1959), an American expatriate artist, who grew up in Iowa, but spent his adult life in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, and Mallorca.

Titled COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive, the film is freely available to everyone here online. More specifically, it is a detailed account of the life-long friendship of Cook with the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is based on her frequent adulation of him in her writings, as well as on the contents of 250 pages of their unpublished correspondence.

Cook was never a well-known artist, but he did acquire some renown for two other reasons: In 1907, he was the first American artist to be allowed to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Later, in 1926, he used his inheritance to commission the then-unknown Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design an early Modernist home (the "first true cubist house") in Boulogne-sur-Seine, which is still intact, and widely known as Maison Cook or Villa Cook.

The friendship of Gertrude Stein and William Edwards Cook (including the roles of their partners, Alice B. Toklas and Jeanne Moallic Cook) was first documented in (my earlier book)  COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier (Bobolink Books, 2005). This new documentary film corrects, updates, and adds to the information in that book.

This film project (as well as the earlier book) was made possible by the earlier work of such Stein scholars as Ulla Dydo, Bruce Kellner, and Rosalind Moad, as well as the Stein / Cook correspondence in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

In 2005, when COOK BOOK was released, Ulla Dydo (the pre-eminent expert on Stein, and author of The Language that Rises) praised it in the following way: "This book jumps out at my eyes, my ears. It comes from everywhere, never drags those even blocks of print that dull the mind. Look at it, read it, let it tease you: It's researched with all the care that keeps its sense of humor and its visual and voice delights. Travel with it, leave home, go and explore the many ways for a book to be a house for living."

The distinguished critic Guy Davenport wrote: "This is as good as topnotch Behrens gets!"

This film is not without humor, and at times it shares surprises. It may prove of particular value to viewers (both scholars and the rest of us) who are particularly interested in American literature, Modernism, Gertrude Stein, art, architecture, horse racing, Harvard, William James, art collectors, expatriates, Paris, Mallorca, the American Midwest, Iowa, art history, the training of artists, Cézanne, Cubism, Picasso, Le Corbusier, LGBT, and gender identity issues.