Sunday, November 20, 2022

WWI French camouflage cartoons by André Hellé

La Baïonnette
Above A page of camouflage-related comic drawings by World War I French illustrator and toy designer André Hellé, as published in La Baïonnette, c1916.

•••

Jerrold A. Morris, 100 Years of Canadian Drawings. New York: Methuen, 1980, p. 10—

The lover of drawings has the advantage of being in close contact with the artist’s original concept conveyed in a relatively uncomplicated medium. Drawing, in the widest sense of the term, is the linear element in art least susceptible to manipulation by what [William] Blake called “Blotting” and the Pre-Raphaelites called “Slosh”—we might call it “fudging.” Among painters are many masters of camouflage, what [J.A.D.] Ingres meant when he said that drawing is “the probity of art.”