Henry Miller, Remember to Remember. New York: New Directions, 1947, p. 55—
Abraham Rattner and Henry Miller (c1930)
It was in the second battle of the Marne, at Chateau Thierry, while directing the camouflage operations of the 75’s, that [American artist Abraham] Rattner was rendered hors de combat by a concussion which sent him flying into a shell hole. The injury to his back which he then received he still suffers from. Transferred to Camp [de] Souge (near Bordeaux) he took charge of the School of Camouflage which had just been started. All the camouflage work undertaken at the front, and at the experimental field near Nancy, had to do with the utter absence of paint and painted color shapes (known as dazzle painting). His job was to construct actual concealments, structures made of poles, chickenwire netting, garlands of tinted burlap, trees, mud, plants, dummy cannons, and so on. Dazzle painting proved to be too limited a form of deception, ineffective because it did not conceal the basic structural shadow forms. The basis of camouflage was to fool the camera’s eye.
I mention this phase of his [Rattner’s] war experience because, studying some of his earlier work, I had naively concluded that elements of the camouflage technique had crept into his painting. A quality which I often described as “flou” made these canvases contrast sharply with his later work in which the structural element is prominent. It was perhaps the prepossession with disturbing and often dislocating effects of light and shade which created the association. I am particularly fond of the work of this period in which it seems that his watery nature gains the ascendance, for Rattner is a strange mixture of fire and water. In these canvases the human figure blends with the patterns of nature in a sort of shadowy, translucent marine-scape.…
