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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 Scranton Times Tribune (Scranton PA), September 22, 1939—
Paris, Sept. 21 (UP)—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.
The Montparnasse district, with blue-tinted windows and dimmed lights still is doing a roaring business, but most of the artists are gone. Sidewalk tables now are filled with soldiers and others who have found the terrace darkness to their liking.
Some of the artists are unhappy, however. Jean Kisling [whose father, the artist Moise Kisling had a studio in the same building as Amedeo Modigliani], for example, who is known to every terrace habitué, put away his brushes a fortnight ago to fight the Germans. But, as he put it, “I wanted to fight on the Maginot Line and they put me on the subway line.” He was made a subway station guard as a member of the passive defense squad.
He wouldn't mind that particularly, except that he hates the subway and never had ridden on a subway train.
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H. HODIGLIENI in New York Tribune, Febuary 7, 1920, p. 4—
Paris, Feb. 6—H. Hodiglieni [sic Amedeo Modigliani], an artist, who claimed to have invented cubist painting, was found dead in a hovel in the Latin Quarter. He used to frequent Paris cafés dressed in trousers with legs of different colored materials.
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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
