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Jason Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest. University of Minnesota Press, 2015, p. 149—
Given his aspirations, [American artist Grant] Wood certainly could not have missed the many overlaps between camouflage and art. In fact, his assignment to camouflage was not coincidental, as the military sought out those with artistic training especially for such service. Wood also could not have overlooked the challenge to conventional practices of artistic representation posed by camouflage techniques: practices derived from the regimes of aerial vision and photography that necessitated them. The obfuscation and manipulation of observed reality demanded by camouflage diverged from the ideals of naturalism and mimesis that had long guided artists. The development of systems of looking and compositional techniques that indulged falsehood rather than truth threatened to lay bare the fundamental artifice of representation and to deconstruct the very purpose of depicting the world. Artists had always understood that representation involved invention and composition, but camouflage went further by making dissimulation an explicit goal. Camouflage's challenge to naturalism embraced and even surpassed the practices of philosophical and artistic abstraction that infused American and European art during the first decades of the century.
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Below RMS Mauretania, WWI-era camouflage-patterned British Cunard ocean liner, c1918. Digital coloring.
Below RMS Mauretania, WWI-era camouflage-patterned British Cunard ocean liner, c1918. Digital coloring.
