who cut off your tie at the Art Academy of Cincinnati?

Batchelor and Behrens / Art Academy of Cincinnati

In the late 1980s, I was living in Cincinnati OH, where I was head of the graphic design program at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. It was an interesting place at the time, the school as well as the city, and I have enduring memories of wonderful students and colleagues. After more than thirty years, I am still in contact with some of them.

Among my favorite colleagues from those days was a British-born printmaker named Anthony (Tony) Batchelor, who died a few months ago. The two of us, given the right circumstances, were prone to bursting out with Pythonesque sillyness. I still have a photograph (shown here) of Tony and myself at one of those spontaneous moments.

In 1981, I had published a book called Art and Camouflage: Concealment and Deception in Nature, Art and War. It did not sell particularly well, but it received sufficient attention (as from the Whole Earth Catalog, for example) that it acheived some small notoreity as one of the early books about the role that artists played in the study of camouflage, both in nature and in war. 

Various things happened as a result: In 1988, soon after I joined the faculty at AAC, the school succeeded in obtaining a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to host a community-wide series of activities (talks, exhibits, and other events) on the theme of art and camouflage. 

That same year I was contacted by British documentary filmmakers who were in process of making a film on the same subject, to air on television in both the US and the UK. The UK version was titled The Art of Deception, and appeared as a segment of Equinox on BBC televison (the name Cincinnati was misspelled). The American version, titled Disguises of War, was broadcast as part of NOVA on American Public Television, by way of WGBH Boston. That version can still be viewed online. 

Roy Behrens as interviewed on NOVA (1990)

 

A still frame from that program is reproduced here. It was filmed on an exceedingly hot afternoon on the grounds of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton OH. It was nearly impossible to complete the filming because (being an air force base) airplanes were constantly taking off. I was wearing a purple shirt and an especially appropriate necktie, the top half of which was a contrasting color, while the bottom half was the very same color as the shirt. 

When it aired nationally, I recall that my mother comically asked, “Who cut off your tie?” Another funny consequence is that the next day after its national broadcast, I received phone calls at the AAC, from former students in Wisconsin and Iowa, saying that they had watched the program, not knowing that I was included. One person told me that, “as the program started, I said to myself, ‘This is something that Roy Behrens would really enjoy”—and then, suddenly, I appeared on screen. Believe me, I no longer look like this.

PRINT magazine article on camouflage

Around the same time I received a call from the managing editor at PRINT in New York, the leading graphic design newstand magazine in the US. Would I be willing to prepare a major article on camouflage in relation to art and design? The resulting article was called Blend and Dazzle: The Art of Camouflage (January / February 1991). In no time, that then led to being appointed a Contributing Editor at PRINT, which I enjoyed tremendously for at least a dozen years or more.

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

Blend and Dazzle | Art of Camouflage in PRINT 1991

Above and below In old age, in retirement mode, looking through publication files, found this large, then-wonderful article on a lecture series on camouflage at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. It was published in the January / February 1991 issue of PRINT Magazine (New York). It was my first article for that delightful magazine (now defunct), for which I wrote articles, editorials, and book reviews for probably a dozen years.

Camouflage Artist | Fritz Kleesattel

Vintage ad for Camel cigarettes (1940s)

 Fred Otto Kleesattel, better known as “Fritz” Kleesattel, was an American advertising artist who was born on July 10, 1889, in Cincinnati, Ohio. After studying at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, he worked as a graphic designer in Louisville, Kentucky, where he established a studio called Klee Ad Art.

His most memorable undertaking occurred in 1913, when he was commissioned by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to create the packaging for Camel cigarettes. It was Kleesattel who designed the Camel in the logo. It is said that he also contributed to the design of various labels for Four Roses Kentucky Straight Bourbon, Heaven Hill Distilleries, and other corporate clients.

After the US entered World War I, Kleesattel enlisted in the American Army and was assigned to the camouflage training unit at Camp Sherman in Ohio. As a camoufleur with the rank of Sergeant, he was an assistant to Indiana-born camouflage artist and patent attorney Joseph Allen Minturn (1861-1943), who later wrote a book about his wartime experiences, titled The American Spirit (1921). In that memoir, Minturn (who mistakenly refers to him as “Kleesatelle”) recalls that Kleesattel was admired in the camp for his “conversion of a conspicuous latrine into a pen of mules,” one of which “had his head, made of painted tin, projecting out between the two top boards in such a natural way that his ears flapped in the wind, and Major Arthur Robinson declared it so fooled his favorite saddle mare that she neighed to it when he rode up one day to get a close view of the penned animals” (p. 97). Later, his and Minturn’s unit served overseas in France.

Kleesattel died in Louisville on January 16, 1965.

Sources

Joseph Allen Minturn, The American Spirit. Indianapolis IN: Globe Publishing, 1921.

Anon, “Camel (cigarette)” on Wikipedia at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_(cigarette)>.