WWI camoufleur / penniless and nearly dispossessed

Camoufleur Frank H. Schwarz

We’ve blogged about American artist / camoufleur Frank H. Schwarz once before, but no doubt he deserves another round of applause. I wish I could tell you where we found this newspaper headshot of him, with the headline WINS PRIX DE ROME, and the brief notice below. The date is 1921, and his name is incorrectly spelled as Schwartz (which we have corrected below). Here it is—

The story of Frank Schwarz, twenty-six-year-old artist of Greenwich Village, New York City, reads more like a novel or play than a real true account. For Schwarz, who was penniless and about to be dispossessed from his $12-a-month “studio,” is today the most talked of person in the world of art. He has won the most coveted of art awards, the Prix de Rome, which is a three-year fellowship in the American Academy of Art in Rome, carrying with it transportation expenses and an annuity of $1,000 during the three-year course. Schwarz won the award with his painting A Tribute to Heroism. He is a native of Chicago and studied art there, working in cheap restaurants in order to earn his meals and a dollar or two for lodgings. He is a war veteran, having served in France as a member of the [US Army] camouflage section.

disruptive coloration used not to conceal, to advertise

Above An Ambulance Used Effectively in a Wartime Campaign, Decorated Camouflage-Fashion for the Purpose of Attracting Attention. Popular Mechanics (c1919).

CAMOUFLAGE AMBULANCE ADVERTISES “DRIVE” / A striking feature of a wartime “drive” recently conducted in Chicago was an ambulance that had been elaborately decorated camouflage-fashion. Thousands of persons looking down into the city streets saw this truck with its top painted in mottled hues and at once their curiosity was aroused. If the vehicle’s appearance was not strictly in accord with army regulations, it nevertheless served as an excellent advertisement for a good cause.

RELATED VIDEO SERIES

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

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 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

Perkins Harnly / artist and cross-dressing camoufleur

Poster, Index of American Design

Few people will have heard of Perkins Harnly (1901-1986), an obscure American artist who grew up in Nebraska, lived in New York for a number of years, and ended up in Hollywood. I first became aware of him while researching a Depression-era art program called the Index of American Design. In a book edited by Francis V. O’Connor, The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1972), there is an essay by Lincoln Rothschild in which it is mentioned that “a specially gifted artist” named Perkins Harnley [sic] had provided that agency with “amusing views of a Pullman diner and an ornate stable as well as more ordinary interiors” (p. 184).

If people know about the New Deal Art Projects, it is most likely because they’re familiar with the Works Progress Administration or WPA (see poster above), in which the US Government commissioned unemployed American artists to create public murals for permanent installation in post office lobbies throughout the country. A surprising number of these have survived, and some of them remain on view in local post offices throughout the country.

What is less well-known is the Index of American Design (1953-1942), in which other unemployed artists (not studio "fine artists" but men and women who had previously worked as designers and illustrators, commonly disparaged as “commercial artists”) were hired not to make “creative” murals but to document examples of vintage American crafts (including folk art), through precise, detailed renderings. Among the things included in the Index of American Design were historic children’s rocking horses, carved ship figureheads, folk pottery, handmade clothing and fabrics, cast iron toy banks, antique furniture, weather vanes and other architectural ornaments, and so on. 

These were all beautifully documented in watercolor renderings, in exacting detail and in color. Miraculously, 18,257 of these have been preserved, and are housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. These images are in public domain, and can be accessed online here. To commemorate that archive (as well as the graphic designers who made them), earlier this year, I designed and posted online a series of posters about  a few of the items it features. 

Among the artists commissioned to make Index of American Design renderings was Perkins Harnly. In addition, he also served briefly as a wartime camouflage instructor. While working for the Index of American Design, Harnly’s supervisor had been a Harvard-trained art museum administrator named Lloyd LaPage Rollins (1890-1970), who had also been director of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. According to Harnley, Rollins was gay and was an avid collector of outlandish Victorian-era artifacts, which today would be regarded as “camp.” His housemate and associate was, as Harnly described him, “an attractive pet Scotsman.”

Interestingly, as revealed by Harnly’s biographer Sarah Burns, Harnly himself was gay and would later become notorious for cross-dressing and related misbehavior. Rollins was (in Harnly’s words) “my WPA Projects boss.” It was apparently through Rollins that Harnly was commissioned to make illustrations for the Index of American Design, some of which were rather large, measuring twenty-two by thirty-one inches. Harnly greatly enjoyed this assignment, in which he apparently had few restrictions. In an interview many years later, the artist recalled the freedom he had in completing this project that continued for years:

On the WPA I had all the time in the world. Every plate took four weeks at fourteen hours a day seven days a week to paint…just one took four hundred hours to render so meticulously and none took less than two hundred hours.

These fact-based yet fanciful renderings of Victorian interiors were well-received by government administrators, and that success was underscored when they were later exhibited publicly (twice at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and reproduced and written about in magazines. Two examples are posted here.

Perkins Harnly, Index of American Design

Perkins Harnly, Index of American Design

From the little that is known about Harnly’s involvement in camouflage, it appears to have been minor in comparison to the work he did for the Index of American Design. When America entered World War II, as Harnly later remembered in a Smithsonian interview, “we were put on defense projects…” He was assigned to camouflage as a civilian instructor, and sent to Fort Belvoir VA. There, he taught camouflage to officers, among them William Pahlmann, a well-known interior designer, and Gene Davis, the art director at Good Housekeeping magazine. The person in charge of camouflage at Fort Belvoir was Homer Saint-Gaudens, the son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the famous American sculptor. 

When that assignment ended, Harnly was sent back to California, where his supervisor was once again Lloyd Rollins, his former “WPA boss,” but this time he “taught a class on camouflage in the attic of a midtown fire station.” Soon however, that class abruptly crashed and burned when Harnly had a falling out with Rollins’ associate (his so-called “pet Scotsman”), who stormed out in the middle of a work session, whereupon the course was cancelled.

Harnly lived for 85 years. He was colorful, to say the least. Sarah Burns’ recent book about his life is titled The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends (Port Townsend WA: Process Media, 2021). Be prepared for some scandalous content. It is a highly detailed account of the life of a person who grew up in a setting of what he himself described as “trashy Tobacco Road types” in the dregs of rural Nebraska. When interviewed at age 80, he claimed that his birth was premature, by seven months, when he was born in a “pauper’s farmhouse.” With no access to medical care, much less an incubator, he was wrapped in cotton, placed in a shoe box, and kept warm inside an oven.

When he was four or five years old, the family moved to Lincoln NE, where they lived adjacent to the Lyric Theatre. Over the years, his proximity to that stage led to his fascination with linear perspective, painting, and set design. His interest in art had begun as a child, but he did not pursue it intently until he was hired by the WPA for their New Deal art program. It was that opportunity, Harnly recalled, that gave him “the reason, the encouragement, the research, the material, and I really went to town.” In the end, he completed a total of eighty-one renderings of Victorian interiors for the Index of American Design.

There is much more to this story of course, far too much to include in a blog post. But two other aspects of Harnly’s life are of particular interest. First, his paternal grandfather, a Nebraska farmer named Benjamin Harnly, enjoyed considerable success in building elaborate Queen Anne residences in Lincoln. He constructed at least sixteen, the most famous of which was the Bryan House, which he built for William Jennings Bryan. 

Second, Harnly worked temporarily for MGM in Hollywood. This resulted from a showing in New York of twenty-two of his Victorian interior renderings for the Index of American Design. In an exhibition titled “I Remember That,” they were displayed on the mezzanine at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 1942 to April 1943. Among the people who viewed them there was an MGM film director named Albert Lewin. He was just then preparing to produce a film version of Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In that story, circumstances are such that a painted portrait of its youthful, handsome protagonist, Dorian Gray, is reduced to putrefaction—as if by otherworldly means—as the physical man himself decays.

Based on his reaction to Harnly’s renderings of Victorian room interiors, Lewin persuaded him to relocate to Hollywood and to contribute to the film as a set design consultant. At the same time, Lewin also contracted two painters, who were brothers from Chicago, named Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, and his identical twin Malvin Marr Albright. They too were brought to Hollywood to work on site on the film. 

The original agreement was that Malvin would complete a portrait of Dorian Gray (looking both handsome and youthful), to be used at the film’s beginning, while Ivan would provide a comparable portrait of the same anti-hero, in a disturbing state of decay, at the end of the film. Ivan Albright’s (now-famous) painting (reproduced below) was used in the finished film, but the painting by his brother was eventually omitted, and replaced by an alternate portrait by a Portuguese artist, Henrique Medina. The paintings by the Albright twins upstaged Harnly’s achievements as a "sketch artist" and set designer. Ivan Albright’s painting was widely publicized, while Harnly is not even mentioned in the film credits.

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

Ivan Albright, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1943)

iowa trickster makes photographic camouflage / 1919

Antonius J. Viken, Waterloo IA / 1919

Above These three photographs were a reader’s contribution to Popular Mechanics, where they were published in Vol 31 Issue 2 (1919) of that magazine. The photographs were taken by A.J. Viken of Waterloo, Iowa, as examples of makeshift camouflage. Here is the text he submitted—

Practical examples of “camouflage” are shown in these three photographs. In the upper left-hand corner the man has adopted an effective, if somewhat strenuous means of making his appearance blend with his surroundings [by standing on his head, his belt line coincides with the horizon]. To the right, the small rider on the horse’s back is almost indistinguishable against the background of sky and trees, while the lower picture shows how difficult it may be to distinguish such a striking object as a goat.

A.J. Viken (Antonius Johnson Viken) [Skinderviken] was a Norwegian-American photographer. Born in Norway on October 4, 1885, he came to the US in April 1911, and became a naturalized citizen (in Chicago) in 1924. He registered for the draft on September 12, 1918, at Waterloo, where he and his wife Johanna (nee Hansen) Viken lived at 1123 Mulberry Street. As a photographer, he was employed by Louis A. Wangler at 227 East 4th Street in that city. In 1919, when his humorous camouflage photographs were published, his residence was listed as Waterloo, but in later years he also lived in Sioux City IA, Chicago, Jackson Heights NY, and on Long Island, New York. He died in Nassau NY on September 26, 1959.

Among Viken’s associates was photographer and inventor Donald Cameron Biedler (1885-1943). In 1924, both men listed their residence as 864 Buckingham Place, Chicago, in the vicinity of Wrigley Field. 

Beidler was a well-known photographer of wealthy, socially prominent clients (and their children) in Chicago, and later in Manhasset, Long Island NY. Originally from Mt. Pulaski IL, Beidler was a grandson of Jabez Capps, the town's founder. In collaboration with A.J. Viken, he was also invented a special motor-driven children's portrait twin camera, called the Beidler-Viken camera (see below), which they patented in 1925. Although it consisted of two cameras, side-by-side, it was not designed to make stereoscopic images. Instead, it was operated by two photographers, one of whom maintained exact focus on the (squirming) child being photographed, while the other tripped the shutter at the opportune moment. Beidler's Chicago studio was in the Lyon and Healy Building at 64 East Jackson Boulevard, circa 1920. In 1929, he and Viken established the  Beidler-Viken Studios in Manhasset on Long Island. Fourteen years later, Beidler died of a sudden heart attack, while Viken lived until 1959. In Biedler’s obituary, his partner Viken was described as “a man highly skilled in the mechanical end of photography.”

Between the years 1925 through 1936, Antonius J. Viken and Donald C. Beider worked together on a number of technical devices related to photography, including various camera stands (1925, 1930), a camera tiltback adjustment (1931), and their Beidler-Viken camera (1931). But Viken obtained patents independently for other inventions, such as a film hanger (1926), a hood for camera finders (1929), a tripod head (1931), and a film holder and hanger (1936). In 1931, Viken also worked with a bacteriologist, acetone expert, and Chicago physician named Dr. Nathaniel Frutkow (described in a research document as “a somewhat quackish physician specializing in pneumonia”) in patenting a diagnostic table and therapeutic lamp. 

The following is a list, arranged by date, of some (probably not all) of the patented inventions that are attributed to Viken, Beider and Viken, or Viken and Frutkow. Full pdf patent documents can be found online by searching Google Patents.

Stand for camera and the like, 25Aug1925, w/Donald C. Beidler. Film hanger, 4May1926, 1,583,708. Hood for camera finders and the like, 26Nov1929, 1,737,038. Camera and camera stand, 14Jan1930, w/Donald C. Beidler, 1.743,184. Tripod, 10Mar1931, 1,795,747. Tiltback for cameras and the like, 17Mar1931, w/Donald C. Beidler, 1,796,315. Tripod head for portrait camera, 30Jun1931, 1,812,614. Diagnostic table, 15Sep1931, w/Nathaniel Frutkow, 1,823,534. Therapeutic Lamp, 15Sep1931, w/Nathaniel Frutkow, 1,823,535. Camera and the like, 24Nov1931, w/Donald C. Beidler, 1,833,668. Film holder and hanger, 21Jan1936, 2,028,262.

Art | an illusion of reality that tells the truth by fibbing

Leon Dabo (1909)

Above Portrait photograph of Leon Dabo by Emil O. Hoppé (1909). Public domain.

•••

Rollin Lynde Hartt, CAMOUFLAGE in Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1918—

As their train nears Chicago, passengers note a low, murmurous hum. It is the Chicagoans saying “Camouflage.” Those of us who once confined our remarks to “Skiddoo! Twenty-three!” and more recently to “I should worry!” and “What do you know about that?” peg along at present on “Camouflage,” though a bit wearisome it grows. Declares a neighbor of mine, “The next time I hear ‘Camouflage’ I shall make my will, kiss my friends and relatives good-bye, and jump in the wastebasket!”…

[Camouflage] borrows its technique from a humble enough source. It is the Chamber of Horrors over again…Some steal their technique from the impressionists. Some repeat the antics of cubism. Others depend for their success upon certain very curious principles of optics. It takes an artist to invent them and an artist to explain them, and Mr. Leon Dabo* is never more entertaining than when holding forth on their theory and practice.

In order to understand the enormously important part impressionism plays in camouflage one must first define impressionism. Aesthetically, it is a simple matter, merely an attempt to reproduce, not nature itself, but the side of nature that appeals strongly to the artist. Technically, however, it involves profundities. Instead of counterfeiting reality, it creates an illusion of reality. It tells the truth by fibbing…

It was to cubism that the camouflageurs had recourse when they wanted to hide ships from view. Painting them gray was a poor device, they found. From habit, the eye would still recognize the silhouette of a ship even at a great distance. But it turns out that the eye had come to depend almost wholly on habit. Break up the familiar silhouette by dappling it with inharmonious colors in huge, shapeless masses, or—better yet—by covering it with immense cubist triangles and with cubist rectangles as immense—and the eye of the seasoned mariner would report no ship at all. The eye sees what it is accustomed to seeing and balks at learning new tricks.…

And why resent that low, murmurous hum of the Chicagoans saying “Camouflage”? Let the hum continue. It is just now a foolish hum, to be sure; it reflects a quaintly naive sense of novelty, as if camouflage were a new thing under the sun instead of being a modern recourse to trickery as old as “Quaker” cannon and the painted portholes on merchantmen, and, for that matter, the celebrated wooden horse at Troy. But it popularizes an idea. It gives it prominence. It backs up the army’s determination to put camouflage where it belongs. France has thousands of camouflageurs. So should we.…

•••

* Note The following entry was featured in a column titled Fifty Years Ago 1918, in the August 25, 1968 issue of the Asbury Park Press (Asbury NJ)—

Aug. 27—Leon Dabo, American painter who has been serving on General Pershing’s staff designing camouflage, was the principal speaker at a war rally in Ocean Grove Auditorium. He described enemy atrocities.

Chicago Skyline Camouflage | Merchandise Mart

Camouflaged Merchandise Mart (c1943), Chicago

In its May 23, 1943 issue, The Milwaukee Sentinel included an illustrated article on the “Newest Tricks of Camouflage” (p. 41). Among the featured topics was the application of disruptive patterns to buildings in urban centers like Chicago, to make it more difficult for enemy aircraft to recognize conspicuous landmarks. The article included the above image, a “doctored” aerial photograph of that city’s Merchanise Mart (which had been at one time the world’s largest building) to show the effects of disruption.

The caption with the photograph reads—

The Merchandise Mart in Chicago as it would appear after camouflaging by the Army’s hocus pocus artists. Through a Nazi’s bombsight the single large object would seem a number of smaller innocuous ones—all by the ingenious use of paint.

In the accompanying article, the following paragraph also appears—

If and when Nazis fly over an American city, say Chicago, our camouflage artists are ready for them, along with our anti-aircraft crews. Every large building, such as the Merchanise Mart, will be so camouflaged that even with binoculars from on high the Nazis will see only a crazy quilt confusion that will give their bombardiers trouble in distinguishing steel and concrete from mere razzle-dazzle.

Experiments in building camouflage had been used earlier in World War I, as seen in the camouflage pattern applied to the Victoria Hospital in the UK (shown below). The WWII proposal to camouflage the Merchandise Mart may have originated with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (founder and head of the New Bauhaus in Chicago) and Hungarian designer György Kepes (who taught camouflage at the same school). In 1969, Moholy’s widow, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, recalled the following in her book, Moholy Nagy: Experiment in Totality (pp. 183-184)—

On December 19, 1942, Moholy was appointed to the Mayor’s personal staff in charge of camouflage activites in the Chicago area.…[in the course of which] he pondered how to conceal the vastness of Lake Michigan with a simulated shore line and floating islands…As head of the Camouflage Workshop, György Kepes produced a wider range of new techniques and concepts. When they were displayed for the first time in 1943, they aroused wide attention.

Camouflaged Victoria Hospital (c1918)

Frank Lloyd Wright & William Penhallow Henderson

Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason City (2016)

Until recently, we were unaware of the link between architect Frank Lloyd Wright and an admired but lesser-known painter named William Penhallow Henderson (1877-1943).

Most people think of the latter as an artist who was closely tied to artists who settled in Taos NM around the turn of the century. But he was also a capable architect, muralist and furniture designer, in a style that was in keeping with the American Arts and Crafts Movement.

Henderson was born in Massachusetts, but grew up in the Midwest. In the beginning years of the 20th century, he lived and taught in Chicago, at which time Wright was living there. In 1914, while Wright was completing the Midway Gardens on the city’s southside, he commissioned Henderson to design a mural for that project. But when Wright (apparently) objected to the end result, Henderson backed out and the mural was soon painted over. While remaining in Chicago, he designed the costumes and scenery in 1915 for a theatrical production of Alice in Wonderland by the Chicago Fine Arts Theatre.

For health reasons, Henderson and his wife relocated to Santa Fe in 1916. The following year, soon after the US entered World War I, a new system of disruptive ship camouflage was adopted by the British Admiralty and, soon after, the French and Americans did the same. In 1918, Henderson was appointed to serve as a camouflage artist in San Francisco.

USS Western Star (1918) in dazzle camouflage

There he was part of a team of civilian artists who painted dazzle camouflage schemes on merchant ships. As we have blogged previously, the artist in charge of that particular team was Edgar Walter (1877-1938). But Maynard Dixon was also involved, as were (Swedish-born) Bro Julius Olson Nordfeldt, A. Sheldon Pennoyer, and others.

When Henderson returned to Santa Fe with Nordfeldt, his friend and fellow camoufleur, a brief article appeared in the Albuquerque Morning Journal, on December 22, 1918, p. 2, with the headline CAMOUFLEURS IN SANTA FE—

William Penhallow Henderson, the noted artist, who has served the shipbuilding board on the Pacific coast as camoufleur, has returned to Santa Fe, with O. Nordfeldt, and etcher and artist of fame, who with Mr. Henderson had charge of the camouflage department at San Francisco. They perfected this art to such a point that the camouflage inspectors in the east compared that of the eastern shipyards with that at San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego as standard. Mr. Nordfeldt will remain in Santa Fe over the winter. The two artists brought with them models of camouflaged ships which will be placed on exhibit in the new museum [New Mexico Museum of Art] and will illustrate a museum night talk.

An earlier article about the camouflage efforts of West Coast artists, titled SEEKS TO MAKE ARMY INVISIBLE, appeared in The Daily Ardmoreite (Ardmore OK) on July 11, 1917, p. 1—

San Francisco, July 11—The western division of the American Camouflage [Corps], an organization of artists which has for its object the recruiting of men who can assist in rendering the forces of the United States army and navy invisible to the enemy, was organized here [at the California School of Fine Arts] last night by artists and scene painters.

By the use of color combinations in small squares, map-like patches and other methods, United States battleships have been rendered more nearly invisible than those of any other nation, the members said today…

A month later later, yet another article on SAN FRANCISCO ARCHITECTS AND ARTISTS AS CAMOUFLEURS appeared in Western Architect and Engineer August 1917, p. 58, about which we posted an earlier blog.