instead of the frontlne they put me on the subway line

Above Paris-based artist Jean Kisling in his studio.

•••

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.

•••

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.

•••

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

a checkered tablecloth / the man Picasso hated most

Juan Gris, Still Life with Checkered Tablecloth (1915)

Above An especially masterful painting by Spanish artist Juan Gris, titled Still Life with Checkered Tablecloth (1915). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain. 

To a designer, what better proof is there that the most accomplished of the cubist artists was Juan Gris, not Pablo Picasso. What an extraordinary composition—how is it possible? I stand in awe. No wonder Gris was despised by Picasso: He was, according to Gertrude Stein, “the only person whom Picasso wished away.” Indeed, he was the only genuine threat.

•••

Anon. Sioux City Journal (Sioux City IA), August 29, 1921—

Little is seen or heard nowadays about the writers of vers libre or the cubist artists. Maybe they have gone where they belong—to camouflage.

Herter's mural in Paris / American Camouflage Corps

Albert Herter mural at the Gare de Paris-Est

We’ve talked about the Herter family before. The family was descended from the well-known Herter Brothers (Gustave and Christian), who were leading designer-craftsmen in New York in the 19th century. The son of Christian Herter was Albert Herter (1871-1950), who was a prominent muralist. In turn, his sons were Everit Herter (1894-1918), a muralist who was among the first to join the American Camouflage Corps during World War I, and who died in action while serving in France. A second son was Christian Herter (1895-1966), who was a highly regarded US statesman and served as Secretary of State.

In an earlier post about the family, we only briefly focused on a huge mural (40 feet wide, 15 feet high) that Albert Herter painted after the war and gave to the French people. It was in part a tribute to the French soldiers (called poilus, French slang for soldiers) who had served in the war. Less obviously, it was as well a tribute to his son. Appropriately, the mural was initially hung in the departure hall of the historic Gare de Paris-Est in Paris, a major railway terminal, from which so many soldiers had departed for the battlefield.

Recently, I was pleased to find a lengthy paper about that famous mural. It was written by Mark Levitch, and is titled "En Souvenir: Albert Herter’s Le Depart des Poilus, Aout 1914 at Paris-Est." It was published in a volume of essays about WWI artworks, edited by Margaret Hutchison and Steven Trost, titled Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory, and the First World War (University of Alabama Press, 2020).

Levitch’s paper is particularly informative because it is based on extensive research, far more complete and detailed than earlier accounts. For example, I had not known, or perhaps I had forgotten, that another American camoufleur, named John Dwight Bridge, had assisted Albert Herter in completing the mural. As we posted earlier, Bridge is himself of interest because both he and Everit Herter were associated with Barry Faulkner (a muralist and co-founder of the American Camouflage Corps), who was the cousin and student of Abbott H. Thayer, the so-called “father of camouflage.” In the years following the war, Bridge married the widow of Everit Herter, Caroline Keck Herter.

In the process of painting this huge railway terminal mural, Albert Herter chose to quietly include members of his own family in his depiction of various families bidding farewell to their soldier sons. To anyone who was unaware of Everit Herter’s wartime death, the mural might easily be interpeted as a generic portrayal (neither factual nor specific) of the sorrow of saying goodbye to one’s soldier son—whose departure may be final.

But things did not work out as smoothly as that. In the years after the war, there was some resentment among the French public about what they saw as the tendency of Americans to claim excessive credit for the war’s success. As a result, there were times when Herter’s mural was seen not primarily as an all-inclusive tribute to French infantry and others, but rather as a means by which the sacrifice of Everit Herter—and the Herter family’s efforts—could upstage the achievements of others.

This was especially reinforced by the mistaken but often repeated claim that an especially prominent soldier in the center of the painting represents Everit Herter. That figure can be clearly seen online, in a full view of the mural. He is elevated above the others, with arms outstretched, so it doesn’t take much to imagine him as an allusion to Christ on the cross. Hence, one can see how people might assume that this was a slightly veiled tribute to Everit Herter. In various essays over the years, other figures were also mistakingly said to be members of the Herter family.

There is no disagreement that Herter family members are included in the mural. But Levitch denies that the soldier with the outstretched arms is Everit Herter. Instead, the Herter family is quietly clustered on the right. In a detail of the mural (as shown below, along with a diagram of the same section), Albert Herter (the muralist and the father) is holding flowers and clutching his chest (1). His wife (2) stands behind him, and their martyred son, Everit Herter peers out quietly from inside the train (3). Their daughter-in-law (4), the widow of Everit Herter is facing Everit’s father, her hand to her face. And Everit’s fellow camouflage artist (who is soon to marry the widow), John Dwight Bridge (5), is bending down and comforting the sons of the father who had been killed in the war. I hope this is a reasonable explanation.

Levith’s essay is far more interesting, and more detailed, than the summary I have provided above. It makes for thoughtful reading.

cubist style condemned as too germanic or boche

Monument by WWI camoufleurs Mare, Süe and Jaulmes

Mary Sperling McAuliffe, When Paris sizzled: the 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and their friends. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, page 52—

Given the [Paris WWI Victory] parade’s many admirable qualities, it was unfortunate that the work of art meant to commemorate the war’s fallen soldiers at the Fétes de la Victoire came to a bad end. The privilege of creating a memorial for the war dead had gone to three men: the painter André Mare, along with his associates, architect Louis Süe and designer Gustave Jaulmes, all three former members of wartime camouflage units at the front. Their creation [shown above, on July 14, 1919, to the right of the Arc de Triomphe], a huge gilded cénotaph, or tomblike monument, thrust upward in the form of a gigantic bier, its sides decorated with Winged Victories, each backed by a pair of real wings from French warplanes. It had been a mammoth undertaking and was unquestionably meant to be patriotic, but critics fiercely derided it as Germanic or “Boche” art. Mare was known for his Cubist style—indeed, he had been painting French artillery with Cubist designs when he was badly wounded at the front—and “l’affaire du cénotaphe” was immediately perceived by Mare’s supporters as an attack by traditionalists on Cubism. 

RELATED LINKS

Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk)

Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk)

Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)

Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk)

fires in American camouflage section buildings in WWI

Moulin de la Galette, Paris

GASOLINE EXPLODES IN CAMOUFLAGE SCHOOL in Seward Gateway Daily Edition (Seward AK), February 2, 1918, p. 4—

PARIS, Feb. 2—A gasoline can exploded this morning as some American soldiers were filling an automobile tank at the famous Moulin de la Galette dancing hall [as pictured above], now used as a camouflage school for the American army. The tank also exploded and two American soldiers were seriously wounded.

•••

OFFICIAL PAPERS BURNED Mice and Matches Blamed for Fire in Washington, in Indianapolis News (Indianapolis IN), April 6, 1918, p. 9—

WASHINGTON, April 6—Fire of unknown origin last night destroyed the upper floor of a building near the great State, War and Navy Building [as pictured below], occupied by the Navy Bureau of Construction and Repair and the Camouflage Section. Some supplies and papers were burned, but the damage is said to be insignificant.

No one was in the building except a watchman, who thought the flames started in a piles of papers beneath a stairway, and that mice and matches probably were responsible.

State, War and Navy Building, Washington DC

Picasso on camouflage / we originated it with cubism

Cook: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive

Above Roy R. Behrens, Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Northern Iowa and Independence (Iowa) native has released a new 60-minute online documentary film about Iowa expatriate artist William Edwards Cook, and his close long-term friendship with American writer Gertrude Stein.

•••

Gertrude Stein (speaking in the pretended voice of Alice B. Toklas), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933—

[In 1907, Pablo Picasso went back to Spain for the summer] and he came back with some spanish landscapes and one may say that these landscapes…were the beginning of cubism.…

…In these pictures he first emphasized the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of the camouflage the guns and the ships in the war. The first year of the war, Picasso and Eve, with whom he was living then, Gertrude Stein and myself, were walking down the boulevard Raspail a cold winter evening.…All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C’est nous qui avons fait ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified.

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

New Film / Cook taught Gertrude Stein to drive / 2022

Duplicated from an identical posting on my alternative blog, CAMOUPEDIA , but important enough to deserve it—

I am pleased (albeit exhausted) to say that, as of yesterday, I completed what may be my most ambitious undertaking in recent years. It is a sixty-minute documentary voice-over film biography of the life of William Edwards Cook (1881-1959), an American expatriate artist, who grew up in Iowa, but spent his adult life in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, and Mallorca.

Titled COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive, the film is freely available to everyone here online. More specifically, it is a detailed account of the life-long friendship of Cook with the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is based on her frequent adulation of him in her writings, as well as on the contents of 250 pages of their unpublished correspondence.

Cook was never a well-known artist, but he did acquire some renown for two other reasons: In 1907, he was the first American artist to be allowed to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Later, in 1926, he used his inheritance to commission the then-unknown Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design an early Modernist home (the "first true cubist house") in Boulogne-sur-Seine, which is still intact, and widely known as Maison Cook or Villa Cook.

The friendship of Gertrude Stein and William Edwards Cook (including the roles of their partners, Alice B. Toklas and Jeanne Moallic Cook) was first documented in (my earlier book)  COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier (Bobolink Books, 2005). This new documentary film corrects, updates, and adds to the information in that book.

This film project (as well as the earlier book) was made possible by the earlier work of such Stein scholars as Ulla Dydo, Bruce Kellner, and Rosalind Moad, as well as the Stein / Cook correspondence in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

In 2005, when COOK BOOK was released, Ulla Dydo (the pre-eminent expert on Stein, and author of The Language that Rises) praised it in the following way: "This book jumps out at my eyes, my ears. It comes from everywhere, never drags those even blocks of print that dull the mind. Look at it, read it, let it tease you: It's researched with all the care that keeps its sense of humor and its visual and voice delights. Travel with it, leave home, go and explore the many ways for a book to be a house for living."

The distinguished critic Guy Davenport wrote: "This is as good as topnotch Behrens gets!"

This film is not without humor, and at times it shares surprises. It may prove of particular value to viewers (both scholars and the rest of us) who are particularly interested in American literature, Modernism, Gertrude Stein, art, architecture, horse racing, Harvard, William James, art collectors, expatriates, Paris, Mallorca, the American Midwest, Iowa, art history, the training of artists, Cézanne, Cubism, Picasso, Le Corbusier, LGBT, and gender identity issues. 

 

Paul Bartlett and the American Camouflage Division

Above Paul Wayland Bartlett in 1918 in Washington DC. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs. Digital coloring.

•••

In a blog post on Frank Overton Colbert in 2018, we mentioned his connection with a widely known Beaux-Arts American painter and sculptor named Paul Wayland Bartlett. In April 1917, Bartlett co-founded a group of Washington DC artists called the American Camouflage Division.

Bartlett was the group’s chairman, while among the other members were Felix Mahony, Michel Jacobs, Glen Brown, Richard Brooks, A.G. Smith, Alexis B. Many, and J. Crozier. When the US entered World War I, this group offered to contribute their expertise in the development of camouflage. At the same time, comparable groups had also been formed in New York City (called the New York Camouflage Society or American Camouflage) and San Francisco (American Camouflage Western Division).

In an issue of The Sunday Star (Washington DC) on April 29, 1917 (Section Four, page 1), a half-page article titled WASHINGTON ARTISTS ORGANIZE A CAMOUFLAGE DIVISION reported that Bartlett had recently—

made an address before an assemblage of fellow artists, architects, sculptors, and painters to explain the possibilities of camouflage. His explanations were inspiring; so much so, in fact, that the establishment of an American association of camouflage was begun then and there.

Paul Wayland Bartlett (1865-1925) had been born in New Haven CT. He began with the advantage of professional connections, because his father was a prominent sculptor, Truman H. Bartlett (1835-1922), who taught modeling for 22 years in the MIT architecture department. Both the father and the son were heavily influenced by Neo-classicism and the French Academy, and, as early as age 15, Paul Bartlett began to study sculpture in Paris.

Throughout the remainder of his life, he remained active in American art circles, but lived primarily in France. In 1914, artists serving in the French Army were the first to propose the establishment of a section de camouflage, so Bartlett’s endorsement of the "art of camouflage" was most likely encouraged in part by that.

Bartlett was known for his commissioned public sculptures, the most notable of which may be The Apothesis of Democracy, the House of Representatives pediment at the US Capitol building (as shown below). He died of blood poisoning in Paris in 1925.

Two artists recall Paris and the origins of camouflage

American artist J. Alden Weir

The US entered World War I on April 6, 1917. About three weeks later, in an issue of American Art News (Vol 15 No 29), it was announced that an American Camouflage group had formed. Its membership consisted of thirteen artists whose purpose was “to put their art at the disposal of the government,” and “to use protective colors as a means of deceiving the enemy.”

Among the artists listed was Abbott H. Thayer (1849-1921), who would increasingly be known as “the father of camouflage,” largely because of a book co-authored with his son, titled Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, initially published in 1909. A dozen years in advance of the book, he was already known for his demonstrations of countershading, in which he made wooden ducks less visible (or, short of that, potatoes) by painting their undersides lighter. He said that this accounted for the survival value of “the white undersides of animals.”

Another artist on the list was J. Alden Weir (1852-1919), pictured above, a prominent American painter of the same generation as Thayer. Both had been students of Jean-Léon Gerome at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and both were closely acquainted with John Singer Sargent. Weir was one of the founders of a group of American Impressionist painters known as The Ten, although he was the only one listed among the advocates of camouflage.

In the Norwich Bulletin (Norwich CT), dated July 30, 1917, a brief note was published that said: “Among famous American artists who have volunteered to teach soldiers abroad the new art of war disguise, camouflage, is J. Alden Weir, whose summer home is at Windham [CT].” He also had another home at Wilton CT, which has been preserved as the Weir Farm National Historic Site.

Another, longer news article that mentions Weir’s interest in camouflage was published a year later, on June 18, 1918, in the Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton NY). The headline reads: Hold Camouflage Is Not Entirely Military Service. Visiting Artists Declare Painters’ Craft Is Equally Responsible for Changing Objects to Fool Enemy Successfully; Laud Weir as Pioneer.

The article describes a conversation between a local news reporter and two American artists, who, while passing through Binghamton, were staying at the Arlington Hotel. One of the artists was Alexis Jean Fournier (1865-1948), a painter, originally from St Cloud MN, who had earlier become known as the resident “court painter” at Elbert Hubbard’s Arts and Crafts artists community, called Roycroft, in East Aurora NY. As a twenty-year-old, he had been a student of Douglas Volk, who, in 1886, was among the founders of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and, when WWI began, an advocate of camouflage. It is of passing interest to note that Volk was named after his mother’s cousin, Stephen A. Douglas, the presidential campaign rival of Abraham Lincoln, and that, in 1860, the four-year-old Volk was present in the studio when his father, the sculptor Leonard Volk, made plaster casts of the face and hands of Lincoln as a congressman.

Cast of Lincoln's Hands by Leonard Volk (1860)

The second artist who took part in the newspaper conversation was an artist-photographer from Detroit named Frank Scott Clark (1865-1937). He was originally from Peru IN (as was songwriter Cole Porter)  on the Wabash River, which is also, as the article notes, “near the home of General Lew Wallace,” the Civil War Union general who wrote the novel Ben Hur.

The artists in the interview were only somewhat younger than J. Alden Weir, and, in their observations about camouflage, they seem determined to credit him with its adoption during the war. Mr. Fournier, according to the article, “stated that the idea of camouflage was first illustrated to military men in London by the painter J. Alden Weir, who used a potato to show the effect of painting out shadows and changing the appearance of an object.”

In truth, it was Abbott Thayer (not J. Alden Weir) who had been demonstrating countershading to American and European naturalists since the 1890s, as confirmed by publications then. And Thayer had traveled to Europe to share this and other techniques to British scientists and the military before the Americans entered the war. “The military experts laughed at Weir,” Fournier insists (when, in fact, they lampooned Thayer), “but the painter went to France where some of his ideas were successfully carried out, and when he returned to London they were put into use by the English army.”

Like Thayer and Weir, Fournier had studied in Paris, and at some point in the interview, the subject of how American artists survived in the Latin Quarter was brought up. Among the things that artists learned while living in Paris, it was noted, was “the art of going without meals.” The discussion turned to stories about a particular artist named Charles Augustus Lasar (1856-1936), a former blacksmith from Johnstown PA, better known as “Shorty” Lasar. This was not far off-topic, because Lasar’s survival tactics “revealed knowledge of camouflage of a lighter but no less interesting” kind. As proof, they provided these details—

When his [Shorty Lasar’s] shirt sleeves became ragged, he would cut off the edges…After so many cuttings that the sleeves reached the elbows only, Lasar, when it was necessary to make a respectable appearance, would punch a hole in his one pair of celluloid cuffs and attach them with strings to the edge of his shirt sleeves. When his necktie was worn threadbare, this unique artist painted a tie on his shirt front, and when his teeth had cavities he filled them with tinfoil…

Regarding Shorty Lasar, there is a note on The Athenaeum website, in which American artist Cecilia Beaux (who, incidentally, was a friend of Abbott Thayer) describes Lasar as "a funny little man with intensely bright eyes and dark hair, standing around—and his legs about two feet long."

RELATED LINKS 

• Optical science meets visual art
• Disruption versus dazzle
• Chicanery and conspicuousness
• Under the big top at Sims' circus

Connecting the Dots Somewhere in Dijon, France

the puzzle

Above A "connect the dots" puzzle titled DOTS "SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE" by Clifford Leon Sherman, as published in  The Anaconda Standard (Anaconda MT), August 31, 1917. The text beneath the puzzle reads—

DEAR FOLKS: We had a lot of fun today watching one of the men in the camouflage department ["somewhere in France"] matching up his paints and decorating the ambulances and ammunition wagons, so they could not be seen easily against the background. One of the boys in my company asked him why he didn't paint himself so as to be invisible. He replied in a joking way, "My dear friend, I don't want to waste any time on myself. And there is no use wasting any time on you, for I can't help it if you look naturally like a ________" [the missing word is in the completed drawing below].

•••

We live in Iowa, not far from an architectural firm called StruXture Architects. It was founded in 1934 by David B. Toenjes, who was the first person to earn an architectural degree at Iowa State University in Ames. He also served in France during World War I, where he was stationed at Dijon ("somewhere in France"), which was also the location of a major American camouflage production facility.

We recently found this brief news article, titled TEN YEARS AGO IN THE SERVICE, in The Waterloo Courier, September 8, 1928—

"I was stationed at Dijon, France, 10 years ago," said David B. Toenjes [of Waterloo IA]. "Our company had charge of getting supplies up to the front from Dijon base." Toenjes was first sergeant of Company C, 309th machine shop repair unit, MTC. 

"At Dijon there was a camouflage park, where papier mache goats, cows and everything else were made. I went over one day to look around. Everything looked natural, but when I sat on a log, things weren't so natural. It was made of paper.

Armistice Day the boys put on a big celebration. The last one trailed in four days later with a woman's fur around his neck." 

the answer

Camouflage Artist | Frank Overton Colbert

Frank Overton Colbert (1923)

Frank Overton Colbert was born at Riverside, in Oklahoma Indian Territory, on August 6, 1895. He is more commonly known as F. Overton Colbert, or, less often, as Frank Overton Redfeather Colbert. “Redfeather” is in reference to his Native American ancestry. His parents, Holmes Colbert (a Harvard graduate) and Ella Overton Colbert (educated in Europe), and earlier relatives were wealthy, prominent members of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. His maternal grandfather, Frank Overton, was a well-known politician, and one of his cousins was Captain Benjamin Colbert, whom Theodore Roosevelt had singled out, during the Spanish-American War, as one of the finest of the celebrated Rough Riders.

The Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples are historically closely related, which may account for Colbert being known as “Choc” while serving in the US Navy during World War I. According to the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, he was also known as “François” in France, where “He was one of the most curious figures of Paris’s Left Bank and was known as ‘the Redskin of Montparnasse.’” In another account of that Bohemian phase of his life, he is described as “a Redskin with all his feathers named Colbert.”

From an early age, Colbert hoped to become an artist, a choice that his father discouraged. As a compromise, he enrolled in the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, where he became a skilled mechanic. But at the end of that technical training, he was no less interested in art. His father withdrew his financial support, and Colbert left Oklahoma to explore the country on his own. He wandered westward, earning money by working intermittently at temporary jobs. Typically, he worked as a farm laborer, repaired machinery, and painted signs and posters. He also gave trick shooting exhibitions to paying audiences. Later, in newspaper stories, he claimed to be friends with Buffalo Bill, and it may have been during these wanderlust years that he became acquainted with that scout and Wild West showman.

Having reached Los Angeles after three months, Colbert set off for Alaska. It took him eight months (with extended pauses to earn money) to reach Seattle, from where he then sailed on to Nome by ship. From Alaska, he traveled by dog sled into Canada, near the Arctic Circle (where he painted the Northern Lights), then embarked on an arduous lengthy return, moving slowly south along the Pacific Coast again as far as South America, then across Panama into Mexico, and back to the US.

By 1917, while still in his early twenties, he ended up in Washington DC, where he became acquainted with a widely known Beaux-Arts painter and sculptor named Paul Wayland Bartlett. Earlier that year, Bartlett had co-founded a group of Washington artists called the American Camouflage Division. Bartlett was its chairman, while among the other members were Felix Mahoney, Michel Jacobs, Glen Brown, Richard Brooks, A.G. Smith, Alexis B. Many, and J. Crozier. The US had not yet entered the war, but it seemed inevitable, and it was this group’s plan to offer their artistic expertise in the development of wartime camouflage. At the same time, comparable groups had also been formed in New York City (called the New York Camouflage Society or American Camouflage) and San Francisco (American Camouflage Western Division).

At the time, as an art student at the city’s School of Fine Arts, Colbert was surely aware of this camouflage group, which had been featured prominently in The Washington Star and other newspapers. Soon after the US entered the war, Colbert enlisted in the navy, where, according to a news story—

His precise knowledge of color was of value to the camouflage department, and many of his designs were used in the disguising of transports.

This is confirmed by another news article at the end of the war, in the Durant Weekly News (Durant OK) on September 12, 1919. After two years of service, the article notes, he was being discharged with the rank of CCM (Chief Carpenter’s Mate). He had been assigned, it continues, to

 the work of camouflaging ships of the service so that they might be more difficult of recognition by the enemy submarines. He has been many times back and forth over the sea and first and last has seen service on every type of vessel afloat.

Following WWI, Colbert returned not to Washington DC, but moved instead to Greenwich Village in New York, where he lived in an apartment on Cornelia Street while studying art at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (now Parsons School of Design). That apartment was infested with bedbugs, and (true or not) Colbert later recalled an incident in which he killed a large bedbug that crawled across his drawing board, by stabbing it with a pin. Elaborating on his colored drawing of the dead insect, he designed a textile pattern, which he sold “to one of the city’s largest silk houses” where it became “one of the season’s best sellers.” He later moved to Sheridan Square.

There was a major breakthrough in Colbert’s career as an artist in February 1921, when an exhibition of his work was held at the Montross Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York, a prominent gallery “where only the work of artists who have ‘arrived’ is permitted for exhibition.” Favorable if brief reviews were published in The Nation, The Arts, The New York Tribune and other publications. In addition, his work caught the attention of a New York journalist and art publicist named Holger Cahill. Newly hired to promote the Society of Independent Artists, Cahill believed that Colbert’s artwork exemplified an American brand of indigenous primitivism which he called Inje-Inje. As a consequence, Colbert began to produce what New York critics called Indian folklore pictures that represented aspects of Native American gods. Non-Indians need not be concerned about not understanding the images, advised one critic, because “the explanation appears beside the picture…”

The Trail to Happy Hunting Ground (1923), Frank Overton Colbert•

An additional factor that prompted Colbert to produce non-European Indian-influenced art may have been (as he recalled) a conversation with William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) that had taken place years earlier. “Red Feather,” Cody said to him, “you dip your brush in the rainbow and paint the Indian from the soul of all the generations of Indians, with the philosophy and precision of European thought.” He also advised: “In your art you belong to the poet with the painter’s eye for color and arrangement. You must be an Indian first and last, however well you become educated.”

As sales of Colbert’s work increased, he painted and exhibited in Paris and Florence as well as New York. According to a news article in the Durant Weekly News on December 15, 1922, he had been visiting Oklahoma for two weeks, but had to return to New York to open a new exhibition at the Montross Gallery. By mid-January, he “will sail to Paris, to continue his artwork in his studio there, as well as another studio in Florence.” Having spent time in earlier years in those two cities, it claims, he “is already a splendid conversationalist in both the French and Italian languages.”

It was apparently during his European episodes that he became a familiar oddity in the cafes and nightclubs of Montparnasse, where he could be seen drawing on site in pastels on thick, yellow sheets of butcher paper. He was especially noticed because he would be wearing a full Native American wardrobe, with an elaborate headdress.

He sometimes also dressed this way when he was in New York. We know this because of a story about his association with American author Mary Hunter Austin. On January 8, 1922, the National Arts Club in New York gathered for a banquet in honor of Austin’s achievements as a writer. As honored guest, Austin could choose to dress as she pleased. And she did: in honor of the American Southwest, she arrived in an outlandish Spanish-like dress that made her appear, as one critic said, to be wrapped in the flag of New Mexico. As a further indiscretion, her escort for the evening was none other than Frank Overton Colbert, who was dressed in buckskin Indian garb, with a headdress of flamingo feathers. His outfit included a necklace strung with nasty-looking teeth. When a socialite at the gathering asked what kind of animal’s teeth they were, Colbert answered “Alligator.” “Oh, how awful,” the woman exclaimed, and then politely added, “But I suppose you see it as the same as a pearl necklace.” To which Colbert responded, “No, not at all—any fool can take a pearl away from an oyster.”

We know that Colbert married, but all but nothing is known of his wife, who went with him to Paris in 1923. Her name was Kate Landon Colbert, and she was born in 1899, but we do not know how or when she died. Nor do we know where she is buried. They had one child, a son named Robert Holmes Colbert, who was born in 1926 in France and died at the age of 50 in 1976.

We also know that Colbert did not do entirely well in Europe. True, his work was chosen for the Salon d’Automne in 1923, and for the Salon des Indépendants in 1926. But it appears he succumbed to depression, and it became necessary to move back to the US (presumably with his wife and son). It is unclear where he settled after returning to the US, but he may have been living in Colorado, because at least one source reports that he was hospitalized in that state in 1941 because of mental illness.

Whatever the tragic circumstances, he died on March 20, 1953, and is buried in a military cemetery at Fort Lyons CO.

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• Painting reproduced above is courtesy of Steven S. Powers. 

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SOURCES
Colbert, François Overton Redfeather. Benezit Dictionary of Artists (2006).
FAMOUS ARTIST HERE PRIOR TO TRIP TO EUROPE. Durant Weekly News (Durant OK),  December 15, 1922, p. 7.
Franck, D. Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigilani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art. New York: Grove Press, 2003.
INDIAN ARTIST IS EARNING HIS WAY FROM CITY TO CITY. Los Angeles Herald. September 30, 1915.
INDIAN ARTIST IS VISITOR IN BISBEE. Overton Colbert of Famous Oklahoma Family Is Making Tour of Country. Bisbee Daily Review (Bisbee AZ). September 19, 1915, p. 6.
INDIAN ARTIST ON WARPATH. Remarkable Story of Oklahoma Born Genius on Road to Fame. WAS AIDED BY CODY. Civilization and Savagery in Struggle for Mastery of Colbert’s Nature. Tulsa Daily World (Tulsa OK) March 13, 1921, Sec A Page 9—
INDIAN ARTIST'S WORK HERE. F. Overton Arrives With His Paintings. Tulsa Daily World. October 28, 1922, p. 5.
Loving, P. "Art: An American Painter" in The Nation. January 26, 1921, p. 125.
Moore, A.W. Holger Cahill's Inje-Inje: The Story of a Modern Primitivism. Online. 
Saw Much Water Service. Durant Weekly News (Durant OK),  September 12, 1919, p. 4. 
Some Current Art Shows in the Local Galleries. New York Tribune. December 4, 1921, p. 1B. 

Note: There is a newspaper photograph (poorly printed) of Colbert, dressed in a feathered headdress and other Native American attire, in the World’s News (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), February 16, 1924, p. 4. The headline reads IMMORTALIZING THE ARTS OF HIS FATHERS, with a caption beneath the photo that claims that he is “François Overton Colbert, the last chief [sic] of the Chickasaw Indians, of Oklahoma, known to his people as Red Feather, now in Paris, where he is at work upon a series of canvases painted in the Indian manner.” 

A slightly different version of this biographical entry has also been contributed to askART.com.

Signed copies still available