Aldis Lamps, Bolo Bananas, and Some Dog's Body

Caption for an illustration (shown above; artist’s signature unclear) from The Aeroplane: The International Air Transport Journal. London, c1919—

THE AIR POLICE—It has been officially stated that we are to have an Air Police Force. Probably it will be International and Local at the same time. As the designing of new uniforms is one of the most important duties of the Air Authorities, a few suggestions are offered—for which no charge will be made. Reading from left to right they are as follows—(A) Provincial Police. Armament as shown. (B) Metropolitan Police. Fitted with Aldis Lamps, Bolo Bananas and Pockets. (C) Our French Bobbies would no doubt prefer “camouflage” as a distinction from the ordinary gendarmes. (D) The Irish Constabulary would, of course, want something different from anyone else. (E) The City Police would, no doubt, go in for something quite “Posh.” (F) And “over there” the Air Force Sheriff would be “Some dog’s body.”

to camouflage the inside—so I don't know where I am

Roland Davies

Above Roland Davies, WWII British Short Sunderland Flying Boat.

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James Thrall Soby, “Genesis of a Collection” in Art In America, Vol 49 No 1, 1961, p. 79—

[Abstract Expressionist artist] Matta [Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren] was born in Chile and therefore presumably exempt from American military service. Nevertheless, he worried about being drafted, and came to me in the Museum [of Modern Art]  to ask whether he could be assigned to camouflaging tanks if he were called up. I explained that this sort of camouflage was less commonly used in the Second World War than in the First because of improvements in aerial reconnaissance. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t want to camouflage the outside of a tank so the enemy can’t find it. I want to camouflage the inside, so I won’t know where I am.”

RELATED LINKS

 Cubism and Camouflage

Cook: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive

Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version

Futurism and Camouflage | A Wood-Turned Effigy

Mussolini Bust (1933), Renato Bertelli

Above In 1933, the Italian Futurist artist Renato Bertelli (1900-1974) produced a series of portrait heads of Benito Mussolini in what is sometimes known as the "aereoceramica style." It is a 360-degree portrait, a "continuous profile," somewhat related in concept to stop motion photography.

In another publication, we pointed out the similarity between Bertelli's Mussolini bust and an earlier illustration by American artist Charles Dana Gibson, published around 1903 (reproduced below), in which a man's head moves back and forth, as he pays attention equally to the beautiful "Gibson girls" on either side.

Charles Dana Gibson (c1903)

More recently, we came across a newspaper article, titled Souvenir Vase That Shows Dutch Queen's Face, accompanied by a drawing of a comparable continuous profile bust (see below). The article was published in the Boston Globe (based on an earlier article in the New York World), July 27, 1899, p. 6—

When Queen Wilhelmina of Holland was crowned the opportunity was supplied for every inventor in her realm to do his best to honor the occasion. A facsimile of one of the cleverest bits of workmanship executed in commemoration of her majesty's coming to the throne has just reached this country.

It is a souvenir effigy turned in wood. The wood was brought from India at enormous cost, and its exquisite shades and markings are well worth the attention of a queen. The design is very clever and the workmanship extraordinarily delicate.

Portrait of Queen Wilhelmina (1899)

A plain beveled bar of wood is the foundation for the wooden portrait. To this background is fastened a piece of carving of a semicylindrical shape, bearing a series of ridges which at first sight seem fantastically devised.

It will be seen, however, that the outer line of the wood, when held in any position, is the counterpart of the young queen's profile. The likeness is so cleverly suggested that Wilhelmina herself is said to have been highly pleased with the fanciful tribute.…

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Paul K. Saint-Amour, "Modern Reconnnaissance" in Modernism/Modernity. Vol 2 No 1, 2003, p. 350—

By 1918, young British aviators were being trained to see an avant-garde exhibition unfurling beneath their cockpits: a First World War Air Force photo atlas for new pilots used "FUTURIST country" and "CUBIST country" in its taxonomy of aerial landscapes, alongside more everyday mneumonic headings such as "FRUIT GROWING" and "PATCHWORK QUILTING."

Camoufleur Everett Warner at Griswold Museum

We are indebted to Jim Dodge for alerting us to a current exhibition called World War I and the Lyme Art Colony at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme CT. The small exhibition, which includes a selection of artworks by historic Lyme Colony artists who contributed to the war, will continue through January 28, 2018. 

Of particular interest to us are war-related artifacts that pertain to US ship camoufleur Everett Longley Warner, including three aerial cityscape views. A two-page article [above] about the exhibition appears in the December issue of the New England Antiques Journal, which can be viewed in full online at <http://tinyurl.com/ybt3mlop>.

US ship camoufleur Everett Longley Warner (c1918)

Reed College Dazzle Camouflage

Dazzle-painted USS Lake Charlotte (c1918)

Above There is an unrestored version of this public domain postcard on the website of the Naval History and Heritage Command, where it is identified as the USS Lake Charlotte or the USS Lake Silver (NH 105954). In other sources, the same ship is referred to as the War Cymbal.

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Anon, STUDENT ON HIGH SEAS in Morning Oregonian (Portland OR), November 30, 1917, p. 8—

In the soldiers' mail to Reed College this week is a letter from Hugh Broomfield, the last Reed man leaving for France. The letter was written from New York and says: "When this letter reaches you I will probably be out on the high seas. I am on board the steamer now and our quarters are quite comfortable. Our ship has been undergoing the 'camouflage' treatment and has been painted with blotches of blue, pink and green. It is a funny sight. I wish the scheme success and hope it deceives the 'subs'…"

The steamer on which Hugh (Dent Garvin) Broomfield crossed the Atlantic did survive that voyage. He became a member of the US Army Air Service, and was shot down in France on October 21, 1918.

Everett L. Warner Aerial View of NYC

Everett L. Warner, New York From a Sea Plane (c1919)

Above Everett Longley Warner, New York From a Sea Plane (c1919). Pastel on paper, 14 x 11 inches. As of this posting, this artwork is available for purchase at MME Fine Art in New York.

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About the Warner pastel sketch above, we were surprised and delighted to find it online. We'd seen it reproduced before, but had never seen it framed. When I showed the frame to William Adair at Gold Leaf Studios in Washington DC, he replied that it is typical of a Boston-area "Murphy-style frame," so-named because of the work of American artist and frame designer Hermann Dudley Murphy (1867-1945). As a painter, Murphy was primarily known for his portraits and landscapes, but he also did some wonderful floral still lifes. His papers are in the Archives of American Art.

When I saw Murphy's name, I realized I had heard it before, and that he was somehow connected to wartime camouflage. Indeed, that seems to be the case. In an online biographical note at the National Academy Museum website, it states that "during World War I he worked as inspector of camouflage for the US Shipping Board." During the war, ships in the Boston Navy Yard were being painted with various camouflage schemes by artists and others. Artist Philip Little from Salem MA (whom we've posted on before) was prominent in that group and was surely well-acquainted with Murphy. Little (and probably Murphy as well) was in direct contact with Everett Longley Warner, who was serving in Washington DC at time, as head of the US Navy's team of artists who designed the camouflage patterns required of all merchant ships, as regulated by the US Shipping Board.

Now back to the wonderful Warner pastel on this blog page. Here's what Helen K. Fusscas wrote in an exhibition catalog titled A World Observed: The Art of Everett Longley Warner 1877-1963. Old Lyme CT: Florence Griswold Museum, 1992—

In June 1919, although the war was over and his skills in camouflage were no longer needed, Warner had still not been discharged. He conceived a scheme whereby his last few weeks in the service would be helpful to him as an artist…As a result Warner spent three or four weeks being flown daily in US Navy seaplanes over New York City and the Eastern seaboard painting small sketches in oils from the air to be enlarged later in his studio…He completed several dozen fairly complete sketches, perhaps the first paintings ever done during actual flight.

Warner was soon discharged from the service. His first thought as a civilian was to enlarge enough pictures of flight to make an exhibition.…In a burst of enthusiasm he quickly completed three large paintings from the sketches…New York From a Sea Plane [is] the only one of this series known to have survived even as a sketch…

Warner exhibited his aerial paintings frequently, but the excitement that he had hoped to stir up never materialized. He discovered that few people new or cared what the land looked like from the air. Totally discouraged by the indifference with which his excursions into this new field were received, Warner gave up the idea of painting aerial views…[He] finally painted two out and burned the other.

Aerial Views, Camouflage & Crazy Quilts

Prior to World War I, in part in response to the Armory Show (1913), there was a flood of comparisons (in cartoons in particular) of cubism and futurism with less exalted forms of "art," such as the "crazy quilts" (made of leftover quilting fragments) created unassumingly by America's grandmothers. Above is an especially funny cartoon of grandma and her cubist quilt. Drawn by Clare Briggs and titled THE ORIGINAL CUBIST, it was published in the New York Evening Sun, on Tuesday, April 1, 1913.

After World War I began, camouflage was widely adopted, and inevitably there were comparisons of camouflage and cubism, and, in turn, of camouflage and crazy quilts. More serious, and far more interesting as well, were the various many comparisons of cubism, camouflage, crazy quilts and views of the earth from an airplane (a novelty then). Here's what Ernest Hemingway said in "A Paris-to-Strasbourg Flight" in the Toronto Daily Star on September 9, 1922—

The plane began to move along the ground, bumping like a motorcycle, and then slowly rose into the air. We headed almost straight east of Paris, rising in the air as through we were sitting inside a boat that was being lifted by some giant, and the ground to flatten out beneath us. It looked cut into brown squares, yellow squares, green squares and big flat blotches of green where there was a forest. I began to understand Cubist painting.

Of course Hemingway wasn't the only one to make such comparisons. Journalists and the general public saw it too. Below are two aerial photographs of the French landscape from the same time period. The second view, which appeared initially in Collier's Weekly in 1918, was captioned with a text that read—

NO WONDER CUBISM STARTED IN FRANCE! No one need wonder any longer where the cubists got their inspiration. They must have gone up in an airplane and had a good look at France! This airplane view of an observation balloon floating over a French village is as good a bit of cubist art as anything that Marcel Duchamp ever turned out.

Aerial Photography and WWI Camouflage

The following text is a news article issued by the US Signal Corps, published as "War News" in American Photography Vol 12 (1918)—

Plans have been completed for the great enlargement of facilities for training and equipping the aerial photographic force for photographing the German trenches from the skies and keeping up to the last minute the large composite picture of the whole German front…

The bulk of the training [of the aerial photographic staff] will be for the developing and printing work which must be done on a standardized plan under process specially developed during the war, often in great haste on special motor lorries close to the front and to the staff. After a month's course, the men will be given a short advanced training and immediately sent overseas for operation in the American sector.

Aerial photography has greatly developed during the war. During the single month of September, British official reports state that 15,837 aerial photographs wee taken by the British alone. No new trench can be dug, no new communication system opened up, no new batteries placed but the ever-present and infallible camera above records it for the examination of the staff below. So piercing has been this work that camouflage has been developed as a protection, thus forcing aerial photography to even greater ingenuity.

Every sector of the front is divided into plots about half a mile square, each one numbered and entrusted to a squad of photographer who become fully familiar with it. As fast as the photographs are made, they are developed, printed, reduced or enlarged to a standard scale, and then fitted into their proper place on the large composite photograph of the sector. This work requires a large force of experts in developing, printing and enlarging, as well as in map reading interpretation.

Cases are on record where only twenty minutes have elapsed from the time a photographer snapped his camera over the German trenches until his batteries were playing upon the spot shown. In that time the airman had returned to his lines, the photograph had been developed and printed, the discovery made, and the batteries given the range and ordered to fire.