Showing posts with label museums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label museums. Show all posts
Saturday, February 28, 2026
camouflage exhibit opens tomorrow / Washington DC
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
exciting new exhibition at spy museum coming soon
The interview was conducted by a wonderful radio host named Ben Kieffer, who is featured daily at noon during the week on Iowa Public Radio on a program called River to River. He was wonderful, as was Kathryn Keane (who spoke so eloquently and without a single flaw), who is one of the top executives at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC.
Our tandem interviews came about because that museum is about to open a new, major exhibition about camouflage (called Camouflage: Designed to Deceive), beginning March 1 and continuing for three years. You can find out more about the exhibition contents online at the museum's website. And you'll also find details about the exhibition catalog (for which I wrote the introduction) online here.
Wednesday, January 7, 2026
Camouflage Exhibit at Spy Museum Opens in March
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| Exhibition Catalog Cover |
The catalog / book can be preordered at online book sites, and tickets are available in advance on the museum's website.
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Sunday, December 22, 2024
WWI camouflage artist / taxidermist Louis Paul Jonas
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| Taxidermy Hall of Fame |
Shown above is a photograph of the well-known museum display of a group of African elephants in the Akeley Hall of the American Museum of Natural History. It was completed by a famous naturalist, taxidermist and sculptor named Carl Akeley, who collaborated on it with one of his prominent students, the sculptor and museum exhibit designer Louis Paul Jonas (1894-1971). Born in Budapest, Hungary, Jonas initially worked with his two older brothers, who owned a taxidermy studio in Denver (eventually there were five brothers in the firm). After moving to New York, he established his own studio, and created admired exhibits in more than 50 museums throughout the world.
I want to focus on Louis Paul Jonas because I hadn’t realized that, during World War I, he served in the US Army’s Camouflage Corps. I learned this only recently from a news article titled MONSTER MAKER, so-titled because he had been commissioned by the Sinclair Oil Company to build full-size fiberglas models of dinosaurs for the New York World’s Fair.
In that article (published in the Barrytown Explorer, Barrytown NY, on October 1, 1963, p. 4), it states that Jonas bought a 120-acre farm near Churchtown NY “and gradually made over the barns and stables into studios, and built up a staff from among his Columbia County neighbors. Now he has a staff of 16 experts, all trained by himself. One he found in a Hudson shirt factory, a young Italian who had been a mold maker in a ceramics works back home; several were members of an Adult Education class in sculpture conducted by Jonas in connection with the Hudson school system—bricklayers, housewives, and factory workers among them; three came to him via the GI Training Program, and the rest are members of his own family, including his ‘key man,’ Louis Paul Jonas Jr.” An extraordinary person obviously.
Saturday, May 27, 2023
the tragic life of a taxidermist, camoufleur and convict
•••
In the 1921 Indianapolis city directory, Arthur J. Coleman is listed as a taxidermist (he was the curator at the Indiana Statehouse Museum) and a custodian, with the home address of 337 South State Avenue. James A. Coleman, his father, shared the same residence, as did Arthur’s mother, Nancy S. Coleman.
In connection with his museum position, Coleman was allowed to carry a gun, a revolver in a shoulder holster. In May 1920, he and three companions (including an eighteen-year-old woman named Floy Minck) were returning to Indianapolis at night, when Coleman, who was driving, noticed that an automobile tire was blocking the road. When he stopped to look more closely, he saw that a rope was attached to the tire, and that it was being pulled off from the side. He heard voices in the dark, and saw six men approaching the car. He drew his revolver and fired two rounds. The men fled and Coleman hurriedly drove off.
In September 1920, Floy Edna Minck (1902-1976) married an Indianapolis carpenter named Bernard B. Bartlett. Ten months later, Arthur J. Coleman married a young woman (the same age as Minck) named Elizabeth (Libby) Schmitter. In November of that same year, there was a jury trial in Indianapolis, in which Coleman was accused of threatening to kill Bartlett, because of a dispute about “a girl whom Bartlett later married” (presumably Floy Minck Bartlett). The jury could not agree on a verdict.
Coleman’s marriage to Libby Schwitter Coleman was an unfortunate pairing. It was troubled from the start, and they agreed to separate at the end of the first year. Coleman moved to New Harmony IN, on the Wabash River, while his wife lived twenty miles west in Crossville IL. They had lived apart for about a year, when, according to Coleman, he received a phone message and a letter from his wife, suggesting that they talk about living together again.
On April 26, 1923, Coleman (this is based on his account) drove to Crossville, to talk to his wife about reconciliation at a house where she was then staying (apparently owned by someone named Jeff Young). When he entered the front door, he was struck on the head from behind and fell to the floor unconscious. When he regained consciousness (he testified), he was lying in a room, with a revolver in his hand. His own revolver was still in his shoulder holster. Nearby was the body of his dead wife, who had died from three or four bullet wounds. In a 1923 news article, it was noted (without explanation) that the owner of the house, Jeff Young, is “an inmate of a hospital for the insane in Illinois.” It was also claimed that a man (unnamed) who was in the house at the time of the shooting had “left immediately and was away from [that area] for a year.”
Despite Coleman’s account of what happened, he was arrested at the site for his wife’s murder, and jailed in Carmi, the county seat. On the day after his arrest, his mother visited him at the jail. She later said: “When I pulled Arthur’s head down to kiss him, I felt a bump on his head and noticed blood on my hand as I left the jail.” But that injury was not mentioned in the documentation for his appeal.
Coleman said that, while he was in jail for three weeks, awaiting his court appearance, the sheriff brought a “professional hangman” to his cell, to describe the agony of dying that way. He was then taken to a window, and shown where the scaffolding would be built. He was told: “That’s where we will stretch your damned neck.” He was also warned about the horror of being lynched if an angry mob would storm the jail.
Coleman later described his condition, while awaiting his court date, as being “sick and nervous.” Inspite of having no memory of the shooting, he decided to plead guilty (to avoid the death penalty) when he appeared before a judge on May 19. He was then sentenced to life in prison for a term of ninety-nine years. He spent the next 21 years at the Illinois state prison at Joliet as well as on a prison farm.
[So what does any of this have to do with camouflage? Aha, I thought you’d never ask.]
It seems that during his confinement, Coleman continued his interest in taxidermy, including animal camouflage, sculpture, landscape design, and museum exhibitions. Various people, including other inmates, congressmen, and well-known citizens (soprano Mary Garden being one) spoke in favor of his work. He was permitted to open a shop inside the prison, and “because of his genius,” a campaign was started to allow him to be pardoned. It did not succeed.
When the US entered World War II, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was a further effort to secure Coleman's release in exchange for advising the army on wartime camouflage. An article described him as “one of the best camouflage artists in the United States.” According to another account, he was “a nationally-known taxidermist and artist” who has “taken up camouflaging” and whose “services were wanted to help camouflage coast artillery batteries.” But that appeal was also denied.
In the end, Arthur J. Coleman was not pardoned, but he was released on parole on July 27, 1944, having served 21 years of his life sentence. Thereafter, he earned his living as a professional taxidermist. As late as April 1960, he owned a taxidermy shop (specializing in “game fish and big game mounts”) in Boca Raton FL.
Below is the most complete source of information about Coleman's life, consisting of two pages in the Indianapolis Times, September 12, 1932, pp. 1 and 3.
SEE ALSO
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)
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Architect Harold Sterner documented ship camouflage
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| American architect Harold Sterner |
In 1888, Albert Sterner moved to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian. He returned to the US in 1918, to teach at the Art Students League in New York. As shown in the photograph below, he also designed war posters.
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| Albert Sterner creating war poster (1918) |
Albert Sterner’s son was an architect named Harold Sterner (1895-1976), who later designed the Helena Rubenstein beauty spa at 715 Fifth Avenue in New York. Harold Sterner’s mother was Marie Walther Sterner, founder and director of the Marie Sterner Gallery (1920-1950).
Harold Sterner attended St George’s School in Newport RI, then studied architecture at MIT, where he graduated in 1917. That same year, he enlisted in the US Navy, where he was assigned to the camouflage department, in the Third Naval District. During his wartime service (according to a listing of MIT graduates), he “kept records of types of camouflage on vessels entering New York Harbor, sending drawings to Washington to be checked with original designs.”
He opened his own architectural firm in 1932. While never formally trained as a painter, he produced a substantial number of drawings and paintings of ships, some of which were given to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York.
Thursday, September 12, 2019
William Penhallow Henderson | Wheelwright Museum
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| Hosteen Klah (left) and William Penhallow Henderson (c1936) |
Following high school, she remained in Wisconsin, and taught Menominee Indian children for several years at Keshena. In 1912, partly for health reasons, she moved to New Mexico territory, and taught Navajo children at a government boarding school at Fort Defiance. In one of her books, she recalls the initial resistance of the Indian children when she tried to teach them English. The breakthrough came when she asked them to teach her to speak Navajo, in the process of which they also learned to speak English.
While at Fort Defiance, she met a young trader, originally from Manchester IA, named Arthur J. (known as A.J.) Newcomb. They married in 1914, and went on to operate trading posts on the Navajo Reservation, in remote, isolated regions of northwestern New Mexico. Their primary post was located about halfway between Gallup and Farmington, at a place now known as Newcomb. Their marriage continued for 32 years (they divorced in 1946), during which they raised two daughters, Lynette and Priscilla.
A.J. bought part of the Newcomb Trading Post in 1913 and moved there to learn the business. One of the first Navajos to befriend him was Hosteen Klah, an influential chanter, medicine man, and weaver. When Franc arrived as A.J.’s wife in 1914, she too became a close and long-term friend of Klah. Fifty years later, she wrote a book about his life. While respectful of the rituals and traditions of Native Americans, she also helped them to adapt. When medicinal plants and other remedies were ineffective against diseases brought by Whites, she provided modern medicines, often traveling to remote hogans. She became known as Atsay-Ashon or Medicine Woman.
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| Newcomb Trading Post |
As Franc Newcomb earned the trust of Hosteen Klah and other leaders, she was gradually permitted to observe rituals that non-Indians had strictly been excluded from. These included sandpainting ceremonies in which symbolic patterns were painstakingly made of colored sand, then promptly destroyed when the ceremony ended. At first, as a silent observer, she memorized features of the sandpaintings, then made drawings afterwards. “Since pencil, paper, or camera were not allowed in the lodge, I had only my memory to depend on,” she later wrote, “…[but] In later years I trained myself to concentrate, and if allowed to remain in a ceremonial hogan for a half-hour, I could reproduce the painting without an error.”
With Klah’s and others’ approval, she gained increasing access and was eventually permitted to replicate about 500 sandpaintings, which she recreated in paint on board. Some Navajos opposed this, condemning it as sacrilege, but Klah consented cautiously. Forty-four of these were reproduced in her first book, Sandpaintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant (1937), while other surviving paintings by her have been preserved and exhibited at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe.
Although she made hundreds of paintings that replicated Navajo sandpaintings, it is unlikely that Franc Newcomb ever considered herself an “artist” in the usual sense. She was a writer and amateur ethno-anthropologist for whom her paintings were a tangible means of preserving sandpainting tradition. She did this in other ways as well. For example, Hosteen Klah had been a weaver of Navajo rugs since the late 1880s. One day, she asked if he might consider weaving monumental rugs (as large as 12-foot square) that would replicate ceremonial sandpaintings. While reluctant at first, he eventually agreed, providing that they would be wall tapestries, not floor rugs to be walked on.
His first such tapestry was purchased by the wife of King Gillette, who had made a fortune from his invention of a razor with disposable blades, the iconic Gillette razor. Klah’s second rug was purchased by a wealthy heiress named Mary Cabot Wheelwright of Boston, who would establish the Wheelwright Museum in 1937. By the time of his death in that same year, Klah had woven twenty-five large tapestries, based on ceremonial sandpaintings.
A few years after Klah’s death, Franc Johnson Newcomb published a book on Navajo Omens and Taboos (1940), and later co-authored A Study of Navajo Symbolism (1956). In 1964, when she wrote a book about the life of Hosteen Klah, she dedicated it to the memory of her deceased former husband, Arthur John Newcomb, who had died in 1948. He was by then her “ex-husband” because the couple had divorced two years earlier.
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| Newcomb Trading Poster (October 21, 1921) |
A decade before their formal divorce, on May 9, 1936, A.J. was living at their home and trading post. Franc was in Albuquerque, where their daughters were attending school. A news article in the Albuquerque Journal described the devastating fire that destroyed their trading compound and most of their finest possessions that day:
Fanned by a stiff south wind, the whole compound consisting of the Newcomb home, the trading post, the manager’s house, the camp cottages, and the garage were soon ablaze.…One of the loveliest collections of prehistoric pottery in the Southwest, collected by Mrs. Newcomb over a long period of years, was completely destroyed as was her collection of more than 400 pressed specimens of herbs and medicinal plants used by the Navajo medicine men. Also lost was a collection of old ceremonial baskets and hundreds of films of Navajo people and scenes.
A small amount of insurance enabled the post to be partly rebuilt. But the psychological damage was irreparable. According to Franc Johnson Newcomb’s biography in American Women Writers (2000), “When fire destroyed their trading post in 1936, her husband’s alcoholism became actute, straining Newcomb to the breaking point.” She and her daughters moved permanently to Albuquerque, where she established a day-care center for children and a visiting nursing service.
At the same time, she was an active participant in the establishment of the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe (where much of Newcomb’s work is housed). Funded by Mary Cabot Wheelwright, with Klah’s consent, the museum building was designed by the celebrated Southwest painter, designer and architect William Penhallow Henderson (who had designed murals for Frank Lloyd Wright for the Midway Gardens in Chicago). Rejected by some as a styllistic oddity when compared with other museums in Santa Fe, it was wonderfully appropriate for Navajo tradition. It is a Modern-style two-story hogan, in which the past and the future are fused. Given its emphasis on geometric abstraction, it may be of additional value to learn that Henderson had served during World War I as a civilian ship camouflage designer in San Francisco.
Helen M. Bannan has said that “Newcomb’s best work is her nonfiction prose blending history, autobiography, and folklore.” Among the finest examples of that is her final book, titled Navajo Neighbors, which was published in 1966, when she was nearly 80 years old. It is dedicated to her daughters.
Franc Johnson Newcomb died in Albuquerque NM on July 25, 1970.
According to Bannan (2000): Although some historians and anthropologists resented Newcomb as an amateur, N. Scott Momaday applauded her realistic portrayals of Navajo life. To Newcomb, Navajos were people, not objects for study. This basic assumption permeates Newcomb’s works, enhancing their value as a record of the personal dimension of intercultural communication.
***
Sources
Bannan, Helen M. “Franc Johnson Newcomb” in American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide. Gale Group, 2000.
Franc J. Newcomb, Authoress, Dies Here. Albuquerque Journal. July 26, 1970.
Johnson, Burges. As Much As I Dare: A Personal Recollection. New York: Ives Washburn, 1944.
Lange, Patricia Fogelman. The Spiritual World of Franc Johnson Newcomb. New Mexico Historical Review. Vol 73 No 3, July 1998. Full text is online at <https://www.francnewcomb.org/>. Accessed on September 8, 2019.
Newcomb, Franc Johnson and Gladys A. Reichard, Sandpaintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant. New York: 1937.
Newcomb, Franc Johnson. Hosteen Klah: Navaho Medicine Man and Sand Painter. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964.
Newcomb, Franc Johnson. Navaho Neighbors. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1966.
Was Founder of MNCA: Mrs. Newcomb dies at 83. Santa Fe New Mexican. August 9, 1970.
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Note A slightly different version of the above biography of Franc Johnson Newcomb has been shared with AskART.
SEE ALSO
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)
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