architects / they have an eye for the looks of things

Above Photograph of Homer Saint-Gaudens, by De Witt Clinton Ward.

•••

HOLLYWOOD PROP MEN ABLE AT WAR CAMOUFLAGE in The Boston Globe, January 15, 1942, p. 12—

WASHINGTON January 15 (AP)—Hollywood “prop” men—the chaps who design the stage sets for the movie stars—make the best prospects for military camouflage work, an Army expert on strategic concealment asserted today.

Lieut. Col. Homer Saint-Gaudens, Harvard-educated head of the camouflage branch of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, said in an article in the Military Engineer:

"Our best men are moving picture property men. They not only have camouflage ideas, but they understand the application of those ideas. They are resourceful; they are disciplined; they have an eye for the looks of things: they can build you the answer."

The colonel, who was himself stage director for actress Maude Adams. and is director of fine arts, Carnegie Institute, says that when a would-be camouflage worker comes to his desk and declares he is a marvellous painter, he (Saint-Gaudens) makes this reply:

"That's okay. But let me have a look at your hands. How are your feet? Can you lug 60 pounds 20 miles and do it again the next day?

"Yes, I remember that set where Robert Taylor makes love to Hedy Lamarr. You say you designed it and helped build it, too? You are just the young man we are looking for."

Saint-Gaudens, who received numerous decorations for his camouflage work during the first World War, said the best camouflage officers, the ones who direct the workers, are young erst-while architects."

Such men, he declared, have "already learned to cope with the builders of new houses who insist on having the stairs and the clothes closet in the same place.”

•••

Below Page spread from an article by Edwin Schallert, Trick Photography in the Gold Rush, in Science and Invention (December 1925), pp. 714-715, showing various special effects and scenic props used in the filming of the Charlie Chaplin comedy The Gold Rush.

  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

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)

Everett C. Hammond / WWI Boston-area camoufleur

Until a few days ago, I had never heard of a Boston-area artist named Everett C. Hammond, who served as a camoufleur during World War I. While described in newspapers at the time as a “portrait painter” and “well-known local artist,” his artistic expertise seems questionable if judged by the lackluster quality of the single drawing found so far. Reproduced above, it was made while he was serving as a US Army camoufleur in France, and was included as part of a letter to his sister in Boston (as described below in this post). At the time he made this drawing, he appears to have had little training in art—it is amateur at best.

•••

CORP HAMMOND TELLS OF CAMOUFLAGE WORK, in Boston Evening Globe, February 12, 1919, p. 9—

Corp. Everett C. Hammond, 1st Army Camouflage Service, a Cambridge man and well-known local artist, called at the local army headquarters today for final orders and to pay his respects to [Major] General [Clarence Ransom] Edwards [ranked last in his class at West Point in 1883].

Corp. Hammond went over seas with the 101st Engineers. He was a member of the old 1st Corps of Cadets when it changed to the engineer regiment. When he was overseas a short time, some one in authority learned that he was quite an artist, or rather “that he could paint” and he was shifted to the Camouflage School for further training in natural colors, etc. Then he was assigned to active duty on the fighting fronts, and went through every campaign. He, with others, would lay long stripes of burlap on the ground and paint them so that it would appear like grass or a natural science, when it was stretched over a battery of artillery that was hammering away at the enemy.

He was in every battle of the famed 26th Division [known as the Yankee Division, as commanded by General Edwards], although his official headquarters at all times was at Dijon. He declared that it quite an exploit, and certainly a dangerous and thrilling one, to first paint and then erect the disguises for the guns in the most active sectors.

He is the first of the camouflage men to report to the local offices, and his flaming yellow sleeve designation [a chameleon emblem], underneath a big blue A, excited curiosity.

•••

BOSTON ARTIST AS CAMOUFLEUR / E.C. Hammond Had Narrow Escape While Hiding Guns With Brush, in Boston Sunday Advertiser and American, March 1919, p. W-7—

More camouflage!

If the war has taught us anything, it has certainly acquainted us thoroughly with the art of camouflage. First it was used In concealing batteries, then to foil the U-boats, and finally came to peaceful pursuits, such as making certain things appear in a somewhat different light than might be otherwise construed—especially the truth.

Our story deals entirely with the first phase of the art—making raging, destructive batteries appear like harmless and aesthetic spots of nature. Something like the demon behind the man with the smiling face.

But now hear a real camouflage artist tell of bona fide camouflage. Listen to descriptions of this art in its original element, and incidentally a few other experiences of this expert camoufeur.

Boston Portrait Painter
By way of introduction, our artist is Corporal Everett C. Hammond. A Boston portrait painter. The war afforded him an opportunity to transfer his peaceful activity to a more fiery environment and he was quick to take advantage of it—enlisting two days after this country declared war. He has just returned to his home in Cambridge—with a thorough training in camouflage, but with an utter ignorance of "Camouflage."

His dally duties perfected him in the former art, but his schooling in the latter has been sadly neglected owing to the association with many clean, manly fellows, whose knowledge on that subject was meagre.

Hammond was among the first camoufleurs to be chosen by the government for this important work abroad. His highly developed training in done colors and natural features of landscapes qualified him for this branch of service with such men as [Homer] Saint-Gaudens, [F. Earl] Christy and [Barry] Faulkner, modern artists of wide popularity.

Was at Seicheprey
He was first with the 101st Engineers, with whom he served at the battle of Seicheprey [on April 20, 1918] and later with the 40th Engineers. Shortly before the battle of Seicheprey his company was engaged in constructing a camouflaged machine gun emplacement which they had half completed when the Boche shelling began. They were forced to abandon this work hurriedly, but not before two of their number had been killed and several wounded. After returning they found this position had been effectively shelled.

Hammond was later placed in charge of the camouflage work of the 130th Field Artillery, which used 75’s and 135mm guns. This unit was particularly active in the Toul sector between Gezencourt and Martincourt.

700 Women Helpers
About 700 French women were engaged during the war in making camouflage materials for the American government. This was done in Nancy and Dijon. Burlap was used principally and was prepared by a coloring process in which numerous natural colors were used. After being dried it was cut into uneven pieces and tied on chicken wire, having the appearance of the vibration and natural color of a grass field.

The colors were selected according to the particular environment, and when the structure was erected about a battery the blend served to conceal it from the enemy.

Each battery occupied an area about 100 feet long and 25 feet wide. This was entirely covered with camouflage raised to a height of twenty feet from the ground. It was done by means of posts surrounding the area at a distance of ten feet apart. These in turn were covered by the vast stretch of burlap colored according to the fields. At a distance this looked like a natural bank. The same was true from above and was indiscernible to the aviator's eye.

Camouflage While You Wait
The extensive operations were not carried on during a quick drive. In such case all guns carried forward their network consisting of burlap and fishnet. The latter was often covered with branches, leaves, etc. In quick drives a gun could be camouflaged in about thirty minutes. Along the established lines it required weeks and often months to construct the camouflage shelter.

The position of batteries were determined by the amount of natural protection, particularly near banks. They were often placed near brush, the effect of the shrubbery being carried out.

Hammond had several narrow escapes, among which was an incident when returning from the inspection of a camouflaged battery. Enemy guns wore searching out the territory, and as he crossed a barren field that section suddenly became the center of the foe's fire. He quickly sprang to a shell hole and was astonished when a dog, evidently a company mascot, came close to his heels. Both remained there until the guns ceased firing.

Another Narrow Escape
Later while he was discussing the camouflage of a certain battery with a comrade a large fragment of shell whizzed by his ear.

•••

SENDS PENCIL SKETCH OF CHAPLAIN EDWARDS, in Boston Post, April 21 1918, p. 12—

Miss Gladys E. Hammond of 241 Upham Road, Cambridge, received a letter yesterday from her brother, Everett C. Hammond of A Company, 101st Engineers, which contained a pencil sketch of Chaplain Edwards• addressing the men of the regiment before their departure for the front.

“My brother wrote,” said Miss Hammond, “that the engineers have been busy building miles of barbed wire entanglements, doing the work at night. He said that the work would keep the men busy for a long time. This letter was written March 12.”

The sketch shows Chaplain Edwards at the front of the colors, addressing the men. A line under the sketch, quoted as Chaplain Edwards’ words, reads: “I am going to commence the service this morning by reading a poem.”

•This appears to be an error, since I have yet to find any reference to a chaplain named Edwards in the Yankee Division, whereas the unit’s commander was Major General C.R. Edwards. Perhaps the two have been confused.

Camouflage Artist | John Dwight Bridge

Portrait of a Lady in a Red Dress by J. Dwight Bridge (n.d.)

J(ohn) Dwight Bridge was born on December 9, 1893, in St. Louis MO, where his family was socially prominent, wealthy and influential. His ancestors had been among the founders of Washington University. Having moved from Walpole MA to St. Louis, his family “made a fortune” from the railroad and the manufacture of cast-iron stoves.

Dwight attended a prestigious private school in Pawling NY. He then went on to study art at the Art Students League in New York, where he worked with painter, muralist and interior designer Albert Herter, whose father had co-founded the Herter Brothers interior design firm in New York, and whose son was Christian Herter, Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration.

In 1917, having returned to St. Louis, Bridge announced his intention to “give up his career in art to enter the Episcopal ministry.” But when the US entered World War I, he decided instead to enlist as a camouflage artist. In September 1918, when the US Army formed its first camouflage unit, he was among the first to enlist, along with fellow artists Barry Faulkner (Abbott H. Thayer’s cousin), Sherry E. Fry, William Twigg-Smith from Hawaii, and Everit Herter (son of Albert Herter), who had only recently married.

Appointed Sergeant Major (and soon after First Lieutenant), Bridge was the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer of the group. He shared a tent with the unit’s leading commissioned officer, Lieutenant Homer Saint-Gaudens, the son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the celebrated American sculptor. After months of training at Camp American University in Washington DC, the camouflage unit (officially known as Company A of the 40th Engineers) departed for France at the end of December 1918. In the subsequent months at the front, two members of the unit died in action, including Everit Herter, who was killed at Chateau-Thierry. Following the war, Bridge lived in Paris, then resettled in New York.

In 1918, five weeks before her husband's death, Everit Herter's wife had given birth to a son named Everit Herter Jr., who never saw his father. Around 1920, Dwight Bridge relocated to Santa Barbara CA, where his former teacher Albert Herter had established a new permanent studio at his mother’s former estate, called El Mirasol. Bridge married Everit Herter’s widow, Caroline Keck Herter, and thus became the stepfather of Everit Herter Jr. In July 1919, the Herters’ second son, named Albert, died in Santa Barbara at the age of two years and ten months. In their early years of marriage, Dwight Bridge and Caroline Herter Bridge became parents of two of their own sons, Matthew and John Jr.

J. Dwight Bridge (c1933)

In the 1920s, Bridge’s marriage fell apart. After several years of estrangement, he and his wife obtained a divorce in 1933. At about the same time, Bridge’s father died in St Louis, and he was slated to receive an inheritance of about $100,000 (worth nearly two million dollars today). In newspaper interviews, he revealed that he would refuse to accept it, saying that “an inheritance is more of a hindrance than a help.” Instead, he gave the money to his former wife and their children, and announced that henceforth he would survive as what he called a “vagabond” or “hobo”  artist.

He decided to hitchhike somewhat aimlessly around the country (his travels would take him as far as Japan and China) all the time earning his living by painting portraits. Carrying few possessions and almost no money, he began his trek in Salina KS, “the geological center of the United States.” According to a 1933 newspaper story (of which there were many, since his story was rightly regarded as odd, even bizarre), having arrived at Salina at 9:30 in the evening, he “laid all his money—30 cents—and his half-filled package of cigarettes down on the station platform, buried his wedding ring and, although it was night, immediately began a search for employment. He was 40 years old.” He was allowed to sleep in jail that night, and, in the morning, began to hitchhike west, earning his meals and lodging by various means. He was, he explained to reporters, “a man from the East, without any funds, a painter who could whitewash fences and paint doors, portraits or murals.”

The news stories bore fruit. After trading pencil portraits of meals, he was soon receiving commissions for portrait painting. The first was for $200, but he gradually raised the price to $500. On his trip to Japan, where he had eight commissions, he stopped over in Hawaii to see his former fellow camoufleur, William Twigg-Smith, whose relatives owned the newspaper there. From Hawaii, he flew back to the US mainland, then resettled in New York, while also continuing to travel around, from city to city, painting portraits of the rich in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Dayton OH, San Francisco, Palm Beach, Colorado Springs, and elsewhere.

In a 1946 article in the Palm Beach Post, there is a pencil portrait of US Navy Captain Martin L. Marquette, who was then the commanding officer of the Naval Special Hospital (about to be closed) in Palm Beach. The drawing, the article explains, “is the work of J. Dwight Bridge, portrait artist and veteran of both World War I and II, to whom the closing of the hospital will signal a return to civilian life. During the past few months, while recuperating at the hospital, Mr. Bridge as part of his rehabilitation work has got his hand back in sketching by doing 90 portraits of the staff and patients at the hospital...During the war [WWII] he engaged in camouflage work in the AAF [Army Air Force] along similar lines he followed for the engineers in the previous war.”

Three years earlier, one of the Bridges’ sons, John Dwight Bridge Jr, (born 1920), had been killed in action while serving with the US Navy in the Mediterranean.

John Dwight Bridge Sr. died in Palm Beach FL on October 22, 1974.

•••

Sources

Evelyn Burke, “‘Hobo Artist’ Paints Society Folk But He Doesn’t Like Money” in Pittsburgh Press, May 2, 1935.

“Capt. M.L. Marquette” in Palm Beach Post (Palm Beach FL), February 3, 1946.

Helen Clanton, “Hitch-Hiking as a Form of Service” in St. Louis Globe Democrat, January 13, 1936.

“Noted Artist Says Fighting Elements Provides More Thrills Than Many Sports” in Dayton Daily News (Dayton OH), April 15, 1936.

“St. Louisan in Camouflage Unit of US Army Home” In St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 15, 1919, p. 5.

“St. Louisan Who Paid Way Around World as Painter and Portrait He Made” in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 19, 1933.

•••

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)

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

Camouflage Artist | Harry Shenker

Cover illustration (1949) by Harry Shenker

As noted in the text below, WWI American camoufleur Harry Shenker worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for the Farm Credit Administration in the period following World War II. While functioning as art editor of that agency's in-house employee newsletter, called the Grapevine, he sometimes published his own cartoons, such as the cover illustration above from the July 29, 1949 issue.

•••

Harry Shenker was active/lived in Paris, New York City, Washington DC, Kansas City MO, and Hartford CT. He is known as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, illustrator and camouflage artist.

Harry Shenker was born May 8, 1888, in Vilna, Russia, in what is now Lithuania. His mother Sophia Frances Cabressky died while he was still an infant. His father, Jacob Shenker, immigrated to the US in 1891. He was a former commission merchant and real estate man, and was prominent in the Hebrew community in Hartford CT. Harry emigrated to the US in 1900 (at age twelve), and lived in Hartford with his father and his stepmother, Sophaia Shenker (whom Jacob had married in 1898).

Federal employment records indicate that Harry, soon after his arrival, while still a teenager, was living in Brooklyn NY (possibly with Jacob’s sister). He studied drawing in New York at the Art Students League in 1903-1905, and at the Art Students League in Hartford from 1905-1910.

While residing in Hartford, Shenker was a member of the Pickle Club, a social organization of older members of the Hartford Art League. In 1907 those members were identified as: Walter O. Eitel, C. Carney, Oscar Anderson, James Britton, Alfred J. Eaton, William H. Smith, Harry Schenker, Isaac H. Grant, Thomas Brabazon, Charles Noel Flagg, and James Goodwin McManus [1].

In 1910, when in his early twenties, he applied for a passport to study abroad for five years, at locations that included the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At that time, he spelled his name as “Schenker,” not “Shenker.” In the passport application, he describes himself as 5 feet 9 inches tall, with brown eyes, wide nose, a medium forehead and short chin. His complexion was dark brown, with brown hair and a roundish face. He returned to the US in May 1914, sailing from the port at La Havre, and soon after reapplied (by now, he spelled his name as “Shenker”) to return to France to study for two additional years.

Like many artists, Harry Shenker enjoyed painting along the coast of Brittany, in the vicinity of Locquirec, a strikingly beautiful village situated around a charming little harbor. According to Alain Levron (owner of the Loïc de Pors Melleca gallery), “Many painters, seduced by the beauty of this coast, put their easel there: [among them] Félix Valloton, Georges Rohner, Harry Shenker, Marius Borgeaud…” [2]. While painting there and at other locations in France, Shenker enjoyed a certain measure of success: On federal employment applications, he lists “$10,000” in annual income while working in that country as an ‘independent contractor and artist.”  

He was still living in France when World War I began in July of 1914. He remained in wartime Paris, but in 1917, the US also declared war against Germany, with France, England and Russia as allies. When the US entered the war, Shenker enlisted in the US Army in Paris, which was officially known at the time as the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). No doubt because of his training as an artist, he was assigned to Company B of the 40th Engineers, known as the American Camouflage Section. It was headed by Captain Homer Saint-Gaudens, a theatre designer whose father was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the most famous sculptors of the time.

As confirmed by federal employment records (dated 1949), Shenker’s WWI army service began in August 1917 and ended in October 1919. He lists his position as “Sergeant, Master Engineer, Senior Grade, 40th Engineers” and adds that he “had supervision [of] over 2,000 workers in camouflage work in France for the US Army.” He describes himself as “a landscape artist,” and requests that he be assigned to “Art and camouflage work.” At the end of WWI, he received a service citation, and was honorably discharged on November 30, 1918.

In that same year, Harry Shenker married a French woman named Marcelle Marie Dalabardon (born in 1890), who was a portrait artist, sculptor and still-life painter. It appears that the artists-couple then settled in France, living on the Brittany Coast (her family lived in Bourg de Locquirec) and working out of their converted boathouse studio.

The certificate documenting the marriage of Shenker to Marcelle Dalabardon includes the signatures of several notable artists/sculptors, including Edward A. Minazzoli, a student of sculptor James Earl Frazier [3], architectural painter Albert Fossard, and Louis Biloul, a painter and art professor at the École des Beaux-Arts [4].  Also signing their marriage certificate was Captain Elwood Ray Keen, who commanded Company I of the WWI 40th Engineers Camouflage unit. Shenker was also a friend of John Storrs, sculpturer and painter who studied under Auguste Rodin [5][6].

In the fall of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, it is believed that the Shenkers were living at Marcelle’s parent’s home in Locquirec. Soon after, World War II began, with the Germans on the one side and the British and French on the other. Understandably apprehensive, it is also recalled that Harry and Marcelle burned and buried their lifetime works, and departed on a ship to the US on April 25, 1941. In the meantime, in Hartford, Harry’s father died on the following day.

The US declared war and joined the Allies in World War II only weeks after Harry’s return from France. He registered for the draft, but did not serve. Searching for work, he was fortunate to come to know two men named Verne Hemstreet (whose family he became close friends with) and B.F. Viehmann. Both men were managers for the Farm Credit Administration (FCA), a federal agency that began in 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government reforms. Through the encouragement of these two acquaintances, Harry Shenker was hired to work for the FCA, and eventually held long-term positions as a graphic designer and illustrator for that agency.

Around 1948-1950, Shenker was identified as the Art Editor of a modestly-printed periodical called the Farm Credit Club Grapevine, which was an in-house newsletter for FCA employees. The cartoon drawings he produced for the Grapevine during those post-war years are lively and refreshing, and may be his most endearing work. Earlier, in the same newsletter, an account of his wartime experiences in Nazi-occupied France was published as a fascinating four-page article called "Life Under Nazi Domination." It is published in the November 18, 1942 issue [7].

While working for the same agency, Harry Shenker also offered an informal “art class” for FCA employees, and published various notes (called "Lessons in Modern Art") in the Grapevine.

Following the end of WWII, Marcelle Shenker traveled back and forth between the US and her parents’ home in Locquirec. She was concerned about its upkeep, as well as wanting to affirm its postwar ownership by her family. At the conclusion of a long career, Harry Shenker retired in 1965 (at age 77), and he and his wife returned to France. He lived for another thirteen years. When he died in Paris in 1979, the American Legion acquired his principal artworks [8].

Notes

[1] Memoirs of the Connecticut Art League, The Hartford Courant Magazine, Sunday April 19, 1948, by John A. Maher.

[2] Bretagne-grandeur-nature. Le Point. Revised 1/17/2007. Accessed at <http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-voyages/2007-01-17/bretagne-grandeur-nature/1088/0/36529>.

[3] The Arts of War and The Arts of Peace. Accessed at < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arts_of_War_and_The_Arts_of_Peace>.

[4] Louis-François Biloul. Accessed at <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Fran%C3%A7ois_Biloul>.

[5] Archives of American Art, John Henry Bradley Storrs papers, Image name: storjohn00004.tif. Accessed at <https://edan.si.edu/slideshow/viewer/?damspath=/CollectionsOnline/storjohn/Box_0003/Folder_042>.

[6] John Bradley Storrs. Accessed at <https://www.askart.com/artist/John_Bradley_Storrs/29674/John_Bradley_Storrs.aspx>.

[7] Life Under Domination. S.U. Baxter. The Farm Credit Club Grapevine. 18 November 1942. Volume 1 Number 7. Accessed at <https://archive.org/details/CAT11083488007>.

[8] Harry Shenker à la galerie d'art. © Le Télégramme. 21 July 1998. Accessed at <<http://www.letelegramme.fr/ar/viewarticle1024.php?aaaammjj=19980721&article=4072056&type=ar#cbkkibaUAF7MKMUs.99>.

This biographical entry is comprised of information that was provided by Cathy Hyman of Blythewood SC. It is based on factual data found in various US government documents, in internet research and online newspaper archives, as well as the childhood recollections of the daughter of Verne Hemstreet, who, as a management executive at the Farm Credit Administration, befriended Harry Shenker and his wife Marcelle in the early 1940s and housed them during their most difficult times in Kansas City MO and Washington DC.

A slightly different version of this has also been provided to askART.com.

Camouflage Artist | Ivan Opffer

Homer St-Gaudens (c1918) by Ivan Opffer

Ivan Opffer was born in Nyborg, Denmark, on June 4, 1897, to a family of Danish scholars and journalists. His brother was Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant seaman and journalist who was known for his relationship with American writer Hart Crane.

Ivan was raised in Mexico City and New York, where his anarchist father was the editor of a radical Danish-language newspaper. His involvement in painting and drawing began at an early age. At a summer workshop, he met and studied drawing with Winslow Homer, then went on to study at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League of New York.

When the US entered World War I, Opffer was one of the members of the American Army Camouflage Corps, headed by Homer Saint-Gaudens (whose mother was a relative of Winslow Homer), the son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. As a camoufleur, Opffer served with other artists and architects, some of whom became well-known, including Barry Faulkner, Sherry Edmundson Fry, Kimon Nicolaides, Robert Lawson, Abraham Rattner, Kerr Eby and others. It was this same unit, while still in training in at Camp American University in Washington DC, that launched a camp newspaper called The Camoufleur. Only three issues were published before the unit’s deployment to France in late 1917. In the October 31 issue, a satirical portrait by Opffer of Homer Saint-Gaudens (titled “Our Boss”) was published on page 5 (as reproduced above).

After the war, Opffer returned to New York, where he became known for his caricatures of leading Modern writers, among them James Joyce, Edgar Lee Masters, Siegfried Sassoon, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Sandburg, G.K. Chesterton, and Thomas Mann.

In the years between the wars, Opffer married Betty à Beckett Chomley, and settled in Paris, where he was a student at the Academie Julian. He also lived in London and Copenhagen, where his drawings were frequently published in newspapers and magazines. With the outbreak of World War II, he and his family returned to New York and lived in Greenwich Village. Among his friends in that era were William Butler Yeats, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Ernest Hemingway. He and his wife Betty are said to be portrayed in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

When he retired in the 1960s, Opffer moved back to Copenhagen, where he died on March 3, 1980.

•••

This account is partly based on an online information page that was written by Ivan Opffer’s granddaughter, Yvonne Opffer Conybeare. Accessed on January 17, 2018 at <http://www.oocities.org/yconybeare/>.

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

Cornish Colony Camouflage | National Parks

Cornish Colony Camouflage

In an earlier blog post, we've talked at length about theatrical designer and arts administrator Homer Saint-Gaudens (1880-1958). The son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (the most famous sculptor of his time) and a distant cousin of Winslow Homer, he was the officer in charge of US army camouflage during World War I. He grew up at his parents' home and studio near Cornish NH, sometimes called the Cornish Colony, which is now part of the National Park System.

As shown above, about two weeks ago, the website of the National Parks Conservation Association featured a blog post by Nicolas Brulliard on the connection to camouflage of the younger Saint-Gaudens, with reference to other Cornish Colony camoufleurs, among them the co-founders of the civilian American Camouflage Corps, sculptor Sherry Edmundson Fry, and muralist Barry Faulkner (who had been Homer Saint-Gaudens' roommate as a freshman at Harvard).

Below is a recent find from the Pictorial Section of the New York Times (Sunday, February 2, 1919). It's a photograph of Homer Saint-Gaudens at the time of his return to the US from Europe.

Homer Saint-Gaudens

For a related but different story about a link between camouflage and the US National Parks, go here for another earlier post.

Camouflage Artist | Raymond J. Richardson

US Navy camoufleurs (1918)

Above This is a rare World War 1-era photograph (c1918) of the drafting room at the Design Subsection of the US Navy's Camouflage Section. This art-centered subsection (under the direction of artist Everett L. Warner) was located in Washington DC, while a second science-centered Research Subsection (under the direction of optical physiologist Loyd A. Jones) was at the Eastman Kodak research facility in Rochester NY. The executive officer in charge of the combined subsections (the Camouflage Section per se) was architect (and Olympic fencing champion) Harold Van Buskirk. Through extensive searches (in part thanks to notes received from the descendants of the camoufleurs), we've been able to identify more of these individuals and to learn about their lives. In this photograph, as indicated by numbers, we have identified Harold Van Buskirk (1), Everett Warner (2), painter Frederick J. Waugh (3) (seated to the right of him is sculptor John Gregory), painter Gordon Stevenson (4), painter Manley K. Nash (5) (standing behind and right of him, holding a large ship model, is Kenneth Stevens MacIntire), and architect Raymond J. Richardson (6), who was in charge of the drafting room. It is not surprising that two of the supervisory personnel (Van Buskirk and Richardson) were architects, because it was often claimed that the best camouflage officers were not artists but architects, because of their experience in working collaboratively. Note also the inclusion of women (an innovation at the time), four or five of whom are in this group.

Richardson (left) and Van Buskirk, looking at model and ship plans

Richardson (?) and Van Buskirk in model storage room

Below is more information about Raymond J. Richardson, with details regarding this unit. It is of additional interest that in 1922 Richardson was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. The head of that school's Department of Art was Homer Saint-Gaudens, who had commanded the US Army's Camouflage Corps during WW1, and in 1924, Everett Warner also joined the faculty there.

•••

Anon, from SERVED IN CAMOUFLAGE SECTION OF U.S. NAVY. READING MAN UNDER WATER, ON LAND AND IN THE AIR in the Reading Eagle (Reading PA), April 11, 1919—

Ensign Raymond J. Richardson, of Reading, who, as a member of the US naval reserve forces, had been serving in the camouflage section of the navy, has been placed on inactive list and has returned to this home town to again take up architecture, the profession which he had been following when he left civilian life to answer the call to the colors. Ensign Richardson enlisted on July 10, 1917, at Newport RI, and was sent from that station to New York City, where he trained under William A. Mackay, considered the dean of naval camouflage in America. Mr. Mackay was at that time engaged in working out camouflage designs for the shipping board.

Later Ensign Richardson was transferred to the League Island Navy Yard, Philadelphia, and had charge of the camouflage work there. On February 25, 1918, he was sent to Washington, where he helped to organize the camouflage section of the navy. At first the designing department consisted of only three men [Van Buskirk, Warner and Richardson, presumably]. This finally grew until there were between 50 and 60 men.

Lieutenant Harold Van Buskirk, a well-known architect, was the executive head of the department, and Lieutenant Everett L. Warner, one of America's best landscape painters, was the head designer. Ensign Richardson served as assistant to these two men and had charge of the drafting room.

The work of this department was to design the type of camouflage which was to be used on the various vessels, both of the transport and combatant type. Models of the vessels were made in wood and these models were studied at various angles and ranges through periscopes and in this way the most effective type of camouflage was determined. Plans and blueprints were then prepared and these were used by the men in applying the camouflage.*

During the time that he was in the service, Ensign Richardson had occasion to make short cruises in submarines and also to make flights in airplanes in order to determine the effectiveness of the work of the camoufleurs. So he served under water, on land and in the air.

Among the men attached to Ensign Richardson's department at Washington was Earl Bankes* * , a brother of C.W. Bankes, of this city. Bankes was a warrant officer.

Ensign Richardson is a graduate of Reading High School, class of 1910, and of the University of Pennsylvania, class of 1913. He took a post graduate course at the latter institution and was awarded the degree of master of science in architecture in 1915.

After graduation Ensign Richardson worked in the offices of some of America's most prominent architects, principally in and about New York City. At present he is with E.Z. Scholl, a Reading architect.

Ensign Richardson is a son of Mr. and Mrs. Fred H. Richardson, 1324 Pricetown Road. His father is a member of the firm of Richardson and Early, wholesale confectioners.

* There were about 450 of these ship painting plans (reproduced in multiples as color lithographs), but apparently only two sets of the plans have survived. The most complete set is in the collection of Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), while a second set is housed at the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA).

** Through various online newspaper archives, we've located a number of articles on an Earl Bankes from Reading PA who had resettled in Miami FL, where his paintings were included in various art exhibitions.

Camouflage Artist | Everit Herter

Herter Brothers cabinet (c1875)

Above An astonishing decorative cabinet, made of ebonized cherry and mixed wood marquetry, circa 1875. It is now in the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Its creators were the German-born designers Gustave (1830-1898) and Christian Herter (1845-1883), whose design firm in New York was called Herter Brothers.

During the Eisenhower administration, while growing up in the Midwest, we were well aware of the name Herter, because another Christian Herter (1895-1966), a respected American statesmen, was Secretary of State from 1959-1961. That person was the son of an American artist and muralist, named Albert Herter (1871-1950), whose own father had been the earlier Christian Herter, the designer-craftsman.

Although we didn't know it then, the artist Albert Herter had a second older son, a young artist named Everit Albert Herter (1894-1918), who died tragically at the front at Chateau-Thierry in France in World War I. The young Herter was a Harvard graduate, among whose college friends had been the muralist Barry Faulkner (cousin of Abbott H. Thayer) and theatrical designer Homer St. Gaudens (son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the most famous sculptor of his time).

Portrait (perhaps a self-portrait) of Everit Herter (n.d.)

When the US Army officially started its Camouflage Corps in 1917, Herter was one of the first to enlist, along with Faulkner, Iowa sculptor Sherry Fry (an Augustus Saint Gaudens protegé), and others whose names I have listed in earlier posts, among them William Twigg-Smith, Valentin di Colonna and Cobb X. Shinn. Saint Gaudens was the officer in charge of the unit, the same unit that published a camp newspaper called The Camoufleur. They trained for several months on the grounds of the American University in Washington DC, then sailed for France in the last few days of December 1917 or the first week of January 1918 (there are conflicting accounts of the departure date).

Until recently we hadn't realized Herter's capabilities as an artist, and still know very little. While it's unfair to assess his potential on the basis of a single painting, we cannot help but be impressed by a work of his in the collection of the Fogg Museum at Harvard. Reproduced below, its title is Portrait of a Young Man in a Brown Shirt (c1913). There is writing on the side that reads: "Study by Everit Herter Harvard Class of 1914 Sergeant Camouflage Corps: [not readable] died in France June 1918." Obviously, the inscription was not added by Herter, but perhaps it was placed there by his teacher, Harvard professor and art theorist Denman W. Ross (1853-1935), whose family gave it to Harvard in 1936.

Everit Herter (1913), Fogg Museum, Harvard

Nor had we realized until recently that Everit Herter had kept a diary during the war, and that a good portion of it can now be accessed online, in M.A. DeWolfe Howe, Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany. Vol 3. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), pp. 229-247. He was the first of two American camoufleurs to be killed in action at the front (the other being Faulkner's friend Harry Dickinson Thrasher).

There are numerous accounts of Herter's death, given his friends and family ties. A brief report that first appeared in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine. Vol 27 (1918) reads as follows—

Everit Albert Herter, sergeant, 40th Engineers, died of wounds, June 13, 1918. A small body of men had volunteered to camouflage a gun in a position in advance of the front line. Sergeant Herter was the first to go out, and after reaching the appointed place, waited for the rest of the party. The other members were either delayed or were unable to come, and while waiting, Herter was severely wounded by a bursting shell. He tried to make his way back to the lines, but lost consciousness. Finally he was rescued and carried to a hospital, but he never regained consciousness, and died within a few hours.

His family was of course devastated, made more poignant by the fact that Everit and his wife were the parents of two infant sons. In Everit's memory, his painter father gave to the French people a huge, magnificent mural that was installed in the lobby of the Gare de Paris-Est (East railway terminal). It can be accessed on Wikipedia here. In addition, there are other photographs of it and an insightful account of its meaning on a blog called Invisible Paris.

additional sources

Camouflage Artist | Homer Saint-Gaudens

Above A portrait by Carlota Saint-Gaudens of her husband Lieutenant Homer Shiff Saint-Gaudens in his US Army uniform in 1917 when he was in charge of the camouflage corps. As published in International Studio (December 1919).

...

In the opening pages of Hannah Rose Shell's book about camouflage and surveillance, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (Zone Books, 2012), she describes the resourcefulness of Homer Saint-Gaudens (1880-1958), who invented a way to make blanket-like camouflage coverings by shredding books and papers.

Recently I also found an online paper by Susan Platt, titled "Gambling, Fencing and Camouflage: Homer Saint-Gaudens and the Carnegie International 1922-1950." It was initially published in International Encounters (Carnegie Museum of Art) in 1996. Saint-Gaudens was the only child of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (the most famous sculptor of his time) and Augusta Homer Saint-Gaudens, also an artist, who was a distant cousin of Winslow Homer.

As Platt explains, the young Saint-Gaudens enjoyed gambling and fencing, and during World War I, he was the officer in charge of the American Camouflage Corps. Her thesis is not so much about Saint-Gaudens' camouflage service as about his presumed reliance on gambling, fencing and camouflaging skills in the decades while he was director of an annual competition called the Carnegie International Exhibition. In that capacity, she writes, he "would 'play the odds,' parry and thrust with the many different constituencies that he needed to satisfy, and disguise radical styles in the midst of bland examples in order to avoid attacks."

Homer Saint-Gaudens had earned his degree at Harvard, where his freshman roommate was future muralist Barry Faulkner (who soon dropped out to study art). Faulkner was a cousin of painter and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer, who was sometimes referred to in news articles as "the father of camouflage" because of his startling assertions about "concealing coloration" in animals. Faulkner had also studied with Saint-Gaudens' famous father, as had his friend, a sculptor named Sherry Edmundson Fry. Later, when Faulkner and Fry were living in New York, they formed a civilian camouflage group, called the New York Camouflage Society, for the purpose of preparing artists to serve as army camoufleurs. When the US actually entered the war, the two men were among the first to join a unit called the American Camouflage Corps. To their surprise, the person in charge of that unit was Homer Saint-Gaudens, who was fresh out of officer training.

It appears that other officers admired Saint-Gaudens, while the enlisted men despised him. According to Grenville Rickard, an architect and camoufleur who had graduated from Yale, and who served in France in WWI, "The 'Saint' [was] our generally accepted term for Lieutenant Saint-Gaudens…" but Faulkner (not an officer but an enlisted soldier in the same unit) recalls that Homer Saint-Gaudens was "intensely disliked by the men."

As Platt explains in detail, before and after WWI, Saint-Gaudens was employed in the theatre, as the stage manager for the widely-admired actress Maude Adams. In 1921, he was appointed Assistant Director of the Department of Fine arts at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and then became the Director a year later.

It is of further interest that, in 1924, there was a new addition to the painting faculty at the Carnegie Institute. It was Everett Longley Warner, an artist who had been the head of a team of US Navy ship camoufleurs during WWI.

...

Below Roy R. Behrens, Angels Can Fly. Digital montage, print on paper (2011). Based partly on a photograph of a bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1891) for the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington DC. The setting for the sculpture was designed by Stanford White. For detailed information, see Joyce K. Schiller, The Artistic Collaboration of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White. PhD dissertation. (St Louis MO: Washington University, 1997).

Camouflage Artist | Ezra Winter

The Ezra Winter Project (online)

American artist Ezra Winter (1886-1949) was born near Traverse City MI. He attended Olivet College (in Michigan), then studied in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute, where he graduated in 1911. In the same year, he won the prestigious Prix de Rome, by which he was able to study for three years at the American Academy in Rome. Winter's prize was in the category of painting, for what was described in a news story at the time as "a large canvas called The Arts, a beautiful and graceful work." A young Denver architect, George Simpson Keyl , received the same prize in that category, while the Prix de Rome in sculpture that year was awarded to Harry Dickinson Thrasher.

Thrasher had grown up in Plainfield NH, where he had been a student of the most famous American sculptor at the turn of the century, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. As Thrasher was growing up, among his friends were Saint-Gaudens' son, named Homer (a theatre designer and, later, an arts administrator), and a young painter from Dublin NH named Barry Faulkner (he was a cousin and student of Abbott Handerson Thayer, the so-called "father of camouflage," and had studied with Augustus Saint-Gaudens as well). Later, Faulkner became a prominent muralist, and a friend of Ezra Winter, with whom he collaborated on several major projects.

When the US entered World War I, a unit for camouflage artists was formed by the US Army. One of the officers in charge of that unit was Homer Saint-Gaudens, while among the very first artists to join were Barry Faulkner and Harry Dickinson Thrasher. After a period of training on the grounds of the American University near Washington DC, their unit was deployed to France at the end of 1917. Of the camoufleurs, there were only two who didn't return—Everett A. Herter (the brother of US diplomat Christian Herter) and Harry Thrasher, both of whom were killed in France in 1918. Faulkner delivered the eulogy at Thrasher's funeral.

At the same time, Ezra Winter was in New York, where, as a civilian, he worked for the US Shipping Board, as a member of one of thirteen teams of camouflage artists (stationed at various ports around the country) who supervised the painting of dazzle camouflage schemes on thousands of commercial ships (called merchant ships). In charge of the unit that Winter was in was another prominent muralist, William Andrew Mackay. According to official policy, the artists assigned to ship painting were not responsible for the design of the camouflage plans, only for applying them.

Instead, the initial camouflage plans were designed by another team of artists at the Navy's Camouflage Section in Washington DC (there was another research group, largely made up of scientists, at the Eastman Kodak Laboratories in Rochester NY). The DC team of artists made wooden scale models of merchant ships, applied experimental patterns to them, and tested their effectiveness in an observation theatre. The patterns that worked the best were then drawn up, printed in multiples as color lithographs, and sent out to the various harbors, where they served as a "blueprint" while painting the ships.

One of the artists in the Navy's DC camouflage team (the group that actually designed the camouflage patterns) was a British-born American sculptor named John Gregory. There are photographs of him, seated in a room with other camouflage artists (Everett L. Warner, Frederick Waugh, Gordon Stevenson, and others), painting camouflage patterns on miniature ships.

Ezra Winter is not in these photos of course, because he was attached to Mackay's unit in New York. But he is in other photographs (taken shortly after the war) when, as he worked on commissions (one of which was the interior of the Cunard Building in New York), he was photographed with two of his collaborators—his fellow wartime camoufleurs Barry Faulkner and John Gregory.

 ...

For more on Ezra Winter, see The Ezra Winter Project by Jessica Helfand, who is co-founder of a Connecticut-based design studio called Winterhouse—located in Ezra Winter's former home and studio in Falls Village CT. As of this posting, three Winter-related installments have been issued, the most recent two at here and here.

Camouflage Artist | Perkins Harnly

The following is an excerpt from an Oral History Interview of American artist Perkins Harnly (1901-1986), who served as a Depression-era Works Progress Administration muralist and, during World War II, as a camouflage instructor. The interview, which took place on October 15, 1981, was conducted for the Archives of American Art by Estil Pennington and Lynda Hartigan. The entire interview can be accessed online here—

Mr. Harnly: …when the WPA broke up—when the war was declared, you see—we were put on defense projects. I was put in aluminum.

Ms. Hartigan: And you taught camouflage design?

Mr. Harnly: Yes. I was an…instructor of officers. Yes, I certainly was. One of my officers in camouflage was William Pahlmann, who was the famous interior decorator. Gene Davis, who was the art [director] of [Good] Housekeeping Magazine. I had big shots.

Mr. Pennington: Leslie Cheek, did you work with him?

Mr. Harnly: I know the name, I know the name. I know the—I can't place him at the moment. But they gave me the project of the people who had much experience, much background, and all that. And we went to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the place where Homer Saint-Gaudens was, a relative, son of the great sculptor, I think.

Mr. Pennington: Yes.

Mr. Harnly: Well, anyhow, he was the head of this thing, of camouflage, until the air bombing of Cologne. It took 22,000 planes to mow the city down. All but the cathedral, they left the cathedral. And after that, camouflage, as we knew it, was not of any use. They used tactical camouflage after that.