There was a gap in the credential culture of America’s art world from 1900 to 1945: the gate-keeping institutions that sought to define a national aesthetic lapsed for half a century, and that left the job of molding young artists to others. Those others didn’t have an interest in defining an “American Style” — in contrast to folk expressions or in contrast to a European style — but they did have an interest in teaching people to draw. Commercial illustration taught Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and N.C. Wyeth how to make a picture, while the explosion of newspapers demanded a generation of on-the-spot draftsmen, willing the Ashcan Movement into existence almost entirely on the need to fill column inches.1 These and others employed armies of visual artists when the office of Fine Artist was a little shaky, but there was an even bigger employer keeping the graphite flowing — and one with national interests in mind. Between advertising, the fourth estate, and the US military, the first early modernist period was seeded with a chaotic pluralism of ideas about how to make a picture and why.
Thomas Jefferson was doing some nation-building when he summoned a “Corps of Engineers . . . stationed at West Point and constitute a Military Academy” in 1802.2 He built West Point in his own image: enlightened man of science and art, West Point would put a healthy mind in a healthy body. The first Superintendent to make West Point a genuine engineering school was Sylvanus Thayer, himself one of only a few early West Point grads, with further education at Dartmouth and the École Polytechnique in France. He was a STEM guy, and his time at the helm saw West Point giving teaching appointments to artists from the National Academy.
Robert Walter Weir (1803 – 1889) took over the instruction of drawing at West Point in 1834. The West Point model needed map-makers, fort-designers, biologists and ethnographers — not painters of picturesque scenes. Architectural models, maps and and graphs are all abstract visual representations of reality — a sort of realism — but not the realism being taught at the painting academies here or abroad. Weir himself didn’t have any formal training. But his students would shape American art down the road, and by the turn of the next century it really didn’t matter whether you could paint a lovely portrait because that work would be turned over to the camera. Weir’s students fanned out across the spectrum of abstract representations of reality, from ethnographic surveys in the work of Seth Eastman to innovations in optics in the work of James Abbott McNeil Whistler.
II. We Created That.
As the 19th century progressed, whatever hold Academicism had on realism started to slip away, and Weir’s own children helped develop the first moves away from the academic style. J. Alden Weir was a member of The Ten, America’s super-group of Impressionists. While the European movement included maverick personalities, many of the tenets of Impressionism were built on the science of optics. Paintings were deemed under-finished — they lacked the high-polish finish of the official academic style — but they were undergirded by an exploration into what things actually looked like, as the science of light, the biology of the human eye, and materials sciences behind the manufacture of paint all came into maturity. The old way of modeling form was built on chiaroscuro and “local color”: grass is green, except at night when it’s really really dark green. The new method embraced the possibility that form can be modeled by value as well as tone. In hindsight it’s a modest observation — an enlightenment perspective that Jefferson and Thayer could have appreciated — but the thought that grass isn’t always green loosed bedlam upon the art world of the day.
A descendant of the Thayer family was also asked to join the Ten, but Abbott Handerson Thayer declined. He had a bigger project on his hands: he called the study of “concealed coloration” his “second child,”3 and he produced a major book on the topic in collaboration with one of his actual children, Gerald Handerson Thayer. Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom explores how animals camouflage themselves. It is built out of the careful observations and naturalism that inspired the West Point model and embraced the optical perspectives that informed Impressionism. One critic denigrated Thayer’s science as “exaggerated,” but the right people were reading it: Theodore Roosevelt, a naturalist and military man, wrote a book-length response.4
In a few short years, the folks at West Point were all reading Thayer again: it had become the founding text of the industry of camouflage. Five years after Thayer’s book appeared, the Great War put its ideas into use. The first truly modern industrial war saw the deployment of weapons that armies desperately needed to hide from, and the fighting men of the world for the first time shed their loud regalia for drab and khaki and other color schemes to help them evade detection.
The war taught a new generation how to paint. In 1917, a young Charles Burchfield made his first inquiries into abstract art — his “Golden Year,” as he put it. But the following year, he put in his time in Camp Jackson, South Carolina, painting camouflage.
“It was impossible for me to do straight camouflage,” he wrote. “I had to have a poetic idea back of my designs.”5 That poetic idea fueled him in his next career — two decades of designing wallpaper, while he toiled over his watercolors in the evenings.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Pablo Picasso had a different response to camouflage. He saw no need to add more poetry. Seeing the first camouflaged canons in Paris, he remarked to Gertrude Stein:
“We created that.”6
He wasn’t wrong. The old order was crumbling, and now the aesthetics of war, long plotted in the garrisons of West Point and the École Polytechnique, would have their day. It also sketched the century ahead: the days of the pretty picture, of things being just what they appeared to be, were long since passed.
The future was abstract: diagrams to reveal an unseen order, camouflage to evade its predations.
A topic for another day (!), most of the Ashcan artists started out in newspaper illustration in Philadelphia.
Just the same sort of nation-building as the founders of the Met, and the early fine art academies — which you can read about in our post on the birth and death of the early academies, here.
As quoted by Richard Meryman, “A Painter of Angels Became the Father of Camouflage,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 1999.
It’s scathing, and full of extraordinarily minute observations, but the ad hominem attacks on Thayer are the most diverting: “I have spoken of Mr. Thayer as well-meaning; but it is difficult to admit that certain of his pictures and statements are to be pardoned on the ground that he is merely a well-meaning and ill-balanced enthusiast” (Bulletin of American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XXX, 1911, p. 230).
As quoted in Charles Burchfield: By Design, 2014.
Gertrude Stein, Autobiographie d’Alice Tokias, Paris: 1933.