Date: Wed, 1 Sep 1999 06:22:55 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (fwd) Old Artist Desgins Modern Camouflage (fwd)


  	  				 
	WASHINGTON -- Anyone in Kosovo who has trouble distinguishing an
American from a Russian soldier can blame the confusion on camouflage
uniforms designed with the ideas of an American artist a century ago in
mind.
 	Uniforms, however, are missing from an exhibit of work by the
artist, Abbott Handerson Thayer, at the National Museum of American Art.
	Perhaps, rightly so, since Thayer's work suffered from his
passionate and eccentric efforts to convert the U.S. and allied military
to his ideas on camouflage, according to Charles Meryman Jr., son of a
painter who worked closely with Thayer.
	One of Thayer's main ideas, now visible in uniforms, was that a
pattern of broken shapes makes a soldier a more confusing target for
snipers. One painting in the exhibit, done with the elder Meryman, shows
how even a brightly colored peacock can be hard to see among foliage.
	Another picture is an innocuous water color of dead brown leaves.
Place an overlay mask on it and a nasty copperhead snake appears coiled
among them. Take off the overlay again and the snake disappears to become
part of the composition. Artist Rockwell Kent helped him on this one, as
did his wife Emma and his son Gerald.
	Meryman called him the ``father of camouflage.''
	But Thayer met a lot of resistance.
	``Your experiments are of no more value than ... putting a raven
in a coal scuttle and then claiming he is concealed,'' President Theodore
Roosevelt wrote him after leaving the White House.
	Today the U.S. Army issues a standard ``woodland'' uniform in
earth colors and a pattern of broken shapes such as Thayer recommended.
Young civilians have adopted the fabric as a fashion statement. British,
German, French and Russian soldiers in Kosovo all wear similar uniforms.
	Artists in France had some ideas of their own. One of Pablo
Picasso's biographers tells how the painter was walking down a Paris
boulevard in the winter of 1914 with American writer Gertrude Stein and
others when they saw a convoy of camouflaged artillery roll by.
	``We're the ones who did that!'' Picasso said. ``That's cubism!''
	A year later, the French army set up the first unit dedicated to
camouflage.
	The Russians redesigned camouflage uniforms after the collapse of
the Soviet Union. They replaced the green, brown and black summer pattern
with black, gray and white spots in winter. Chechen rebels, various
insurgent and government forces also have used them, sometimes making it
hard to distinguish warring sides.
	Thayer also was highly regarded early in the century for his
portraits and landscapes, especially of Mt. Monadnock near his home. He
also liked painting angels.
	Today he is mostly remembered, if at all, for a portrait of his
daughter Mary, 11, dwarfed by huge white wings behind her shoulders which
appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1993. The original is in the
current show.
	Thayer died in 1921.
	--------------
	``Abbott Thayer: The Nature of Art'' will be at the National
Gallery of American Art through Sept. 6. Admission is free.
  	   	
-- end of forwarded message --



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