Ann Elias tells the story of Max Dupain and Frank Hinder, two WWII-era Australian artists who “used the techniques of abstraction, cubism and surrealism to help the military camouflage and conceal soldiers, airplanes and military equipment”:
Their overseas counterparts included such illustrious modernist names as Roland Penrose in the UK, and László Moholy-Nagy and Arshile Gorky in the US. These artists researched how to conceal and disguise objects and bodies for military advantage, instructing their respective military forces in the “art” of camouflage. …
There are many synergies between modernism and military camouflage. Camouflage is paradoxical and cryptic. It requires the mind to think in doubles. Abstraction’s dissolution of form, surrealism’s subversion of the authority of vision, collage’s disorientation of perspective and cubism’s fragmentations were all modernist trends that were fundamental to the techniques Dupain, Hinder and their colleagues used to create camouflage. Towards the end of his life Dupain reflected that in the 1940s he was “pattern prone.”
Elias wonders if the modernists don’t get more credit for their wartime work because their collective effort “sits so ambiguously–and uncomfortably–between the history of violence and the history of aesthetics.” Although that doesn’t seem to have hurt the Abstract Expressionists, who received CIA backing in the 1950s and ’60s.
Previous Dish on modern art and international relations here.
(Photo: Max Dupain, Bankstown aerodrome camouflage experiment, c.1943. National Archives of Australia)
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