Abbott Thayer and the invention of camouflage

• Maggie M. Cao ^[1]
  1. [1] Columbia University

     Columbia University

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 39, Nº. 3, 2016, págs. 486-511
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • How is camouflage, with its visual language and assumed modernity, precisely related to painting? This essay takes a look at the forgotten history of early camouflage: its discovery in the natural world and its theorization by an American painter, Abbott Handerson Thayer, who at the turn of the century controversially proposed that animal camouflage was universal. Thayer produced a series of unprecedented artworks, from wallpaper cutouts to landscapes made from bird feathers, for the purposes of representing camouflage -an inherently paradoxical task. His attemps to visualize invisibility demonstrate the ways in which the logic of camouflage proved incompatible, even destructive, for painting. THayer's visual strategies, based on erasure and disintegration, carry implications of loss and violence that speak to camouflage's pictorial agency as well as its complex modernity.