From Service to Self-Expression: Veterans in the Arts

Ellsworth Kelly, photographed in his studio in Spencertown, New York Photograph: © Jack Shear

Camouflage, Collage: Ellsworth Kelly and the Art of Mimicry

by Sara Buoso

Ellsworth Kelly with screenprints, Fort Meade, Maryland, 1943, image Courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Studio

Ellsworth Kelly, Circa 1944, during his military service in Europe. Private first Class of The 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, Luxembourg

American artist Ellsworth Kelly (1923 – 2015) is known for his contributions to Abstract and Minimalist Art. This article intends to take a step back from these stages of the artist’s career to retrace the fundamentals of Kelly’s formation from his time at the Pratt Institute (1942-1943) to his serving the US Army in the US and Europe (1943-1945), from his years in Boston (1946-1948) and his second time in France (1948-1954) until his return to the US in 1954. Two techniques developed in these years--camouflage and collage--are significant to an understanding of the artist’s reframing of spatial composition through an aesthetic of mimicry. The artist’s experimentation with these techniques was recognized by notable honors and awards: Kelly was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2013, and the US Postal Service produced a series of stamps featuring ten of Kelly’s pictorial works in 2019.

Ellsworth Kelly US Postage Stamps

According to the literature, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris 1949, by the American artist Ellsworth Kelly, a piece consisting of oil on two stretched canvases contained in a single frame, the upper painted in white while the lower is painted in grey, was painted by the artist during his second Parisian period between 1948 and 1954 and marks a turning point in Kelly’s career. From this piece onwards, Kelly formulated his personal interpretation of Abstract and Minimalist Art. This article suggests that beyond this pictorial composition lie the fundamentals of a unique method for interpreting the visual field. Kelly said that the painting derived from the experience of visiting the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in October 1949 and observing how the context and atmosphere surrounding the paintings in the museum had an impact on the artist’s perception, which he later tried to reproduce in his own studio. Drawing from this experience, this article intends to reconstruct the ways Kelly was able to mature and formulate methods and strategies of seeing and making visible/invisible objects appear/disappear in spatial compositions as fundamentals of his contribution to Abstract and Minimalist art.

Ellsworth Kelly was born on May 31, 1923, in Newburgh, New York, and grew up in Oradell, northern New Jersey. His father, Allan Kelly, served in the US Army at West Point until 1929, then embarked on a career in insurance; his mother, Florence Githens Kelly, was a teacher. Along with his grandmother, both played an important role in introducing the artist to nature at the age of six, a theme he cultivated all his life. Birdwatching was a major fascination during the artist’s childhood, a fascination that he began to cultivate alongside an interest in the arts through the illustrations of artists such as John James Audubon and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, both ornithologists and illustrators. These interests coalesced in the artist’s mind to form a unique sensibility towards nature through the language of shapes, forms, colors, space in motion, and silhouettes, as testified by later works such as Falcon, 1959, and the series Blue Curve, 1948-1985, and Red Curve, 1955-1999, documented by the exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, online, in 2020. In addition, Kelly’s interest in the arts was also supported by his high school teacher Dorothy Lange Opsut who used to call him the “best artist” and encouraged him to develop this talent. This explains why after showing an early interest in acting and the stage, in 1941 Ellsworth Kelly enrolled at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

Ellsworth Kelly, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949, oil on two joined panels of wood and canvas, 50 1/2 x 19 1/2″. Photo: Hula Kolabas, courtesy of Ellsworth Kelly Archives.

Ellsworth Kelly (American, 1923-2015), Red Curve VI, 1982, oil on canvas, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Alfred Austell Thornton in memory of Leila Austell Thornton and Albert Edward Thornton, Sr., and Sarah Miller Venable and William Hoyt Venable and High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund, 2002.3. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.

At the Pratt Institute, as reported by the art historian and curator, Gregory Galligan, Kelly’s interest in the grammar of composition was informed by design principles and methodologies. Among others, the artist was influenced by the theories of abstract artist, Maitland Graves, author of the publication The Art of Color and Design, 1896, where alongside an analysis of the fundamental elements of visual representation, especially color, Graves firmly advocated for the primacy of non-representational art, a position that from 1954 will inform Kelly’s understanding of the language of abstraction. But the approach to design methodologically pursued by the Pratt Institute led him to approach one particular practice: camouflage.

As discussed by the artist and academic Roy Richard Behrens in the article “Art, culture and camouflage,” 2005, the roots of camouflage techniques are found in the contributions of American naturalist and painter Abbott H. Thayer (1849-1921). In the pivotal essay “The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration,” 1896, Thayer derived principles of camouflage from observations of how animals protect themselves by taking advantage of color and shadow effects in natural environments, allowing them to blend into the surroundings. These observations led the author to define camouflage as a visual technique to be understood through the language of optics, scenography, and the arts. Thayer, envisioning possible applications of this technique, tried to convince the US government to use ship camouflage during the Spanish-American war in 1898, without success. His theories were initially greeted with suspicion, notably by former President Theodore Roosvelt, himself an amateur naturalist, who publicly disagreed with Thayer’s position. Soon, however, camouflage techniques were implemented and adopted in the military services during the First World War, as by Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, a French academic painter and infantryman who admired Cubism and who was able to establish a dedicated section du camouflage in 1915 as part of the French defense. As further documented by Behrens in the article “Art and Camouflage: an annotated Bibliography,” 2012, camouflage design techniques were embraced in Britain and the United States and had an enormous impact in the Second World War.

Cover of the Industrial Camouflage Manual published by Pratt Institute in 1942; Research on making fake trees from nets (via Internet Archive)

In the Pratt Institute’s 1941-2 annual report, its former director, James C. Bourdeau, advocated for this practice. When addressing the vision of the Institute, he ambitiously defined the school as “the fountain-head for industrial Camouflage education,” a definition derived from perceptual experiments and research conducted by the Pratt Institute and the Office of Civilian Defense beginning in 1942, a collaboration that resulted in the publication Industrial Camouflage Manual, 1942, by Konrad F. Wittmann, an architect, which had national impact.

The introduction to the manual states: “A new element determines our planning - the bird's-eye view. Until now, we designed a factory with ground-plan and elevation, but it is no longer unimportant how this looks from the sky.” The aim of this publication was to consolidate and establish an emerging field of study already existing during the First World War, providing theoretical and practice-led evidence for thinking about camouflage as a design practice. This involved studies on the prominence of lines and shadow in landmarks, cityscapes, and aerial views, alongside of an analysis of regular and irregular patterns, round and geometric forms, straight and distorted lines, angles of recognition, color transformation, light and shadow confusion, all as principles of composition. The manual also provides insight into techniques aimed at questioning the visual field and its representation in relationship to nature through strategies of formal distortion, explosions, decentralization, efficiency, and protection as a design problem. It also reported: “Successful camouflage is never the result of tricks or mystification, study of nature, repeated observation, and an ability to ‘build’ three-dimensional effects are necessary premises for good camouflage work.” All these design principles were examined and discussed in relation to their strategic relevance, including an analysis of case studies such as the prototyping of manufacts like nets, surfaces, artificial trees, tanks, elevators, water towers, and other objects intended for defense purposes. This explains why Kelly decided to use this knowledge and skills strategically in his later career.

Example of a dummy tank (1944) (courtesy Department of Defense/National Archives)

These contexts and frameworks explain why in 1942, after three semesters at the Pratt Institute, Kelly, following the rise of the Nazi Party and the attack on Pearl Harbor, took the initiative and sent a letter to volunteer for the Army. As Kelly shared in an interview in 2011: “I read an article in the paper about the Army working with camouflage in Fort Meade, Maryland. I didn’t want to be in the infantry, so I wrote them saying, ‘I’m an artist and I’d love to be in your outfit.’ They said, ‘Get in the Army. We have your name. We’ll find you.’ Kelly was assigned to the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion, also known as the “Ghost Army,” a department comprised of artists mainly from Philadelphia and New York who scored at least 119 on an IQ test. After an assignment at Camp Hale in Colorado, where Kelly trained with mountain troops despite not knowing how to ski, he was then transferred to Fort Meade, Maryland, where he begun to work with specialized designers on techniques of military camouflage.

In the catalogue of the major exhibition dedicated to Ellsworth Kelly at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1973, art critic and art historian Eugene C. Goossen retraces this period of the artist’s biography, dwelling on Kelly’s experimenting with camouflage techniques between 1942 and 1945. After some early in-field assignments on the construction of camouflage nets when based in Louisiana and Tennessee, Kelly joined the communication department in line with the spirit of military propaganda pursued by the battalion. The military’s propaganda materials consisted of a series of silkscreen posters aesthetically influenced by Bauhaus and Modernist schools of thought, grouped in series of twelve or so and focused on the technique of camouflage. Each series dealt with different aspects of composition such as color, texture, shadow, blending, and shape, with the aim of illustrating how the visual experience can be constructed and manipulated for military purposes. Whilst the graphic design was assigned to expert soldiers, Kelly contributed to the stencil techniques using a palette of natural earth colors, mainly sienna, umber, and additional primary colors, all informing an aesthetic of mimicry. In 1944, when the battalion was moved to Camp Forest, Tennessee, Kelly was assigned to the 23rd Headquarter Special Troops, where he focused on camouflage strategies of distortion, deception, and illusion. This involved the designing of materials and manufacts such as inflatable tanks, trucks, army, artillery pieces, and other dummy equipment, to distract the enemies and create a false perception of the visual and sonorous fields. For all these assignments, Kelly was able to employ different uses of camouflage design techniques. Although the artist turned these strategic design functions into an inquiry on abstract composition from the post-war period onwards, these projects remained pivotal experiences for developing his unique understanding of the visual field.

In 1944, the Ghost Army was sent to Europe, and Kelly had the opportunity to spend two months in England, then moved on the 19th of June to France, first to Normandy, then reaching Saint Germain in Paris that summer. As Goosen reports, Paris, which was liberated by Allied forces on the 25th of August, immediately had a profound impact on Kelly’s imagination. But whereas his companion, Bill Griswold, a student of the history of architecture, met with Picasso in his studio, Kelly chose to explore the city and its artistic landscape and architecture. These explorations are documented by a series of sketchbooks in which Kelly experimented with drawings and watercolors of this landscape. The drawings Art Abrams, 1944, Luxembourg, 1944, and Briey, France, 1945, show how in Paris, Kelly began to develop a reductive method of composition consisting of essential lines, shapes, and tonal colors in anticipation of his personal understanding of the language of abstraction. When the allies boke the German defenses and entered Berlin in the early summer of 1945, Kelly, along with the rest of the battalion was sent back to the US.

Ellsworth Kelly, Plant II, 1949, oil on wood, 16.5 x 13 inches, Private collection,

Back in the US, Kelly’s interest in the visual arts led him to enroll at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he attended drawing and art history classes, and encountered School of Boston expressionism between 1946 and 48. Here in particular, the artist felt the need to reconnect with nature, also guided by the influence of painter Max Beckmann, a German Expressionist, whose lecture delivered at the School at the invitation of Professor Karl Zerbe in Boston, had an enormous impact on Kelly’s formation. However, the lasting impressions Paris had made on him led him to embark on a second visit thanks to the support of the G.I. Bill, which paid for veterans’ education. Kelly sailed to Paris, arriving there in October 1948 to enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts, settling at the Hotel Bourgogne on the Ile-Saint-Louis in 1949. In these post-war years, a completely different cultural environment was developing in Paris. Many artists were returning after years of exile, and the city soon became an international and vibrant source of inspiration for emerging artists like Kelly. But even in this context, the artist maintained his ongoing interests when choosing the themes of his artistic investigation. Nature was one of these, as seen from Kelly’s exploration of simplified and organic forms in the series Plant I, and Plant II, 1949. In parallel, Kelly developed an interest in the exploration of objects from daily life as fragments of the world through techniques of alteration and distortion derived from camouflage practices. In both genres, it is undeniable that during these Parisian years, Kelly gradually abandoned realistic elements of composition to formulate a personal understanding of organic and pure forms achieved through reductive strategies of composition and vision.

This turn was significantly influenced by Kelly’s encountering old masters and Medieval, Romanesque and Byzantine Art, such as the notable experience of seeing the Isenheim Altarpiece, 1512-16, by the painter Matthias Grünewald and the sculptor Niclaus of Haguenau, at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, which deeply impacted the artist’s ideas of spatial composition and the field of the viewer’s experience. This experience is in line with the artist’s visits to Poitiers, Chauvigny, Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, Tavant, Chinon, and Mont-Saint-Michel, as documented by the series of drawings from frescoes, stonework, and sculpture he realized during those years. But Kelly’s curiosity was also significantly affected by the contributions that contemporary artists made to the language and the style of the Avantgarde in the early 1900s. The expressive power of color in Henri Matisse, exhibiting in Paris in the 1950s, informed Kelly’s interest in color, while Jean Arp’s pictorial investigation of organic forms may have informed his fascination with elements of chance in composition and collage techniques as seen in Wood Cutout with String I, 1949. Kelly met Arp in person, introduced by art critic Michel Seuphor. Kelly deeply assimilated Picasso’s questioning of representation when he visited the Picasso Museum in Antibes. During Parisian studio visits, Kelly encountered the essential forms of Brâncuși, the exploration of spatial dimensions of the work of Alexander Calder, and the deconstruction of composition of John Cage. He traveled to Marseilles to see Le Corbusier’s Habitation, where he was taken aback by the architect’s use of color and forms.

Ellsworth Kelly, Gauloise Blue with Red Curve, 1954, pstcard collage, 3.25 x 5.5 inches, Private collection, © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.

One can only imagine the heterogenous and experimental nature of the works, practices, theories and schools of thought Kelly may have had access to during these Parisian post-war years. These may explain why the artist felt it necessary to embrace a practice like collage, constructing a distorted, altered, and manipulated vision by means of abstraction. Influenced by movements such as Cubism and Surrealism, in 1949 Kelly released his very first collage piece titled Seaweed/Mandorla, 1949, consisting of juxtaposed organic and abstract forms, connoted by structural elements such as contour, rhythm, density, spatial presence, and color, all merging into an abstract visual object. Kelly’s interest in collage techniques became almost a conceptual operation. While connoting everyday objects with significant symbolic meanings, this piece provides evidence of the artist’s interest in understanding art not as an invention of the artist’s mind, but as a differential manipulation and reinterpretation of what already exists in reality. This explains why in these post-war years, the artist also began to collect postcards as everyday aesthetic and communicative objects and to experiment with techniques such as cutting and tearing--a cropped-out of the photographic image on a postcard overlayed with fragments of paper materials--geometric disruption and, ultimately, the act of juxtaposing real and abstract compositions.

In 1954, after six formative years in France, Kelly decided to return to the US. His official reason was his interest in attending the solo exhibition of American Expressionist and Minimalist artist Ad Reinhardt at Betty Parsons Gallery, in New York. 1954 is also the year Kelly realized his first postcard collage. Titled Gauloise Blue with Red Curve, 1954, the work takes the form of a postcard consisting of a curved red shape juxtaposed with a small fragment of blue paper taken from a Gauloises cigarette packet. Produced during the first week of his return to New York, it was meant to be sent to the artist Ralph Coburn, a friend Kelly had met in Boston who was then living in France.

Observing the line of these blue and red curves is significant for understanding the artist’s interest in reductive and mimetic forms of composition whilst juxtaposing only apparently distant realms such as reality and abstraction in the spirit of the post-war period. This piece is the first of a series of over four hundred postcard collages that Kelly made between 1949 and 2005, mainly intended for family members and friends and only retrospectively exhibited. But soon after arriving in New York in 1954, Kelly will face the decline of American Abstract Expressionism, embracing instead the rise of Hard Edge Abstraction to which he will contribute with his personal countertendency with regard to shapes, forms, and colors, and surfaces as isolated elements not of picturality but of abstract minimal evidence in relationship to the wall. And the rest is history.

Sara Buoso

Rome, Italy

September 2026

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) Born in Newburgh, New York. He studied applied arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before volunteering to serve in the Second World War (1943–45). On the G. I. Bill, he enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1946) and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1948). In 1970, he began a long-lasting print collaboration with Gemini GEL Los Angeles and moved to a farmhouse in Spencertown, New York, where he began creating large outdoor sculptures. During his lifetime, Kelly participated in such seminal exhibitions as Sixteen Americans, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1959); Primary Structures, Jewish Museum, New York (1966); Systemic Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1966); and Expo 67, Montreal (1967). Major traveling retrospectives dedicated to his artwork have been organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1973); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1979); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1996), among others. His work was included in multiple iterations of Documenta, Kassel (1964, 1968, 1977, 1992) and the Venice Biennale (1966, 2007). His numerous awards include the French government’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres (2001) and Officier de la Legion d’Honneur (2009). He received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting by the Japan Arts Association in 2000, and the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2013. In 2015, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas realized his 1986 design for a non-denominational chapel.

Ellsworth Kelly

Photo: Alex Majoli and Daria Birang

Sara Bouso is an art critic and curator. She holds a PhD in Art Theory and History, Central Saint Martins, London, specializing in photology and practices of light. She is a lecturer in Contemporary Art History at AANT, Academy of Arts and New Technologies, and DAM, Digital Arts & Media Academy, Rome

Sara Bouso

Camouflage, Collage: Ellsworth Kelly and the Art of Mimicry

​