Two world-changing inventions can be credited to American artists: the telegraph (Samuel Morse ) and camouflage (Abbott Handerson Thayer). As a painter, Thayer made his reputation with angelic figures and pristine landscapes (one landscape is at LACMA). He also did natural-history-style illustrations of camouflage in nature, such as Peacock in the Woods (below left). During the Spanish American War, Thayer became convinced of the military value of camouflage. In 1902 he and fellow artist George de Forest Brush were granted U.S. patent 715,013 for a “Process of Treating the Outsides of Ships, etc., for Making Them Less Visible.”

Thayer had mixed success in convincing the military to adopt his invention. Teddy Roosevelt, who blustered that the Armory Show was not art, also thought Thayer was nuts, perhaps with more reason. Thayer’s mood swings would have qualified him for mucho meds today. The British dismissed Thayler’s notion of replacing their traditional khakis with leafy abstractions. France was the first nation to adopt camouflage in a big way. Picasso and Braque witnessed an early display of French military camouflage during the first World War. Gertrude Stein recorded Picasso’s famous reaction: “We did that. That is cubism.”

Thayer couldn’t have anticipated the importance that camouflage would have for artists and art in the century to come. Edward Wadsworth’s 1919 Vorticist painting, Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool (top), is an essentially realistic image of the “dazzle” camouflage inspired by Thayer’s theories. Over the following decades, the military put artist-draftees to work painting camouflage—what else were they good for?—and thus the roster of erstwhile camouflage painters came to include Franz Marc, Oskar Schlemmer, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Arshile Gorky, and Ellsworth Kelly. In the century of abstraction, the experience must have been instructive, even for those Americans who repudiated modernism.

Today Warhol is the only household-name artist commonly associated with camouflage. But British Op art owes much to the dazzle-ships, and camouflage was an inexhaustible obsession of Scottish artist-poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who conspiracy-theorized links between modernism and militarism. In retrospect, it’s not hard to see the connection. Traditional painting was an illusion in which paint made a pleasant fantasy appear real. Camouflage was virtually the opposite, the use of paint to make something real and dangerous look like nothing at all. Abstraction was also understood as the “opposite” of traditional painting. (“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”) However different the goals of camouflage and abstraction, they gravitated between the same poles: geometric suprematist-Bauhaus-op art  vs. biomorphic art-nouveau-abstract expressionism.

Given all that, it might seem that camouflage-as-found-abstraction is a minded-out vein. MOCA’s “The Artist’s Museum” offers a counterexample, Cindy Bernard’s Security Envelopes. Bernard photographed the familiar camouflage patterns on the inside of bank envelopes, intended to prevent snoops from seeing numbers on checks and statements. As a conceptual piece, it’s a riff on financial “transparency.”

You might think it’s a comment on the mortgage meltdown, but you’d be wrong. Bernard did the Security Envelopes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the wake of another financial catastrophe, the stock market’s 1987 “Black Monday.” They were shown at the 1989 Whitney Biennial. Each of Bernard’s photos is a classic small B&W print, framed and presented on a museum wall as an abstraction. Some remind you of Aaron Siskind, others of  William Morris. There are “outsider” scribblings and faux modern lithographs offered by mail order during the Depression. The fifty photos shown at MOCA are a museum of modernism’s isms. As Ian Hamilton Finlay wrote, “Every style in art is a camouflage through which, by our own reconstruction, we think we see ‘real’ nature.”

Tags: Andy Warhol, Bridget Riley, Cindy Bernard, Edward Wadsworth, Ian Hamilton Finlay, MOCA