EVERETT WARNER (1877-1963)
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Biography • Everett Warner (1877-1963)
Everett Warner was born in the small town of Vinton, Iowa, where his father was a lawyer. His mother was descended from a line of prominent missionaries (the Riggs family), who worked extensively for years with the Dakota Sioux Indians, translating and preserving their traditional language. Warner spent part of his childhood in Iowa, then moved to Washington DC, when his father was appointed Examiner for the Bureau of Pensions.
While completing high school, Warner took classes at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Washington Art Students League. He was then employed for several years as an art critic for the Washington Evening Star. In 1900, he moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League with figurative painter George Bridgman and illustrator Walter Clark. From New York, Warner sent paintings to prestigious museum invitationals, including: the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the National Academy of Design.
In 1903, with earnings from his painting sales, Warner traveled to Europe where he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian, while also taking sketching trips to Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and other countries. Returning permanently to the US in 1909, he became affiliated with the Old Lyme Art Colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut, which (under the sponsorship of art patron Florence Griswold) had become a well-known center for American Impressionism. In 1915, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, Warner won a silver medal for painting and a bronze medal for printmaking.
When the US entered World War I in 1917, Warner searched for ways to contribute to the war effort. He applied for the Camouflage Corps as one of his closest friends Charles Bittinger (1879-1970), an MIT-trained scientist and Paris-trained artist held a prominent role in World War II ship camouflage. It may have been partly through Bittinger that Warner was approached by the US Shipping Board (in the summer of 1917) to carry out a camouflage scheme that had been invented by Thomas A. Edison. Using Edison’s specifications, it was Warner who applied that scheme to a former German ocean liner, the SS Ochenfels. Warner quickly saw the limitations with Edison’s method and presented his own ship camouflage plan to protect ships from submarines to the US government. His method, known officially as the Warner System, was one of six camouflage measures approved by the US.
In February 1918, Warner accepted a commission as a Lieutenant in the US Naval Reserves, and was assigned to manage a design-based subdivision in Washington, DC of a newly formed American Camouflage Section. Other designers in the group included fellow artists Frederick Waugh (marine painter), Gordon Stevenson (portrait painter), and John Gregory (British-born sculptor).
In 1919, after World War I had ended, the Navy was slow to arrange for Warner’s discharge. Warner devised a painting experiment to make good use of his remaining months in the Navy. For a period of three to four weeks, he arranged for daily observation flights in military seaplanes over New York City and the Eastern seaboard. He became one of the first artists to sketch and paint from an aerial view. He extended his experiment by making large paintings from the small ones he had made in flight.
At the insistence of Homer Saint-Gaudens (son of the celebrated sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens) who had been the officer in charge of the American Army’s Camouflage Corps during World War I, Warner was hired as an associate professor of painting and design at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1924. Warner held this position until 1942.
In early 1941, after viewing a newsreel showing what he considered amateurish dazzle camouflage on Royal Navy Ships, he wrote a letter to the US Navy offering his services. At the time, the Navy did not anticipate using disruptive camouflage schemes and declined his offer. In the summer of 1942 however after the US entered World War II, Warner (then age 65) was asked to return to the Navy, to serve as Chief Civilian Aid to Commander Charles Bittinger (his close friend from earlier years) in the design of ship camouflage. As the techniques for observation had changed in the years since World War I, so too did ship deception needs. While much of World War II American ship camouflage was disruptive and deceptive (rather than directed toward invisibility), its newly restrained, geometric style (akin perhaps to Modern Art) was vastly different from the dazzle designs of the previous war.
At the end of World War II, Warner was discharged from the Navy. At age 68, he retired from teaching, and settled with his family in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. Warner no longer painted, but devoted himself to writing about art. Warner died of a heart attack on October 20, 1963, at age 86.