World War I camouflage and its creators afford a rarely considered reversal of traditional understandings of Cubist strategies. Most inter-war and post-war critics ignored the war in their pursuit of a pure Modernist aesthetic formalism. The more recent generation of scholars who forged the 'New Art History' in the 1980s recognized the impact of the war, but tended to focus on the anarchist opposition implicit in Pablo Picasso's papiers colles or the classicism advocated by artists embodying the 'rappel a l'ordre' in the aftermath of the war. The work of the so-called 'Salon Cubist' artists remains at the margins of academic scrutiny. Andre Mare (1885-1932) was a member of this circle, which met in the Puteaux studio of the brothers Villon before the war. He was a central artist-designer of the Maison Cubiste installation at the 1912 Salon d'Automne. Whilst serving on the front line throughout World War I, Mare compiled ten sketchbooks, which provide a distinctive case study of the complexity of aesthetic and historical questions within Cubist representation, unscrutinized in the scholarship. In 1916, he joined the camoufleurs, a unit that pioneered the creation of mass-scale camouflage. They devised an extraordinary variety of forms of camouflage, from disguised gun emplacements to Mare's specialism, 'fake' trees, which even appeared in Charlie Chaplin's 1918 film Shoulder Arms. Mare's sketchbooks suggest a counter-narrative to the dominant heroic visions of Cubist form as an assertion of virile, politically oppositional Modernist creativity; it is rather a mode of combatants' strategies of psychic self-preservation. By obfuscating destruction rather than revelling in the catharsis of fragmentation, Mare's wartime oeuvre offers a sub-limated but nonetheless central form of Cubist practice, rooted in decorative colour and intellectual detachment as a strategy to cope with the experiences of atrocity and survivors' guilt.
