Kimon Nicolaїdes (1891–1938) was an American art teacher, author and artist. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army in France as a camouflage artist.
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Nicolaïdes was born in Washington, D.C., where his Greek-born father worked as an importer of Asian artifacts. His mother's American ancestors date back to the Colonial period. He made his living initially by a variety of jobs, including picture framing, journalism, and even by appearing once in a film as an extra, playing the role of an art student. Despite his family's opposition, he did in fact become an art student, during which he attended the Art Students' League in New York, where he studied with John Sloan and George Bridgman.
He served in the U.S. Army in France during World War I, where he was one of the first American camouflage artists, serving in the same unit as Barry Faulkner, Sherry Edmundson Fry, Abraham Rattner and others. Among his wartime duties, he often worked with contour maps, which may have occasioned his subsequent use of "contour drawing" as the first exercise in the famous book he later wrote on the study of drawing [1]
Following World War I, he returned to New York to teach at the Art Students' League[2][3]. In the process, he developed a method of teaching drawing that he shared in a famous and widely used book, titled The Natural Way to Draw.
At the time of Nicolaïdes' death, the manuscript for The Natural Way to Draw was incomplete. A close friend and former student, Mamie Harmon, oversaw its completion and its publication in 1941. (Harmon's papers are available in the Archives of American Art.) [4]. His influence on the teaching of drawing has been long-lasting and substantial, and his book is still in use today. In brief, he advocated a three-pronged way of learning to draw, through (1) slow and meticulous contour drawing, (2) free and rapid gesture drawing, and (3) vigorous tonal drawings of weight or mass. His method was in ways opposed to that of John Ruskin, the famed 19th-century British art critic who had earlier written a text on The Elements of Drawing.