Kelly stayed in France after the war, studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and spending several years in direct contact with the European avant-garde. His time in Europe as a student followed directly from his time there as a soldier, and the entire European experience — military service, postwar study, immersion in the French art world of the late 1940s and early 1950s — was formative for the artistic identity he brought back to America and developed further over subsequent decades.
The specific connection between his Ghost Army service and his later art is not a simple cause-and-effect story. But the biographical fact of his service, combined with the specific visual demands of the work he did there, is part of a fuller account of how one of the twentieth century’s significant painters developed his particular sensibilities.
## Bill Blass and the Uniform
Bill Blass is a more complicated figure in the Ghost Army story than his celebrity might suggest. By the time he became famous as a fashion designer in the 1960s and 1970s, his wartime service was a biographical fact but not a widely known one; the classification meant it could not be discussed, and the fashion world’s interest in his background extended to his design training and business acumen rather than to his military record.
Blass served in the visual deception element of the 23rd, working on the construction and positioning of dummy vehicles and the broader visual environment of the deception. The specific skills he brought to this work — a precisely calibrated sense of how clothing and accessories communicate identity and status, how visual signals are read and interpreted by an audience, how appearance can be managed to create a desired impression — were directly applicable to the work of making a fake military formation look real.