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| News article from Mail Online |
While the photographs are certainly fun, the text is marred by erroneous claims that "dazzle camouflage was originally inspired by modernist artworks," and that pioneering marine camoufleur Norman Wilkinson was "inspired by cubist and vorticist artworks." To our knowledge, the only vorticist involved was Edward Wadsworth and he (according to his daughter) was not a camouflage designer, but a dock officer who supervised the application of designs devised by others.
It also states that the camouflage pattern on each ship was unique. While that was the initial intention, it proved too ambitious, with the result that the same design was often adjusted and applied to a number of ships, as seen in this example.
In the US, Wilkinson's equivalent was American Impressionist Everett L. Warner, who was hardly a cubist. He did use abstract geometric shapes in his design of dazzle schemes, but it was all highly calculated and purposeful. And yet, recalled Warner, "it was precisely when our work was most firmly grounded on the book of Euclid that the uninitiated were the most positive that the ships were being painted haphazard by a group of crazy cubists."
Finally, the article claims that dazzle camouflage "fell out of favor by the 1940s, because it was rendered useless by the introduction of radar." I can't speak for the UK, but that certainly wasn't the case in the US (or in Germany even), where some of the most outlandish designs were in use throughout World War 2. Indeed, there may even be more photographs of bizarre dazzle-painted ships in WW2 than in WW1.
