Camouflage & the National Parks

From Linda Flint McClelland, Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, pp. 459-460—
 

With the advent of aviation defense, camouflage emerged as a new field of design in World War II—one that was well suited to the skills and knowledge of landscape architects, many of whom had worked in the woods andhad spent almost a decade designing constructed improvements that blended into the natural scenery of state and national parks… Like the design of natural parks, the success of camouflage relied heavily upon site selection, adherence to principles of design which concealed form and detail, and the selection of appropriate materials often including natural vegetation. Camouflage required that development conform to the general character of the site and fit into the immediate surroundings, thereby following the natural contours of the land and avoiding raw scars of cuts and fills…

Camouflage research and development drew upon the skills and experience of several former park designers. At the offices of the Engineering Board of the Corps of Engineers at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, George L. Nason became the chief of the camouflage design office. His varied staff of designers—architects, landscape architects, illustrators, engineers, model makers, and site designers—included V[ivian] Roswell Ludgate, who had been the regional landscape architect for the National Park Service's Eastern Region, and Merel S. Sager, who had been a resident landscape architect for the Western Region since the late 1920s. Former Massachusetts state park inspector Edward B. Ballard served as an Air Corps for camouflage research at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and regional landscape architect Norman T. Newton served as an intelligence and camouflage officer for the Air Corps at Pendleton Field, Oregon.

Camouflage Artist | Daniel Putnam Brinley

Daniel Putnam Brinley (1879-1963)

Above Daniel Putnam Brinley, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum (J0001309).

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In earlier posts, we've talked about American muralist William Andrew Mackay, who was a major contributor to World War I ship camouflage. Over the years, we've been able to expand the list of those who worked with him as camouflage artists when he oversaw the painting of merchant ships in the New York area for the US Shipping Board. We've also found the names of those who studied with him at a camouflage school he established during the war, among them Harold Everitt Austin, Charles Bittinger, Henry Scott Bluhm, Thomas Casilear Cole, Maurice Lisso Freedman, Eric Gugler, W.S. Gephart, George Edgerly Harris, Kenneth S. Maclntire, Raymond J. Richardson, Frank Julius Spicker, Walter L. Ward, and Charles D. Bosisio. There were others as well.

A name that should be added is that of another muralist, Daniel Putnam Brinley (1879-1963), who not only worked on ship camouflage with Mackay, but may also have served in the US Army as a camoufleur. The primary documentation for this is in the Daniel Putnam Brinley and Katherine Sanger Brinley papers in the Archives of American Art. In that collection, there is a Brinley typescript that seems to be a chronology of his "camouflage work for navy" in Baltimore in October 1917. He mentions Mackay (referred to as "Mac") and Commander J.O. Fisher, who worked with Mackay on early experiments in ship camouflage. There is another interesting entry (dated October 21) in which he notes that, while visiting Fisher in Washington DC, he also "went over to the Camp [American University] to see what was going on with the [US Army] Camouflage Corps." In the following passage, he mentions three of the original members of that unit, William Twigg-Smith, William Nell and Barry Faulkner (a cousin of Abbott H. Thayer):

They [the Camouflage Corps] are still in rather a hectic state as far as I can see, and the chief interest at present is a vaudeville show [a fund-raising effort] they are getting up. I asked for Twigg but he was not around. I saw Billy Nell and he seemed to be enjoying himself although he said he had had a bad cold…They all wanted to know what had happened to me and when I told them they said they could not understand it especially Barry Faulkner as he said that the surgeon put him down as blind without his glasses! and some of the men said that they never had their eyes looked at, rather amusing is it not.

In a later entry, Brinley mentions another Army camoufleur, an illustrator named F. Earl Christy. Another document in the AAA collection is a letter written by Mackay on September 7 of that same year. Apparently Brinley (who had served in the Army in 1916, prior to the US participation in WWI) was hoping to be able to join the Army Camouflage Corps, and Mackay's letter is a verification of his experience and capabilities. It reads in part:

This is to certify that the bearer, Daniel Putnam Brinley has worked under my directions and is thoroughly familiar with the laws of light and form as applied to the term "Camouflage."

His knowledge of color for concealment is of greatest value and his ability to assist me on important experiments carried on for the United States Navy is of greatest importance.

One other odd connection: Of Brinley's artistic achievements, one of the best-known is a series of maps he created for the Liberty Memorial (the National World War I Museum) in Kansas City MO, which are on exhibit in Memory Hall. As noted in an earlier post, that same museum also has the surviving portion of a huge diorama, the Panthéon de la Guerre, completed in 1918 by French artists who were serving as army camoufleurs.

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[Added June 23, 2014]: Brinley was also a member of the American Association of Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), which organized the Armory Show in New York in 1913. Shortly after its opening, they held an uproarious dinner at Healy's Restaurant in honor of "our Friends and Enemies of the Press." Elizabeth Lunday, in The Modern Art Invasion (Guilford CT: Lyons Press, 2013, p. 75), describes what happened as the evening wore on—

Perhaps inspired by the dancing waitresses, artist D. Putnam Brinley, who stood nearly seven feet tall, began a high-kicking contest, which he unsurprisingly won. Then the short, bearded sculptor Jo Davidson joined him on the floor, and he and Brinley danced a tango. A heavy knock was heard at the door and in walked a doddering old man in a long white beard and an old-fashioned stovepipe hat. He introduced himself as The National Academy of Design, then joined Davidson and Brinley in a riotous Turkey Trot.

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 [Added January 15, 2016] Abel G. Warshawsky, The Memories of an American Impressionist. Ben L. Bassham, ed. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1980, p. 19—

My most difficult opponent in hand-wrestling was Putnam Brindly [sic], a young giant, six feet three in his socks, whom I met many years later decorating army huts on the French front when my brother and I were similarly engaged. He was then so tall that he could do stencils on the ceiling without using a ladder.

additional info

Camouflage Artist | Worden G. Wood

Rear Admiral John Lorimer Worden (1818-1897)

This is a wonderful photograph (detail) of USN Rear Admiral John Lorimer Worden, who commanded the ironclad USS Monitor during the American Civil War in its battle with the Merrimac (the CSS Virginia).

It's of interest here because Admiral Worden was the grandfather of marine painter and illustrator Worden G. Wood (1880-1943), who served as a camoufleur for the US Shipping Board (Emergency Fleet Corporation) during World War I.

Wood was born in Brooklyn, and attended school at Trinity School and Columbia University.  At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he joined the US Naval Reserve and served aboard the Yankee clipper. Later, he also served under General John J. Pershing in his pursuit of Pancho Villa.

In April 1917, he was assigned to the US Navy, and appears to have contributed to the development of camouflage for American merchant ships. On July 31, 1918, he was assigned to the camouflage branch of the Delaware River District in Philadelphia, but (for reasons that are unclear) was reassigned back to New York just ten days later.

As an illustrator and art director, he worked for various book and newspaper publishers, including the MacMillan Company, the New York World, the New York Herald, and the Boston Herald (for which he wrote about yachting).  As a marine painter, he was frequently commissioned to make paintings of ocean liners and other ships by major shipping firms.

For further information, see "Worden Wood, Marine Artist, Illustrator Had Served on World Staff" in New York Times, November 21, 1943, p. 56. William Bell Clark on "Camouflage Painting on the Delaware" in Philadelphia in the World War 1914-1919. NY: Philadelphia War History Committee 1922 (pp. 318-322).

Camouflage Artist | Sheldon Pennoyer

American artist A(lbert) Sheldon Pennoyer (1888-1957) was originally from California. In 1913, he was living in Paris, where he was a student in the Architectural Section of the École des Beaux Arts. When his interests turned to art, he enrolled at the Académie Julian. Soon after, World War I broke out, and he returned to California.

In 1954 he wrote, “World War I found me in the 40th Engineers Camouflage Corps that was forming at Camp American University, Washington DC.” He recalls that one of the major events in the winter of 1917 was “the famous Camoufleurs’ Ball at the New Willard Hotel,”  for which Pennoyer was assigned by his commanding officer, Captain Aymar Embury II, “to build a model of a railroad field gun [shown here] which he wished to use as a centerpiece for his dinner table when he entertained a number of his officers and men before the opening of the ball… Sash pulleys for wheels, heavy cardboard mailing tubes for the gun barrel, plenty of quick-drying camouflage paint and moss representing the grass along the roadbed, tied in fairly closely with all we could see in a photograph we had of a railway gun in France. It had a fake realism quite in keeping with all the deception we, as camoufleurs, were attempting at the time.”•

That same winter, Pennoyer’s unit sailed to France, then traveled by train to Dijon. There, he and several others (with Sherry Edmundson Fry in the lead) were assigned by Embury to function as a liaison to the French camouflage section. In that capacity, one of his most challenging requests was to camouflage a massive fourteen-inch naval railway gun, with a firing range of up to thirty miles.

A lifelong railroad enthusiast, Pennoyer was especially known for his depictions of subjects related to railroads.

• Pennoyer, Sheldon (1954), Locomotives in Our Lives: Railroad Experiences of Three Brothers For More Than Sixty Years, 1890-1951. New York: Hastings House, pp. 26-34.

Camouflage Artist | Charles H. Ebert

Charles H. Ebert (1873-1959)

Of late I have been trying to find information about an American impressionist painter named Charles H. Ebert (1873-1959). Born to affluent parents in Milwaukee, he grew up in Kansas City. His artistic training was at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and the Art Students League in New York. In 1894, he went to Paris to study, along with Charles Allan Gilbert (who contributed to ship camouflage in WWI), Ernest Kaiser, Oscar Lentz, and Ernest L. Blumenschein (who had earlier been his roommate). When he returned to the US in 1896, he became the chief political cartoonist for Life magazine. He resigned that position after four years, and moved to Greenwich CT to paint full-time and to study with John Henry Twachtman. While studying with Twachtman, he became acquainted with Mary Roberts, who was also an artist, as well as the inheritor of a family fortune that had come from her father's invention of a device for oil drilling. They married in 1908.

Mary Roberts Ebert had graduated in 1895 from Wellesley College. In that school's alumni notes for 1917, she is described as "living this winter in New York. Her husband, Carl [sic] Ebert, an artist noted for his landscape painting, is doing experimental work for the camouflage of ships at sea" (p. 119). Presumably, Ebert was working in New York, where he was probably among the team of civilian camouflage artists headed by William Andrew Mackay.

Photo credit: Charles H. Ebert, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum J0106662.

Who Invented Dazzle Camouflage?

Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske (1854-1942)

So who was the first to make use of disruptive patterns in ship camouflage, a practice that was widely known in World War I as dazzle camouflage? The easiest answer—and the one that's most often repeated—is British artist Norman Wilkinson, who proposed the use of dazzle painting in 1917, and who presumably gave it its name. Yet, from the very beginning, others have claimed to have thought of it first, notably the Scottish zoologist and Member of Parliament John Graham Kerr (1869-1957). A well-documented discussion, concluding on the side of Kerr, was published two years ago, in Hugh Murphy and Martin Bellamy's "The Dazzling Zoologist: John Graham Kerr and the Early Development of Ship Camouflage" in The Northern Mariner XIX No 2 (April 2009), pp. 171-192. Kerr called for the adoption of which he called "parti-coloring" as early as 1914.

Kerr was the teacher of zoologist and camoufleur Hugh B. Cott, who would later write Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940). But he was also acquainted with (and largely approved of his theories) American artist and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer. In 1923, in "Camouflage in Nature and War" in the Brooklyn Museum Quarterly (Vol 10, p. 161), Thayer's son and collaborator Gerald suggested that his father and he could also have been credited with early accounts of dazzle camouflage. He writes, "The moving object [such as a ship] cannot, as a rule, be hidden, but it can be made less definite, more puzzling, a more 'tricky' and difficult target, by certain arrangements of color and pattern. This my father and I pointed out in 1909 in our book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom; and we there used the terms 'dazzle' and 'dazzling' very much as they have since been used in connection with the camouflage ships."

There are other complications too. The photo above is a portrait of American Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske who states in his autobiography (From Midshipman to Rear-Admiral. NY: Century Company 1919) that, as early as 1902, he had employed a dazzle-like method, to interfere with range-finding. He writes: "This scheme of preventing range-finding by an enemy was a scheme that I had devised when I was executive officer of the battleship Massachusetts in 1902. I had told possibly half a dozen officers about it under the pledge of secrecy, because I thought it would be a very valuable thing to use in case we ever got into war, but I wanted the idea kept secret. The scheme was simply to break up the smooth lines on a ship, such as the sides of masts, funnels, etc., by putting irregular strips of wood on them, or pieces of canvas that would flutter. To use the ordinary one-observer range-finder, a smooth vertical line is necessary; and I found by some experiments which I carried on on board the Massachusetts that accurate range-finding could be prevented by that simple means. One day I sent out a whale boat to a distance of about half a mile from the ship, with her two masts stepped. One mast had the irregular pieces of wood nailed on it, and the other was in its ordinary condition. I tried using the range-finder myself, and I found I could measure the ranges of the smooth mast very accurately, but of the other one only inaccurately. I did not tell anybody what I was trying to do, and I fancied from some of the fragments of comment that I heard that some people thought I had gone crazy" (pp. 620-621).

Auto Camouflage

Reconstructed Stolen Car (1921)

A post-World War I issue of Popular Science (January 1921, p. 36) reported the use of camouflage among car thieves:

"'Stolen—a seven-passenger touring car,' is not an uncommon message at Police Headquarters. When the police get a report like this, they watch out, naturally, for a large touring car. But the thieves may have changed its shape in the meantime.

Take, for example, the automobile shown above. As you see, it is a roadster having two seats. Originally it was a seven-passenger car. The men who stole it removed the entire rear end of the body and substituted for it boards and canvas. Disk wheels added to the disguise. It was through a mere chance that the police found the car."

Camouflage Artist | Howard V. Brown

We've talked about American muralist William Andrew Mackay in two earlier posts, one an overview of his life, the other a description of his initial approach to ship camouflage, in which he juxtaposed small patches of pure colors to produce at a distance an optical gray. During World War I, he was in charge of a unit of civilian camouflage artists, who were part of the US Shipping Board (aka the Emergency Fleet Corporation). Headquartered in Manhattan at 345 East 33rd Street, they were not responsible for designing dazzle camouflage (that was done by US Navy camoufleurs in Washington DC), but for adapting for various ships the sets of plans passed on to them. All this was discussed at length in an article by Raymond Francis Yates, titled "The Science of Camouflage Explained," in Everyday Engineering Magazine Vol 6 No 6 (March 1919), pp. 253-256. Of added significance is the cover of that issue (shown here), which features a painting of one of the artists in Mackay's unit, studying a dazzle-painted ship model through a periscope-like instrument that simulates viewing conditions at sea, from the view of a U-boat commander. It is even more interesting to find that the cover illustrator was Howard V. Brown (1878-1945), who was well known at the time for his engineering and science fiction magazine illustrations—alas, he was also a camoufleur in the unit headed by Mackay.

Ann Elias: Camouflage Australia

Newly published Ann Elias, Camouflage Australia. Sydney AU: Sydney University Press, 2011. "Camouflage Australia tells a once secret and little known story of how the Australian government accepted the advice of zoologist William John Dakin and seconded the country's leading artists and designers, including Max Dupain and Frank Hinder, to deploy optical tricks and visual illusions for civilian and military protection. Their work was an array of ingenious constructions for the purpose of disguise and subterfuge. Drawing on previously unpublished photographs and documents, Camouflage Australia exposes the story of fraught collaborations between civilian and military personnel who disagreed over camouflage's value to wartime operations and the usefulness of artists to warfare." More

Two Sides of a Camouflaged Ship

During World War I, it was standard practice in Allied ship camouflage to apply markedly different camouflage schemes to the two sides of any ship. Shown here for example are the port (top) and starboard (bottom) sides of an American freighter, the SS West Galoc, as photographed in 1918.

Dazzle Camouflaged Duo

These are two British dazzle-camouflaged ships from World War I. At first glance they may appear to be two photographs of the same ship, partly because of position of course, or even two prints of one photo. On closer look, it becomes apparent that not only are these two distinctly different photographs, the two ships and their camouflage schemes are also different. The one at the top is the SS Empress Russia, while shown below that is the SS Osterley. An original print of the top photograph is in the collection of the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, England. The printed source for the other image is uncertain, but it seems a safe assumption that both were made in 1918 by a Liverpool photography firm called Stewart Bale Ltd. The Merseyside Maritime Archives and Library houses a Stewart Bale Collection. It is also a safe assumption that the camouflage for both ships was designed by British naval camoufleurs, headed by marine painter Norman Wilkinson. Below is a later photo of the starboard side of the SS Osterley, taken on November 11, 1918 in New York Habor, when the ship was wearing victory flags.

Ghost Army Film Screenings

Click here to see film trailer

For more than six years, documentary filmmaker Rick Beyer has been working on a film about a World War II secret US Army unit that specialized in deceiving the enemy on the battlefield, using inflatable decoys (tanks, trucks, jeeps and so on—including the phony tank shown here), sound effects,  misinformation, and other tricks. Officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, they referred to themselves as the Ghost Army. Among its members were a number of people who later became well-known designers and artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Bill Blass and Art Kane.

The film is nearly finished now. It's being screened at various locations around the country, and a trailer has been posted online. Click above to access that, and to learn about the screenings.

Camouflaged Olympic

Jerry Vondeling's drawing of the starboard side of the Olympic

One of the sheets of modeling parts

A card model-maker named Jerry Vondeling has produced printable pages (available online) of all the parts of a 1:1200 scale model of the HMT Olympic (sister ship of the Titanic), as it appeared during World War I, adorned in dazzle camouflage. The tiny (9-inch) model is pretty astonishing; and just the uncut cards themselves are wonderfully elegant layouts. Through the courtesy of Currell Graphics, you can download this and other free card models (of all sorts of things) as printable full-color pdfs at this webpage.

Cubism Meets Camouflage

John French Sloan, Cubist Cartoon (1913)

It is usually claimed that cubism began around 1907 in Paris, but it was not widely introduced to the American public until 1913, when an International Exhibition of Modern Art (known as the Armory Show) premiered in New York from February 15 to March 15, then traveled on to Boston and Chicago. On the day after its opening, a headline in the Magazine Section of the New York Times read “Cubists and Futurists Are Making Insanity Pay.” Cartoons and jokes about cubism became epidemic, as in this example by American artist John French Sloan (1871-1951), first published in 1913. Throughout World War I, cubism, futurism, vorticism and camouflage  (dazzle ship camouflage in particular) were said to be related, and were all commonly compared to crazy quilt patterns, harlequin outfits, aerial views of cultivated land forms, and the hallucinations of absinthe drinkers.

Camouflage and Patrick Hughes

Patrick Hughes, Vanishing Venice (2007)

For many years, I've been interested in the paintings (as well as the writings) of British artist Patrick Hughes (1939-). As early as the mid-1960s, he began to paint perspective scenes (such as the one shown above, titled Vanishing Venice), not on flat canvases, but on odd-shaped board constructions, as shown in the line drawing above. In the process, he developed a method of painting he calls “reverspective.” In these mesmerizing paintings, features that appear to recede (visually) in space are in fact physically nearer. As a result, as you walk past one of them, it appears to move in astonishing ways (much as did the rotating trapezoid window that Adelbert Ames II invented in the 1950s). You have to experience this to believe it. Fortunately, there are online film clips as well as other notes about these bewildering images.

What does this have to do with camouflage? It has everything to do with a certain variety of disruptive camouflage, called dazzle painting, which was widely used in World War I for ship camouflage. Much as in Hughes' paintings, in dazzle-painted ships, certain surfaces appeared more distant when in fact they were physically closer. The intention was to interfere with the targeting calculations of the German U-boat gunners in their efforts to torpedo ships.

Hughes' paintings are visual paradoxes, a subject that has interested him since childhood. In fact, my first introduction to him was through his writing, not his art. I recall that the first of his books that I bought was Vicious, Circles and Infinity: A Panoply of Paradoxes (co-authored with George Brecht in 1975). In subsequent years, I also found Upon the Pun: Dual Meaning (1978), and More on Oxymoron (1984). Now, he has come out with a new, more comprehensive look at the same subject (a book I highly recommend) called Paradoxymoron: Foolish Wisdom in Words and Pictures (London: Reverspective Ltd, 2011).

Animal Camouflage

In recent years, Martin Stevens, Sami Merilaita, Roger Hanlon and dozens of other biologists have turned to empirical investigations of the appearance of animals, and especially what is commonly called "adaptive coloration" or natural camouflage.

Hanlon (at the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole MA) and his associates have focused on the extraordinary capabilities of cephalopods (octopus, squid and cuttlefish), which can rapidly change their appearance in complex, amazing ways—producing disguises beyond belief. There's a wonderful NOVA program about this research called Kings of Camouflage.

In the meantime, Stevens and Merilaita (biologists at the University of Cambridge and Abo Akademi University, respectively) have edited an anthology of recent studies related to this, titled Animal Camouflage: Mechanisms and Function (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011). ISBN 978-0-521-15257-0. In the volume, there are seventeen papers on the widest range of aspects of adaptive coloration. It amounts to a fascinating survey of a rapidly expanding research area. As the only non-scientist to be represented, I was delighted to see the inclusion of my essay on "Nature's Artistry: Abbott H. Thayer's assertions about camouflage in art, war and nature."

Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook (2012)

"To most people, the word 'camouflage' is synonymous with low visibility, mostly through background matching. But in World War I, when the primary threat to the Allies was the hugely successful torpedo attacks by German submarines (called U-boats), it was decided that low visibility was insufficient, and other approaches to ship camouflage were introduced.

Foremost among these was 'high difference' or 'disruptive' camouflage, a counter-intuitive method in which ships were painted in brightly-colored abstract shapes, which made them conspicuous but difficult to aim at. This is because the torpedo was slow, and the ship was a moving target. To fire a torpedo, the U-boat commander had to 'lead the target'; he had to aim not at the ship, but at the location the ship would reach by a given time. Accordingly, Allied camouflage artists made use of misleading shapes and vivid hues that made it difficult to determine the speed and direction of a distant ship.

This practice (which captured the imagination of the public) became known by various names, including 'dazzle camouflage,' 'baffle painting' and 'jazz painting.' This book is a collection of little-known writings about this and other approaches to ship camouflage during World War I.

Did dazzle camouflage actually work? It is often assumed that it did not because, if for no other reason, there is supposedly no scientific evidence from that era to prove it was effective. But among the documents in this book is confirmation that there were postwar 'laboratory experiments' at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that suggest that it almost certainly worked."

Dazzle Camouflage at Rockwell Center

Joyce K. Shiller's article on dazzle ship camouflage on the Rockwell Center website

At the website for the Norman Rockwell Museum, and the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, Curator Joyce K. Schiller has posted a wonderful article on World War I dazzle ship camouflage, called The Dazzling Ideas of Science. Included as visual examples are two magazine covers (Popular Science Monthly and Everybody's Magazine) and a US Government poster from that era, each featuring dazzle-painted ships. The identities of only two of the artists are known, Leon Alaric Shafer (1866-1940) and Rockwell Kent (1882-1971). Kent's cover painting for Popular Science Monthly is especially amazing, and is of additional interest because he was a student of Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921), who was among the first to claim that visual art and camouflage were derived from the same principles of vision. While Kent was Thayer's student, he contributed a painting of a copperhead snake, which was used as an illustration in Thayer's now-famous  book, Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909, 1918). The book's author of record was Thayer's artist-naturalist son, Gerald Handerson Thayer. more>>>

Architectural Camouflage in WW2

Cover of Architecture in Uniform. Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2011.

From Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War. Book and exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal 2011) from April 13 through September 18, 2011—

During the Second World War, architects almost completely supplanted painters in the field of camouflage. Studies into the technique had continued uninterrupted since 1918, and camouflage departments now occupied an important place in all the armed forces. more>>>

Edward Wadsworth | Camouflage

Wadsworth in process of painting (1919)

What a glorious find! In an old issue of the New York Herald on April 20, 1919 (p. 13), we've located a news photo of British Vorticist painter Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949), poised on a stepladder, in process of painting his famous large-scale painting of camouflaged ships, called Dazzle-ship in Drydock at Liverpool (1919), now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. The news caption reads as follows—

Mr. Ernest Wadsworth [sic], a British artist, paints a portrait of a camouflaged ship which is a study in Cubism. Mr. Wadsworth, during the war, was in charge of ship camouflaging at Bristol and Liverpool, where he designed the futurist coat in which disguise the Aquitania eluded U-boats.

Not only is the artist misnamed, the facts are probably also skewed. Wadsworth had been handpicked by British head camoufleur Norman Wilkinson to supervise not the design of ship camouflage but the painting of the ships. For the most part, he followed prepared diagrams that were designed, tested and distributed by a small team of artists under Wilkinson's supervision. For further information, see the "Edward Wadsworth" entry in Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (2009).

Camouflage Artist | McClelland Barclay

From the McClelland Barclay entry in CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage, pp. 40-41—

American illustrator McClelland Barclay (1891-July 18, 1943) [see top right photo above] was originally from St. Louis MO. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, then with George Bridgman and Thomas Fogarty at the Art Students League in New York. As early as 1912, his work was often featured in major US magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal.

During World War I, he produced recruiting posters for the US government, and worked with William Andrew MacKay in designing ship camouflage for the US Shipping Board.

In the 1920s and 30s, Barclay was widely known as an advertising illustrator, designing posters for the film industry, painting “pin-up girl” illustrations, and developing marketing images for leading manufacturers, the most popular of which were his paintings of sexy models for General Motors’ Body by Fisher sales campaign.

In 1938, he was appointed an Assistant Naval Constructor with the US Naval Reserve. He again worked on camouflage, and in 1940 he obtained a patent titled “Camouflaging” (US Patent No. 2190691) [top left above] for dazzle-like aircraft camouflage. In that year, an article in the New York Times reported that his patent was “for the camouflaging of airplanes by painting the wings with designs that were said to conceal the shape and make it difficult to judge the position of an airplane.” Some of his designs were applied to prototypes and tested [photos of three prototypes are pictured here], but were never actually implemented. During World War II, Barclay continued to experiment with camouflage and to design recruiting posters. Appointed a Lieutenant Commander, he was a passenger on a US Navy vessel that was struck by a torpedo near the Solomon Islands on July 18, 1943.

Also pictured above (in the bottom photo) is an earlier example of dazzle-like airplane camouflage (unrelated to Barclay's work), as published in the New York Herald in 1919, in which it was described as "an upside down flyer" and "a weirdly camouflaged airplane that was a feature in the recent aerial pageant at Hendon, England. Note the dummy landing carriage atop the upper plane and silhouetted pilot's head beneath the fuselage designed to puzzle the spectators as to whether or not the plane is flying rightside up."

additional sources

Alon Bement | Georgia O'Keeffe's Teacher

Camouflage Article by Alon Bement in Washington Times, June 15, 1919

Alon Bement was born in Ashfield MA on August 15, 1876, and died in 1954. He studied in Paris with Leon Bonnat and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, then went on to teach drawing, painting and design at Columbia University, the Maryland Institute of the Arts, and the University of Virginia. His interest was not just in the practice of art, but in art theory and education as well. In 1921, he wrote an influential book titled Figure Construction, editions of which are still available.

He was especially interested in the design theories of Arthur Wesley Dow, whose book on Composition (1899) was widely used in art schools in the early 20th century. Bement is mostly remembered today as a pivotal influence on Georgia O’Keeffe. She met him in 1912, took courses from him at Columbia University (where Dow was Art Department Head), and was even his teaching assistant. It was Bement who introduced her to Dow’s Japanese-influenced approach to design, which O’Keeffe made use of in her work. As documented by Robinson (1989), “the encounter with Bement, and with Dow’s theories, altered Georgia’s life.”

It is less commonly known that Bement was an active participant in ship camouflage during World War I. He served as a camoufleur for the US Shipping Board, and was probably part of a New York-based camouflage team that was headed by William Andrew Mackay. In addition, in 1917-1919, he published four substantial articles on the artistic underpinnings of camouflage. His involvement in the subject is noted in the biographical entry in Behrens (2009). There is a file of newspaper clippings and other ephemera about him in the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Writings by Bement include—
Bement, Alon (1921). Figure Construction: a brief treatise on drawing the human figure for art students, the costume designer, and teachers. NY: Gregg Publishing Company.
___(1917). “Camouflage,” in Teachers College Record 18 No 5, pp. 458-462.
___(1919a). “The Report of the U-16,” in St Nicholas XLVI (November 1918-April 1919), pp. 495-498.
___(1919b). “Tricks by Which You Can Camouflage,” in American Magazine 87 (May), pp. 44-46.
 ___(1919c), “’Camouflage’ for Fat Figures and Faulty Faces,” in Washington Times. American Weekly Section, June 15.

Other sources—
Roy R. Behrens (2009). Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage. Dysart IA: Bobolink Books.
Roxana Robinson (1989). Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Lebanon NH: University Press of New England.

O Blazing Tiger of William Blake

Cover illustration of a dazzle-painted ship (1918)

On the cover of the October 12, 1918, issue of The Independent (Vol 56 No 3645) was featured a painting of a dazzle-camouflaged ship (the image shown here is a detail), with no mention of the artist's name. Inside, on the contents page, an equally uncredited subscriber contributed this poetic lament—

O blend of emerald wild and drunken amethyst, 

O wild, hysteric nightmare of psychoanalyst, 

O purple cow of Burgess, O blazing tiger of Blake, 

O neo-impressionist lily, O super-Barnumcular fake, 

What madman out of Potsdam, what loon from Blagovetschenskgeorgsrknlintvoff. 

What Bolshevik or sideshow freak or Greenwich village toff 

Told you that the way to hide was with vivid gobs of blue 

Cutting athwart green triangles and gray gridirons askew 

All done on a painted background of most unearthly hue 

Like a sunrise up at midnight dabbled with evening dew?

Prohibition Camouflage

Prohibition Camouflage

This is a wonderful photograph from a pictorial page in The New York Tribune on April 2, 1922. The title is "A Bit of Prohibition Camouflage," and the caption reads—

"Have a smoke, er, that is, I should say, a drink?" The latest stunt to fool the dry agents is this innocent looking cigar case filled with glass cigars, each corked and containing a real he-drink. Another device, this one for the fair sex, to be put on the market recently is a pair of alcoholic opera glasses, each half of which hold a cocktail of pre-Volstead proportions. Have you seen 'em?

Camouflage Artist | Ben Kutcher

Ben Kutcher, book illustration

There was a note published in The Bookman, a New York-based literary journal, in 1919 about a Russian-Jewish book illustrator named Ben Kutcher (1895-1967) who served as a camouflage artist in the US Army during World War I (Vol 48 (1919), p. 381)—

Ben Kutcher, a young Russian artist whose illustrated edition of “A House of Pomegranates” has just been published, is now with the camouflage corps at Washington [DC]. 

The full title of the book referred to is Ben Kutcher’s Illustrated Edition of A House of Pomegranates: And the Story of the Nightingale and the Rose (Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918). It consists of earlier writings by Oscar Wilde, with a wonderful introduction by H.L. Mencken, who says of Wilde—

What he did with words was a rare and lovely thing. Himself well nigh tone-deaf, he got into them a sonorous and majestic music. Himself hideous, he fashioned them into complex and brilliant arabesques of beauty. Himself essentially shallow and even bogus, he gave them thunderous eloquence, an austere dignity almost Biblical, the appearance of high sincerity that goes with all satisfying art. In these stories, I believe, he is at his best. 

The full book, including Kutcher’s illustrations (reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley), is available online here.

A painter, designer and illustrator, Kutcher was born in Kiev c1895 and emigrated to the US in 1902. His papers, which date from 1926 through 1967, are in the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. According to an online summary, “The collection contains an autobiographical manuscript describing Kutcher's arrival in the US, the early years of his career, his experiences in the US Army, and his associations with artists and designers.” He designed books, bookplates and stage sets.

Other books illustrated by Kutcher include editions of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Andersen’s Fairy Tales, and The Aztec Treasure House for Boys, in which appeared the illustration on this page. A retrospective of his book illustrations, drawings and paintings was held in the year of his death, April 5 through May 18, 1967, at the Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum in Berkeley.

French Camoufleurs in Huge Diorama

Panthéon de la Guerre (1918), detail

From Roy R. Behrens, Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (2009), p. 279—

In 1916, seventeen French artists collaborated on a huge circular diorama, as a tribute to the heroes on the Allied side of World War I. Called the Panthéon de la Guerre, it contained about five thousand full-length figures, with a circular expanse of four hundred feet. It was completed in 1918, and displayed in a custom-made building until 1927. As documented in Mark Levitch, Panthéon de la Guerre (2006), of relevance to camouflage is the fact that among those depicted on its “staircase of heroes” are a handful of identifiable World War I French camoufleurs. In 1927, the panorama was sold to US businessmen and shipped in a ten-ton crate to New York, where it was displayed at Madison Square Garden and at subsequent expositions. In 1956, it was donated to the Liberty Memorial [now the National WWI Museum] in Kansas City MO, where, two years later, selected sections were cut up and reassembled [by Missouri artist and camoufleur, (Leroy) Daniel MacMorris] to make a smaller mural, only sixty-nine feet wide.

WWI Umbrella Camouflage

Disruptive shadows in a Spanish street festival (c1909)

For whatever reason, there was increased interest in the disruptive effects of shadows among photographers, painters and other artists near the close of the 19th century. This is especially evident in the paintings of certain European and American painters. See for example, John Singer Sargent's Breakfast on the Loggia or The Hermit. In some cases, no doubt it was inspired by patterns of disruption in the protective coloration of animals, as confirmed by demonstrations by Abbott H. Thayer and others. During World War I, comparable techniques were adopted for concealing from aerial observation personnel and equipment on the ground.

According to James E. Edmonds (in History of the Great War, Vol 1, London: Macmillan, 1932, pp. 83-84), “Concealment from the air was first attempted by the use of canvas sheets painted to represent the ground as seen from an airplane. Experience proved these to be heavy to erect and difficult to maintain in position. On the suggestion of Mr. [Solomon J.] Solomon, they were replaced by a lighter and more manageable article [called “umbrella camouflage” or "garnished nets"], in the form of old fish nets or wire netting, garnished with tufts of painted or dyed raffia (gardener’s bast). For the Somme thousands of rolls of wire netting were supplied to the divisional engineers who, when raffia was lacking, wove grass into it. In the course of time all batteries were equipped with these overhead covers. As the demand increased and the supply of raffia became inadequate, canvas strips were substituted for it, and were found to be less flammable.”

But apparently long before the war, there was a civilian tradition of doing more or less the same, as shown here by this photograph from a 1909 issue of The Strand Magazine (p. 719) of a Spanish street festival. Submitted by Edmund Pöhler of Barcelona, the article states: "This strange effect, produced by sunshine and shade, is a common scene in Spanish towns, where, once every year, about eight days are set apart as the Fiesta Major (Grand Holidays). During this period each district vies with its neighbor in adorning the streets. Dancing at night to the music of hired musicians, under the fantastic canopy overhead, illuminated by the many lights of every open window and door, invites one and all to participate in the gaiety and animation of the scene."

WWI Ship Camouflage Teams

 

Location of WWI Ship Camouflage Teams © Roy R. Behrens

When the US entered World War I, the design of all ship camouflage, including that of civilian commercial (merchant) vessels was taken over by the US Navy. The Navy's camouflage section, consisting of two subsections, was administrated by architect Harold Van Buskirk. Physicist Loyd A. Jones was put in charge of a science-based Research Subsection at Eastman Laboratories in Rochester NY, while artist Everett Longley Warner was in charge of a team of artists at a Design Subsection in Washington DC. In addition, ten groups of civilian camoufleurs were set up at various US ports, as shown by this map. Using lithographic painting plans that were prepared by Warner's team, it was the responsibility of these civilian artists to apply dazzle camouflage schemes to the actual ships. There is a post-war description of this in Everett L. Warner, "Fooling the Iron Fish" in Everybody's Magazine. Vol 41. November 1919, pp. 102-109—

 

[Early in the war] An arrangement was reached with the United States Shipping Board whereby all existing types of camouflage were to be discontinued. The Navy undertook to supply dazzle designs for all American vessels and the Shipping Board agreed to organize and maintain at the ports a force of camoufleurs whose duty it should be to supervise the application of these designs to the vessels.

The Navy worked so quietly and under such close censorship that few people were aware of the leading part that it was playing in the work. There exists even today a very widespread impression that the designs which the Shipping Board camoufleurs applied to the ships originated with them. This belief is entirely without foundation. All designs were supplied by the Navy, and while it is true that at several of the ports the camoufleurs built small testing theatres copied after ours and did a certain amount of experimental model painting, this was wholly for their own education or relaxation, and none of the dazzle designs so made was ever authorized for application to any ship.

WWI Camouflaged Machine Guns

Anon. WWI-era magazine photo.

What a wonderfully clear, sharp image this is of a WWI transport wagon for two machine guns, covered with a disruptively-colored camouflage tarp. At the time, high contrast disruptive patterns (intended to interrupt the continuity of a shape) were applied to land vehicles as well as to ships. See dazzle camouflage.

Metamorphosis and Camouflage | Visual Pun

Anon, a 19th-century visual metamorphosis

In the Victorian era, there was considerable emphasis on and appreciation of wit, including visual metamorphosis (as in this example), consisting of sequential drawings in which one thing evolves into another. Here, in a series of seemingly logical steps, a musician is transformed into a stringed instrument. This process has everything to do with what is commonly known today as creativity or metaphorical thinking (cf. Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation), but it also pertains to camouflage, which frequently works by disguising a thing so that it resembles another, called mimicry. Perhaps the best book on natural mimicry is Wolfgang Wickler, Mimicry in Plants and Animals. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

Camouflage and Everett Warner's Cousin

I recently found an old memoir by an American clergyman named John B. Ferguson, a graduate of Miami University of Ohio (1903), who was pastor for fourteen years at two Presbyterian churches in Indiana, in the towns of Howe and Hopewell, then later at the American Union Church in Manila in the Philippines. During World War I, he also served in France with the YMCA, an experience that he later described in Through the War with a Y Man (1919). It turns out that Ferguson was a relative of Everett Longley Warner, an American Impressionist painter who played an especially pivotal role in the development of US Navy ship camouflage during that war. In the book, Ferguson writes this about the day of his departure from New York Harbor for Europe on the SS Chicago (pp. 46-47)—

As was the case with most boats we did not sail immediately. It was exceedingly interesting to see all the camouflaged ships in the harbor. My artist cousin, Everett Warner, very graciously came to see me off. When I saw him come on deck, my first question was, "How did you get on this boat without a passport." He showed a little silver badge which meant the naval board, and I saw that ranks and badges were very important things in the army. From him I took my first lesson in the interesting art of camouflaging. A big freighter near us was all in gray and black. He told me how important it was to have the funnels properly done. There were many theories about it, and I suppose the cubists had their ideal opportunity, for the color scheme on some of the boats seemed to the layman's eye about the most conspicuous mark on any except a painted ocean.

Henry Adams on Art and Camouflage

[The images above are three stages in an illustration of a copperhead snake that first appeared in Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909) by Gerald Handerson Thayer, the son of American painter and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer, aka "the father of camouflage." As originally published, a cut-out overlay silhouette (center panel) could be placed on top of the painting of the snake in a forest floor setting, thereby revealing its location. The original painting, like many of the book's illustrations, was the collaborative work of Thayer, his son and his students, including (for this one) Rockwell Kent. Thayer's book in its entirety is available online through Google book search.—RB]


Ornithology, Infantry and Abstraction, by Henry Adams. Art and Antiques Magazine (March 2011). Modern camouflage was invented by artists who studied nature, and camouflage in turn influenced some of modernism's biggest breakthroughs. more>>