Dazzled by Dazzle

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook (2012)

From an article in the New York Sun, April 21, 1918, magazine section, p. 12—

Astern of the gray transport steams another ship, the second vessel crazily camouflaged—as if the skipper had said to a boss painter, "Mike, you and your whole crew go ashore and get stewed to the eyes and then come aboard again and paint this ship as you see fit."

•••

From an unsigned article in the Coconino Sun, Friday, January 3, 1919, p. 5—

The sailor, returning a trifle saturated, found his hitherto respected and respectable ship camouflaged in the most modern cubist style. Running his eye over the whole mess of conflicting squares, triangles, lines, circles and sundry other nameless blobs of paint which graced the sides of his "home," and blinking stupidly at the hideously screaming color scheme, he slowly raised his hand while the tears coursed down his cheeks and murmured wearily, "Never again."

•••

From Herman Whitaker, German Shark: The American Navy in the Underseas War. Century Company, 1918, p. 17—

Barred, striped, blotched, smudged, ring-streaked with vivid pinks, arsenic greens, blowsy reds, violent blues, they [dazzle-camouflaged ships] looked like—like—like nothing in the world unless it be that most poisonous of drinks, a Frisco pousse-café. All of the giraffes, zebras, leopards, and tigers ever assembled in the "World's Greatest Aggregation" exhibit conventional patterns in comparison with this destroyer camouflage. The exception to this blazing color scheme, a recent arrival from home, looked, in her dull lead paint, like a Puritan maiden that had fallen by accident into a blowsy company of painted Jezebels.

Toy Boat Camouflage

The photo above was published in the New York Tribune (May 11, 1919), p. 8, with the following caption: 

A corner of the model room of the camouflage section of the [US] Navy Department. Scale models of every type of vessel, decorated with the weirdest of designs, are kept here for test and experimental purposes. It is easy to imagine what undoubted joy would be Young America's were he once let loose in this toy shipyard. 

The person on the right is Harold Van Buskirk, the executive officer in charge of the Camouflage Section (which had two branches), while on the left is Everett L. Warner, who headed the Design Subsection in Washington DC. It was the Navy's responsibility to provide the camouflage designs for all American ships, both military and merchant, the plans for which were then sent out to teams of artists assigned to dock officers (called District Camoufleurs) at coastal harbors throughout the country. The District Camoufleur for Brooklyn NY was muralist William Andrew Mackay. Only recently, we discovered the following article from 1919, in which he is interviewed at length about his work as a camoufleur. [The photos on this blog post were not part of the original article.]

***

Two months earlier, the following article, written by Otis Peabody Swift, was published in the New York Evening World Daily Magazine (March 6, 1919) with the headline HOW A NEW YORK ARTIST, WITH TOY BOATS, WORKED OUT CAMOUFLAGE TO FOIL U-BOATS: In William Andrew Mackay's studio, sixty men under his direction worked night and day on designs of the United States Shipping Board, using diminutive models [like those shown here].

Now that the war is over many "mystery stories" of the war can at last be told. Perhaps one of the most interesting is the story of camouflage, the weird painting of seagoing ships that baffled and defeated the sea wolves of the submarines.

Camouflage, as developed in this war, is a product of American study and imagination. It is largely the result of the work of William Andrew Mackay, the New York artist and interior decorator, who for five years before the war experimented with the idea of protective coloration for American battleships. And the success of his plan is shown by the fact that of the 749 American vessels camouflaged according to the designs of the United States Shipping Board, supplied by the navy, only seven were sunk.

It was in the big studio workshop of the Mackay School of Camouflage at 345 East 33rd Street [in Manhattan] that the camouflage idea was developed. Here sixty men worked day and night disguising the American ships.

Along the walls of the big studio hang marine background paintings, showing the various color tints of the oceans. There are the long gray green wave of the North Atlantic, and the violet fog of the [English] Channel. There is the deep warm blue of the Gulf Stream, and the muddy brown of the Gironde delta. Against these backgrounds the camouflage effects were tested. Over in a corner stands a real periscope, manned by Skipper Mackay. And on tables, chairs, racks and shelves are dozens of nine- and ten-inch wooden models of merchant ships, awaiting their coat of camouflage.

When a vessel was to be camouflaged a wooden model was first made up of the ship, exact in every detail. Then different types of camouflage were applied and tested through the periscope against the different marine backgrounds. It was the old sport of playing boats. Famous artists and architects, students in the school, sailed their toys across the maneuvering boards. There were over a hundred of these little ships, and they formed a navy that would delight a youngster's heart. Then when a satisfactory design, one well fitted to that particular vessel, had been decided upon the plans were sent to the shipyard or dry-dock, where the actual camouflage would be applied.

"Yes, this looks like a deserted battlefield to me," said Mr. Mackay at the studio yesterday. "It was here that the first work of camouflage was developed. In all, 749 vessels were camouflaged, and sixty men, artists, architects and designers, made this shop their headquarters, under direction of the United States Shipping Board, working over designs, testing colors, peering through the periscope at the wooden models, and then dashing off to try out some few effect on the vessels that, in a few days, would be depending upon our skill in the art of disguise to save them from the U-boats.

But let's go back to the beginning. Caesar invented camouflage. His tiriemes that sailed north to conquer the red-haired Britons were all painted green, and his crews were ordered to wear green suits to make them less visible. In Macbeth we find the soldiers carrying trees to conceal themselves on that day when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane. But modern camouflage, as developed by the war, is the product of American study.

Seven years ago, when I was at Newport, I read a volume by Prof. Ogden N. Rood of Columbia University entitled Modern Chromatics. He pointed out that the gray of nature—the sky, rocks and trees—is a combination of red, green and violet. It then occurred to me that by blending these colors I might evolve a battleship gray that would make our dreadnoughts less visible. Commander J.O. Fisher, USN, had been working along similar lines at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Together we experimented in 1915 on American submarines at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We painted them in stripes and bars, and there evolved the first principles on which modern camouflage is based.

When the United States entered the war I placed the results of these experiments before the Navy Department. I privately undertook to camouflage American merchant vessels, and also opened the Mackay School, where fifteen camoufleurs were trained for the navy. Then I was appointed District Camoufleur by the Shipping Hoard, and the big job began. Plans were supplied by the Shipping Board, and new types of camouflage were worked out at their Washington headquarters.

There was nothing haphazard about the art. Every ragged line, every crazy angle, jarring color, had a meaning. First you must understand that there are really two kinds of camouflage. There is the camouflage which attempts to make a boat less visible, and thereby permits it to escape the enemy, and that camouflage which, although the boat shows up plainly, deceives the enemy as to the course, speed and identity of the craft. The most successful method was a combination of both forms.

In England Commander Wilkinson RN had been working on the idea and had developed the dazzle system. This consisted of large black and white figures. It dazzled the sub. He could see the boat, but he couldn’t place his shot. There were just as many subs, and they saw just as many British boats, but they couldn't hit them. Before the camouflage was put on the Germans got fifty boats a week. Afterward the average was ten boats a week.

Here in the States we combined the dazzle idea with low visibility. There were many tricks to the trade. You see the subs would shoot up their periscope and got a look at the ship. They based their mathematical calculations on what they saw in that moment's glance. We painted a false bow wave along the side of the ship, which, by foreshortening, made the vessel seem farther away than it was. We broke down all vertical lines, destroying the ship's silhouette by which they ascertained identity. We painted on the false bow lines which her appear to be going in another direction.

Above The top photo is a plaster unpainted model of the SS Baxley. According to other sources, ship models for this purpose were usually made of wood. The bottom photo is the actual ship after its camouflage scheme was applied.

From time to time other more spectacular methods of camouflage were adopted. The Von Steuben came into port one day with a destroyer painted on her side. Other vessels painted SC [submarine chaser] boats on their sides, some painted superimposed bows on their sterns so you couldn't tell which end was which. Of course the cubist artist hailed camouflage as the logical development of beauty and art, and said that from now on all ships and houses and automobiles ought to be decorated that way. But camouflage was purely utilitarian—we forgot the artistic part. We didn't care how the ship looked if it could dodge the submarines.

And they certainly did. It was so successful that we took to camouflaging SC boats, seaplanes and even houses and barracks on land where there was danger of air raids—as at Porto Corsino, Italy, and Dunkirk. The Germans got the idea and camouflaged their submarines, and camouflage got into vaudeville and the dictionary. Well, it's all over now. The ships are coming up the bay in their peacetime paint, and all the checkerboard ships and the Welsh rarebit decorations are a thing of the past. The big point is that it did the work. Of the 749 boats that were camouflaged in the second district only seven were sunk.”

Today Mr. Mackay is packing up the toy ships of the 33rd Street studio and is sending them to the Brooklyn Museum, where with the periscope and the deep sea background, they will afford the public an idea of how a wartime convoy looked at sea. And he is going to his bungalow at Coytesville, NJ, just atop the Palisades [Park], and forget all about ships while tramping round the woods with Patricia Mackay, aged seven, who has a toy boat collection that is the envy of every youngster in Jersey.

additional information

Mastheads for The Camoufleur

In a recent post, we talked about the discovery of three issues of a World War I camp newspaper, called The Camoufleur, published in the fall of 1917 by camouflage artists at Camp American University, near Washington DC. Reproduced above are three different logo-like masthead designs that were variously used in those issues. The top one was used on the front page of the first issue (dated October 31, 1917), and is signed by camouflage artist Walter Tubesing. The one at the bottom (uncredited) was used as the front page masthead for the remaining two issues, and the one in the center (also uncredited) appeared on the editorial page (page 2) of the second issue.

Other camoufleurs listed as having contributed to these issues include (in no particular order) William D. Foster (architect), J.D. Senger, Roy C. Jones (architect), Ralph E. Griswold (architect), Sheldon K. Viele (architect), V.P. Spaulding (architect), Fred H. Daniels (painter), G. Berliner, O. Accorsini, Kimon Nicholaides (drawing teacher, author), Bernard Hoyt (architect), I. Opfer, Everett A. Herter (architect and brother of diplomat Christian Herter), C.A. Lee, David C. Comstock (architect), (Wilmer) Bruce Rabenold (architect), Barry Faulkner (muralist and cousin of Abbott H. Thayer), Clifford C. Jones (architect), W. Pow (the unit's Sergeant Major), W. Nice, A.E. Cheeseman, B.L. Burman, S.N. Hartel (architect).

Other camoufleurs are also mentioned, but were apparently not on the newspaper staff. We'll be back with more names, graphic delights and juicy new discoveries in future postings. (Thanks again to librarian Nancy Cunningham for having shared these issues with us.)

The Camoufleur | WWI Camp Newspaper

We've been greatly excited this week—and for good reason. A few days ago, we received a wonderful package from a Texas-based librarian named Nancy Cunningham. After seeing our blog, she sent an email, asking if we might be interested in three issues of a World War I camp newspaper called The Camoufleur. According to an editorial note, it was published by the "Camouflage Company of the 24th Engineers" [elsewhere I've seen it listed as Company F of the 25th Engineers, but before long it was reorganized as Company A of the 49th Engineers]. Also known as  the American Camouflage Corps, the unit was in training in 1917 at Camp American University, on the outskirts of Washington DC, preparing to go off to France.

We are so pleased to discover that these materials have somehow survived all these years (they are terribly fragile, and it's entirely possible that these are the only remaining copies). The first issue was published on October 31, 1917, with subsequent issues on November 17 and December 11 (most likely these were the only issues, because soon after the date of the third one, the unit sailed for Europe). Each issue consists of eight pages, measuring 11 inches wide by 13.75 inches in length, and printed on now-brittle newsprint. The front page of the second issue is shown above. The motto on the masthead reads "Seeing Was Believing."

Presumably all the contents of these issues (brief articles, updates on the camoufleurs' work, bad poetry, cartoons and comic drawings) were produced by the American artists and architects who were serving at US Army camoufleurs. Many of their names are included in the lists of contributors. Other names are mentioned because the same unit also produced and performed in a camouflage-themed stage comedy, titled Les Blagueurs (the jokers). With a cast of forty-one performers, the four-act comedy premiered at Camp American University, then traveled to Camp Meade (near Middletown PA) for repeat performances on November 23 and 24.

We've talked about many of these artists before, in earlier postings on this blog, or on our websites, or in three books on the subject, FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002), CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (2009), and SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook. In the second issue (shown above) there is an article about a visit to the camouflage unit by US President Woodrow Wilson, Mrs. Wilson, Secretary of War Newton Baker, Commanding General John J. Pershing (although I'm no longer certain of that) and various other high-ranking officers and dignitaries on October 31, 1917. What the article fails to mention is that, by happenstance, among the visitors that day was the well-known portrait painter, John Singer Sargent. In fact, if you look at the front page of this issue, in the photograph on the left the President and Mrs. Wilson are in the foreground, while Sargent (circled in red) is standing in the background. (Incidently, according to The Camoufleur, the two soldiers in charge of the day's demonstrations were Iowa-born sculptor Sherry Edmundson Fry and New Hampshire muralist Barry Faulkner, a cousin of Abbott H. Thayer, the "father of camouflage.")

Below is another photograph of the same event taken at nearly the very same moment. It's available online at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs website, but it was also distributed to newspapers throughout the country, and used in brief news stories about Wilson's reaction to the camoufleurs' demonstrations.

For example, the following news article, titled "President Wilson Is Fooled by Camouflage. Unable To See Soldier within Five Feet of Him," was published in the New York Tribune, November 15, 1917, p. 2—

Camouflage, that deceptive military art, fools others besides soldiers and airmen on the Western front. Right down in Washington it has hoodwinked n0less a person than the commander and chief [sic] of the army and navy, Woodrow Wilson.

The story of how this came about was told last night at the Fine Arts Building, in West Fifty-Seventh Street, by Captain Aymar Embury [in civilian life, a prominent architect], of the engineer corps, who told of the camouflage work that he and his men are doing at the experimental field at Washington Barracks, near the nation's capital.

The President was invited to a demonstration of camouflage at the field. With him came the Secretary of War and fourteen generals [among them, according to the article, Generals William P. Biddle, Saltsman, William M. Black, Winslow, Abbott, and Edwin B. Babbitt], and they were all fooled.

"Do you see the man?" Captain Embury asked the Chief Executive as he stood upon the field.

"What man?" Mr. Wilson asked, and refused to believe it when he was told that a soldier was concealed within five feet of him.

The captain blew a whistle and a soldier sprang, literally from the earth [from a hole in the ground, beneath a papier maché rock, as seen here in the foreground], to the President's delight.

They then asked Mr. Wilson if he could find the field gun concealed near by. He looked long and hard. There didn't seem enough cover for one, and he said so at last.

"And then," said Captain Embury last night, "A screen of foliage was swung aside and the gun went off. The President jumped. It was a good hearty jump. He seemed to cover about fourteen [feet? inches?] of ground."

But why was John Singer Sargent there? It turns out that Sargent had been at the White House that morning, painting a portrait of the President. During the sitting, the subject of military camouflage came up, and Sargent could not help but tell about his strange experience two years earlier, when he had offered to assist American painter Abbott H. Thayer in demonstrating the effectiveness of camouflage to the British Army's top brass in London (we'll share more on Thayer and that ill-fated effort in a future post). By coincidence, the President explained, he, the First Lady and others had been invited to a training camp that same afternoon to witness the clever inventions of the American Camouflage Corps. At Wilson's suggestion, Sargent joined the entourage.

As for the wealth of materials in these three issues of The Camoufleur, this is (as they say) only the tip of the iceberg. We've now scanned every page very carefully, to provide future researchers with access to digital files and printed facsimiles, and we will be publishing other highlights in future postings on this blog. Again, all this has thankfully come about through the wisdom and generosity of librarian Nancy Cunningham, who purchased these and assorted materials on eBay many years ago while looking for information about the 604th Engineers (in France, c1918), her grandfather's unit. These materials had been the property of Major William John Harrison (a medical officer), who had been a camp doctor during 1917 at Camp American University. For whatever reason, he never discarded these issues of this wonderfully odd publication.

One other note related to this: In an old issue of the Ogden Standard (Ogden UT), on January 19, 1918, p. 1, there is a substantial article on "Trench and Camp Newspapers for Our Soldiers." It focuses on two WWI American camp publications, of which one is The Camoufleur.

Sea Classics | Ship Camouflage

Edward Wadsworth, Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919)

In the June 2012 issue of a newsstand magazine called Sea Classics, there is a pictorial article on "The How and Why of Warship Camouflage." A friend of mine, a WW2 navy veteran, told me about it, and I excitedly tracked it down. On the cover is an exquisite painting (although substantially altered) by British artist Edward Wadsworth, who was hand-picked by Norman Wilkinson during WWI to oversee the painting of camouflage schemes on dry docked ships in the harbors. Most likely, Wadsworth himself did not design any of the  dazzle painting schemes that were used; he simply adapted provided designs to fit specific vessels.

Wadsworth was a prominent Vorticist artist, and this particular painting (above) is his largest, best-known work. Titled Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919), the original oil painting (which measures 120 inches high by 96 inches wide) is in the collection of  the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Unfortunately, the editors of Sea Classics decided not to give Wadsworth credit for his work (he isn't even mentioned), nor is there a note about its title and its whereabouts. That information is easily found—it only takes a minute—in the Wikipedia article on dazzle camouflage.

Equally disappointing is the article itself, which repeats old information (including mistakes) from forty years ago that has since been corrected and amplified by new research. For example, there is the familiar error of referring to American artist George de Forest Brush as Robert De Forest Brush (there was no person by that name). The naming error first occurred in US Navy records (c1899), and in 1971, it was repeated in an article on World War I ship camouflage by navy historian Robert Sumrall. At the time, a letter to the editor from a Brush relative pointed out the error, and the mistake was later reaffirmed by a penciled notation on a navy memorandum in the papers of Everett L. Warner, the American artist who directly oversaw a unit of marine camouflage artists in both World Wars. On his copy of the document, Warner circled "Robert" with a link to a note in the margin that reads "correction George." So why repeat that error and others? It looks like the answer is probably due to the amazingly outdated sources that were used in preparing the article. There's no bibliography for it, but at the end there is list of three books for "further reading," the most recent of which was published in 1975 (37 years ago). How unfortunate—ship camouflage is a fascinating aspect of modern history and one that deserves to be covered in a balanced and genuinely accurate way.

Eric Kandel | Camouflage

The same engraving of a sphere (twice), but the right one is inverted.

As is increasingly being confirmed by current brain research, the Gestalt psychologists were right. They claimed that we as humans share certain perceptual inclinations that are hard-wired or innate—they "come in the box" with the rest of the brain. These are inborn universal traits, neither culture-laden nor unique.

Now that people think of "art" as all but exclusively having to do with individuality and self-expression, artists rarely talk about the traits that we inherently share, including these fundamental organizing tendencies. In contrast, graphic designers (whose temperament is in between artists and architects) use them constantly and, for the most part, are well aware of how they work. In fact, these same tendencies are the basis for all the age-old ploys in conjuring (sleight of hand and stage magic), pickpocketing—and, of course, in camouflage. Chief among them are similarity and proximity grouping, edge alignment, continuity, closure and so on.

Nobel Prize neuroscientist Eric Kandel talks about these tendencies (he calls them "bottom-up processing") in relation to current brain research in his amazingly wide-ranging book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain (NY: Random House, 2012). As he explains, when we look at objects or drawings of things, we come with the assumption that the source of light is overhead. As a result (as shown above), if two identical images of a shaded sphere are placed together, but one of them (the sphere on the right) has been vertically flipped, the other one (which is seemingly lit from above) looks spherical, expansive and solid. The one lit from the bottom looks deflated, less substantial and concave.

Solomon J. Solomon, Pencil drawing of a hand (c1910)

Artists and designers, even the earliest cave artists, seem always to have known this, the traditional technical name for which is shading. It is of great importance because it is such a reliable way to make flat drawings (which are merely marks on paper) appear to be three-dimensional shapes that bulge out in space toward the viewer. A particularly skillful example of this is a drawing of a hand (above) by British painter Solomon J. Solomon (1860-1927), from his book The Practice of Oil Painting and Drawing (London: Seeley, 1910).

Solomon was an uncle of the American playwright Moss Hart. Interestingly, he was also the person put in charge during World War I of the British Camouflage Section within the Royal Engineers (1916-18).

Solomon is often credited with the use of overhanging nets, garnished with burlap strips, so that anything beneath them will be visually broken up by irregular shadows—just as happens on the tennis court, when the shadows of the chain link fence disrupt the shape of the ball in the grass. It is also commonly said that he and his camouflage unit devised the first British steel-lined observation post, designed to look exactly like a dead tree on the battlefield.

Examples of countershading from Camoupedia (2009)

Years in advance of WWI, a prominent American artist, Abbott H. Thayer, revealed how inverted shading (commonly called countershading) contributes in a major way to  "protective coloration" (or animal camouflage). An avid naturalist as well as an artist, it was Thayer's belief that there is a functional reason why so many animals have "white undersides" (light-colored bellies, with darker coloring toward the top)—not unlike the coloring of the sphere on the right at the top of this page. As a result, countershaded animals look less dimensional, even flat. I have discussed this in detail, in print as well as online.

If an artist can apply shading to a shape on a flat surface, so that it looks three-dimensional, then the exact opposite can also be done:  Shading can be painted out and inverse shading painted in, so that a truly dimensional form looks flat and insubstantial. Here's how Thayer's son and collaborator, Gerald H. Thayer explained it:

If a rounded object, say a ball or cylinder…is to be made to disappear, it has, in the first place to be countershaded. That is, its shadowed parts must be lighter in color, must be painted lighter until the shadow no longer shows; and the portions facing toward the source of light must be just proportionately darkened. In this way, a rounded, solid form can be made to look perfectly flat.

The elder Thayer demonstrated this repeatedly. Sometimes he used artificial lighting and stuffed animals, such as the tiger he set up a Harvard University (as shown above, the third row down). Lighted from below (on the left), the animal is clearly visible, but it virtually disappears (on the right) when lighted from above. Thayer's more portable standard way of showing the effects of countershading was to "paint out" wooden duck decoys (or short of that, sweet potatoes). In the bottom photo, he claims that there are two decoys, but we only see one. The one on the left (clearly visible) is the color of the ground but has not been countershaded, while the one on the right (which I can't find) has been expertly countershaded.
...
• For more information, see this annotated bibliography on Art, Architecture and Modern Camouflage. See also public radio podcast on dazzle camouflage, and the trailer for an upcoming film on the same subject.

More info

Camouflage Artist | Alan Sorrell

Alan Sorrell, Self-Portrait (1928)

We've been looking for information about British artist and writer Alan Sorrell (1904-1974), who served as a camoufleur and war artist during World War II. According to the Brighton University website—

 

During the Second World War Sorrell volunteered for the RAF but was transferred as a Camouflage Officer to the Air Ministry in 1941. He made drawings and paintings of camp life, a number of which were purchased by the War Artists Advisory Committee…

It was well known that scores of British artists had worked as camoufleurs during World War I, so that, as Brian Foss explains in Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939-1945 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 16-17), when World War II broke out—

 

…from early on, camouflage design had struck many artists as the most obvious route to congenial employment. By the beginning of September 1939 the Ministry of Labor had received letters from more than 2000 applicants for camouflage work, only a tiny fraction of whom even got onto a waiting list.…[By 1943] the number of artists who had earned a living in this line of work—though far below the number who had hoped to do sso—was impressive. Among the artists who had found camoufleur jobs for themselves were William Coldstream, Frederick Gore, Ashley Havinden, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Robert Medley, Colin Moss, Rodrigo Moynihan, Mervyn Peake, Roland Penrose, Robert Scanlan, Edward Seago, Richard Seddon, Alan Sorrell and Julian Trevelyan.

Earlier in his life, at age 24, Sorrell had been awarded the Prix de Rome for mural painting, which enabled him to study in Rome. Reproduced above (with permission) is an extraordinary self-portrait drawing, made with pencil, ink and opaque watercolor in 1928.

Alan Sorrell, Cavern in the Clouds (1944)

Mark Sorrell, one of the artist's three children, has written an online biographical essay about his father for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In an especially memorable passage, he writes—

Sorrell was a neo-Romantic. Recruits marching down to the station, in a wartime painting, proceed under a haloed moon. His reconstruction drawings are invested with dramatic cloud formations, swirling rainstorms, and smoke. In his more imaginative compositions, not tied down to immediate reality, a brooding oppressive atmosphere often prevails. They are images of a violently broken civilization—earthquake-shattered cities, jungle-invaded monuments, propped façades. In spite of this pessimistic attitude, he was a man with a gusto for life, naturally sociable and gregarious, with a witty manner which was hindered but never stifled by a stammer.

Of equal interest is an online video that was made by the artist's daughter, Julia Sorrell, in which she talks about her father in relation to a portrait that he made of her. In addition, there is other information at the website for the Alan Sorrell Project.

Alon Bement, O'Keeffe and Camouflage

In earlier postings, we've talked about American artist and teacher Alon Bement, shown here in an early photograph. A follower of Arthur Wesley Dow (author of Composition), Bement was an important influence on the young Georgia O'Keeffe (see photo lower on this page), who studied with him at Columbia University.

During World War I, he was a civilian camoufleur for the US Shipping Board, in the course of which he worked with William Andrew Mackay in New York. He wrote at least four magazine and news articles on ship camouflage, in which he also talked about how camouflage could be of use in everyday life. One of those, titled "Tricks by Which You Can Fool the Eye" (in American Magazine (May 1919), pp. 44-46 and 132ff), begins with the following statement—

When you think of camouflage, you imagine it is something that belongs only to war. You probably have no idea that you can literally "use it in your business," that you can employ it in your houses, your yards and gardens, even in the clothes you wear.

He goes on to talk about how camouflage could be used to enhance the look of "a certain kind of dwelling which is as ugly as it is common." He illustrates this with "before and after" drawings (shown below) of a house whose appearance could be greatly improved merely by making some changes "in the eaves, the windows, and the door, the porch, and the placing of shrubbery."


























It is a quaint article, mostly made up of advice on how to compensate for ones physical imperfections, by using clothes and cosmetics to conceal what might otherwise be too apparent.

The article mentions the work of artist and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer, and, at the very end, Bement also talks briefly about his own wartime work with camouflage—

To keep him [the German U-boat commander] from learning our tricks we varied the [ship camouflage] diagrams, put in "jokers," discarded old ones and invented new ones continually. We kept him guessing. And while he was guessing, our ships were eluding him.

In the New York studio where this work was carried on under the direction of Mr. William Mackay there was an elaborate system of testing the designs. We had a periscope, small models of vessels, and various painted sea and sky backgrounds. Some captains of merchant vessels were skeptical about the value of camouflage and declared they wouldn't use it on their ships. But when they once saw, by means of these little models, how we could fool them, old sea dogs that they were, they became enthusiastic converts.

American painter Georgia O'Keeffe

Postscript (February 14, 2014): Since first posting this page in May 2012, we have located a news article from the Milwaukee Sentinel (April 18, 1943) titled MODERN MAGIC TO MYSTIFY OUR ENEMIES. It includes four photographs of civilian camouflage students at the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York. One of the photographs is of a classroom setting in which nine students (seven women and two men) are listening to a lecture by their instructor, Alon Bement, described as "a veteran camoufleur of World War I." Bement is standing in front of a chalkboard, on which has been written the famous passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth in which the soldiers are camouflaged by foliage from trees in Birnam Wood. He is holding a dazzle-painted ship model. The caption reads—

These hard-working students of the art of camouflage are learning how to make things seem what they're not under the instruction of expert Alon Bement, one of the World War l's ablest camoufleurs.

Roy R. Behrens, O'Keeffe Homage. Digital montage (2011).

Camouflage Poet | Marvin Bell

On the Fly, Marvin Bell

Many years ago (has it been that long ago?), we organized a non-funded one-day symposium on camouflage, called CAMOUFLAGE: Art, Science and Popular Culture (Saturday, April 22, 2006 at the Kamerick Art Building at the University of Northern Iowa). Although only a few of our colleagues were there from the Department of Art, other scholars came from departments across campus, from around the country, and even from throughout the world, each one speaking sans honorarium, and each one paying completely for his/her own expenses. What an unforgettable day it was. Three of those who spoke that day have since published important books on the subject (Maite Méndez Baiges, Camuflaje: Engano y Ocultación en El Arte Contemporáneo (2007); Henrietta Goodden, Camouflage and Art: Design for Deception in World War 2 (2007); and Ann Elias, Camouflage Australia: Art, Nature, Science and War (2011)), and a poem that was written by American poet Marvin Bell (see online interview above), as a keynote for the conference, has since been reprinted in his recent book, Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (2011). Soon, it will also be featured online as the poem of the week on Narrative Magazine. Here it is in full—

...

Marvin Bell (©2006)
from The Book of the Dead Man

                  Live as if you were already dead.

                                             —Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man and Camouflage

When the dead man wears his camouflage suit, he hides
     in plain sight.

The dead man, in plain sight, disrupts the scene but cannot
     be seen.

His chocolate-chip-cookie shirt mimics the leaves in a breeze.

His frog-skin dress, his bumpy earth nature, leave us lost and
     alone, his mottled apparel sends us in circles.

His displacements distract and disabuse us, he is a
     slick beguiler.

Everything the dead man does is a slight disruption
     of normality.

He is the optical trickster, the optimum space-saver, the one
     to watch for.

He is of a stripe that flusters convention, he is the one
     to watch out for.

That we thought him gone only proves his wily knowledge.

The dead man has lain unseen among the relics of
     embalmed time.

He was always here, always there, right in front of us, timely.

For it was not in the dead man’s future to be preserved.

It was his fate to blend in, to appear in the form of,
     to become...

Now he lives unseen among the lilies, the pines, the
     sweet corn.

It was the dead man’s native desire to appear not to be.

2. More About the Dead Man and Camouflage

The dead man knows that camouflage is all in the mind.

He has seen in the human need for shape the undoing
     of shape.

He has witnessed the displacement of up-and-down, across
     and slantwise.

He has curled the straight lines and unbent the curves, he has
     split the wishbone and painted outside the lines.

The dead man has undone the map by which to get there.

It is not what the dead man looks like, but what
     he no longer resembles.

For he hath reappeared in no disguise but as himself.

Call him disheveled, call him disposed, call him shiftless,
     he is.

For he hath been made and remade in the form of
     his surroundings.

He hath become all things that he looketh like.

Hence, he has been stepped on by those who could not
     see him.

He has been knelt upon by those who looked in vain.

The dead man bestirs in a background that looked inert.

The dead man is the ultimate camouflage.

He is everywhere, but where is he?

...

Those who attended the conference that day were given, as a memento, a signed broadside of the poem (see below).

Camouflage Artist | Arthur Singer

Birds of the Fifty States

There's a wonderful website called Singer Arts. It's all about the life and work of one of the best known American bird artists, a man named Arthur Singer (1917-1990). Even if people may not recognize his name, nearly everyone knows his work. He illustrated more than twenty books and bird identification guides, notably Birds of North America, and in 1982, he and his son Alan were commissioned by the US Postal Service to produce a two-set series of stamps, called Birds and Flowers of the Fifty States (shown here is the state bird series).

At the Singer Arts website, there is a 9-minute video interview of him with Charles Kuralt, numerous examples of his work, and a fairly detailed biographical page.

Oddly, it doesn't mention what may be Singer's greatest accomplishment: During World War II, he was recruited by the US Army to serve (with 1100 other men) in a top secret unit called the Ghost Army, aka 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. After arriving in Europe, they devised effective ways to deceive the German Army, using sonic and radio deception, visual camouflage, inflatable decoys and a mix of persuasive phony events. A major documentary film about this fascinating unit, titled The Ghost Army (produced by Rick Beyer), is nearing completion.

More About William Andrew Mackay

Ship camouflage proposals by William Andrew Mackay

Since starting this blog, we have featured a number of posts either about William Andrew Mackay, an American muralist and World War I ship camouflage artist, or about various artists who worked with him as wartime camoufleurs in New York (see links below to previous posts). More recently, we've discovered full-color reproductions of at least two of his ship camouflage designs (shown above) in Lindell T. Bates, The Science of Low Visibility and Deception (New York: Submarine Defense Association, 1918).

These are cut-out ship silhouettes that were used for testing two different but related proposals by Mackay. Both of these are attempts to achieve low visibility by using small splotches of color (not unlike a Pointilist painting) which, at a great distance, would be seen as a nondescript ambient gray, less discernible than a simple, one-color "battleship gray." In the model at the top, Mackay has combined these low visibility splotches with large, disruptive patterns that (at somewhat closer distances) were intended to make it harder to see the ship as a single, continuous shape.

Mackay's drawing for US Patent No. 1,305,296 (1919)

In 1919, Mackay obtained a patent for a similar proposal. His patent drawing (above) and a full text account are online here.

There are surviving photographs of camouflaged ships using Mackay's methods. Shown below for example are WWI-era photographs of (top to bottom) of USS DeKalb, and USS Isabel (full view, followed by a deck detail).

USS DeKalb

USS Isabel (port side)

USS Isabel (close-up of camouflage pattern)

Other posts on this blog that pertain to William Andrew Mackay. For additional info, see brief biographical article in Camoupedia, and (especially) "Camouflage Science Explained" by Raymond Francis Yates (1919) in Ship Shape.

additional information

Camouflage Artist | Homer Saint-Gaudens

Above A portrait by Carlota Saint-Gaudens of her husband Lieutenant Homer Shiff Saint-Gaudens in his US Army uniform in 1917 when he was in charge of the camouflage corps. As published in International Studio (December 1919).

...

In the opening pages of Hannah Rose Shell's book about camouflage and surveillance, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (Zone Books, 2012), she describes the resourcefulness of Homer Saint-Gaudens (1880-1958), who invented a way to make blanket-like camouflage coverings by shredding books and papers.

Recently I also found an online paper by Susan Platt, titled "Gambling, Fencing and Camouflage: Homer Saint-Gaudens and the Carnegie International 1922-1950." It was initially published in International Encounters (Carnegie Museum of Art) in 1996. Saint-Gaudens was the only child of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (the most famous sculptor of his time) and Augusta Homer Saint-Gaudens, also an artist, who was a distant cousin of Winslow Homer.

As Platt explains, the young Saint-Gaudens enjoyed gambling and fencing, and during World War I, he was the officer in charge of the American Camouflage Corps. Her thesis is not so much about Saint-Gaudens' camouflage service as about his presumed reliance on gambling, fencing and camouflaging skills in the decades while he was director of an annual competition called the Carnegie International Exhibition. In that capacity, she writes, he "would 'play the odds,' parry and thrust with the many different constituencies that he needed to satisfy, and disguise radical styles in the midst of bland examples in order to avoid attacks."

Homer Saint-Gaudens had earned his degree at Harvard, where his freshman roommate was future muralist Barry Faulkner (who soon dropped out to study art). Faulkner was a cousin of painter and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer, who was sometimes referred to in news articles as "the father of camouflage" because of his startling assertions about "concealing coloration" in animals. Faulkner had also studied with Saint-Gaudens' famous father, as had his friend, a sculptor named Sherry Edmundson Fry. Later, when Faulkner and Fry were living in New York, they formed a civilian camouflage group, called the New York Camouflage Society, for the purpose of preparing artists to serve as army camoufleurs. When the US actually entered the war, the two men were among the first to join a unit called the American Camouflage Corps. To their surprise, the person in charge of that unit was Homer Saint-Gaudens, who was fresh out of officer training.

It appears that other officers admired Saint-Gaudens, while the enlisted men despised him. According to Grenville Rickard, an architect and camoufleur who had graduated from Yale, and who served in France in WWI, "The 'Saint' [was] our generally accepted term for Lieutenant Saint-Gaudens…" but Faulkner (not an officer but an enlisted soldier in the same unit) recalls that Homer Saint-Gaudens was "intensely disliked by the men."

As Platt explains in detail, before and after WWI, Saint-Gaudens was employed in the theatre, as the stage manager for the widely-admired actress Maude Adams. In 1921, he was appointed Assistant Director of the Department of Fine arts at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and then became the Director a year later.

It is of further interest that, in 1924, there was a new addition to the painting faculty at the Carnegie Institute. It was Everett Longley Warner, an artist who had been the head of a team of US Navy ship camoufleurs during WWI.

...

Below Roy R. Behrens, Angels Can Fly. Digital montage, print on paper (2011). Based partly on a photograph of a bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1891) for the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington DC. The setting for the sculpture was designed by Stanford White. For detailed information, see Joyce K. Schiller, The Artistic Collaboration of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White. PhD dissertation. (St Louis MO: Washington University, 1997).

Dazzle-Camouflaged Kayak

We were delighted to happen upon a web link about a dazzle-camouflaged surface design for a kayak, designed by The Hungry Workshop, an Australian letterpress design studio. It was produced in connection with a five-day, 404 km race, as detailed on their web blog. Above and below are various views of the vessel's design, as photographed by Aj Moller. Copyright © for designs and images belong to their originators.

Camouflage Artist | Harry Crisson

Above The USS Aeolus, in the process of having its dazzle camouflage applied, at the New York Navy Yard (June 1, 1918). US Naval Historical Heritage Command. NH 919.
...

Until today, I'd never heard of Harry Crisson, who was an artist of French descent and a native of New Orleans. After hours of online searching, I still know very little. I did find him mentioned in a news article about the 1919 Mardi Gras in Galveston TX, the only city to hold that event that year (because of World War I). The unsigned article, titled "Mardi Gras Floats Being Decorated in Hidden Lands," appeared in the Galveston Daily News (February 23, 1919, p. 8). Here is what it says about Harry Crisson—

The artist has painted Mardi Gras floats in New Orleans during the past fifteen years. When Uncle Sam went to war against Germany [in 1917], he became a camoufleur for the United States Emergency Fleet Corporation. He camouflaged ships in a district which ran all the way from the Sabine River [in Texas and Louisiana] to Key West. He received his discharge shortly after the armistice was signed.

In this connection, he holds a letter which he would not care to lose, for it comes from the Emergency Fleet Corporation commending him for his ability to camouflage war vessels.

American Ship Dazzle Plans

Above are three surviving cut-outs from World War I ship camouflage plans. Painted in watercolor on board and measuring 6" high x 29.25" wide, they were made by an unknown American camouflage artist(s) (c1917-18) and are now in the collection of the National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Bureau of Ships. My suspicion is that these painted silhouettes were made for testing purposes on the shore of Lake Ontario, under the direction of Eastman Kodak physicist Loyd A. Jones.

Below is a diagram of a visibility testing setup, designed by Jones. The cut-out ship silhouette was suspended from the crossbeam with piano wire and positioned at a height at which it appeared to rest in the water. It was then viewed through a telescopic instrument (devised by Jones) called a visibility meter, and measurements were made of its reflected light. It seems that all the other marine camouflage centers used three-dimensional plaster or wooden scale models of ships, not silhouettes, and substantially different testing methods. For detailed information on Jones' methodology, see Robert G. Skerrett, "Hoodwinking the Periscope" (originally published in 1919), reprinted in SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook (pp. 122-151).