WWII aircraft factories hidden from enemy aerial view

Above An aerial view of the Lockheed-Vega aircraft factory in Burbank CA, during WWII, when the entire facility was hidden beneath a vast simulation of houses, stores and residential neighborhoods.

•••

CAMOUFLEURS GOT BUSY in Daily News (Perth, Western Australia) August 4, 1945, p. 10—

The US entered World War II with many a war plant that needed careful defense.

Among the most vulnerable were flimsily protected airplane plants along the eastern and western coasts. They were unexpendable and immovable. Their nakedness demanded some sort of wrapping.

So the US Corps of Engineers put to work a motley legion of industrial designers, billboard painters, crack Hollywood illusionists, and serious artists.

By last week, workmen were yanking wire trees and make-believe houses off many camouflaged war plants.

The makeup job had been costly: Fullblown protective concealment of thirty-seven vital plants had cost 22 million dollars. Other money went for simpler tone-down work, or “disruptive painting,” at smaller plants and airfield hosts.

In the heat of its enthusiasm for plenty of camouflage, the Corps of Engineers gave out contracts for disguising fields hundreds of miles inland.

Famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy turned camoufleur to plan the two million dollar “passive protection” of Baltimore’s Glenn Martin bomber factory.

Warner Brothers technicians had to protect the big Douglas plants at Santa Monica against twin risks. Within easy periscope sight from the Pacific, it was vulnerble to shells as well as bombs.

Douglas airfield architects had their camouflage plan ready before Pearl Harbor. They made minatures, then photographed them from simulated bombing altitudes.

Building the dummy airport, phony plants, and a fake residential [neighborhood], complete with washing on clotheslines, took two and a half years, and cost two and a half million dollars.

It was duplicated on the plants when the war came.

Masking the consolidated plant at San Diego called for great nets draped over the Pacific Highway.

At Seattle, the task was difficult.

Boeing’s Flying Fortress plant was sandwiched between busy Boeing Field and a natural landmark, the Duwamish River.

Camoufleurs hid the field so trickily that veteran pilots had to ask the way in.

Atop the Boeing plants went a 26-acre village, made of chicken wire, canvas, lumber and painted chicken featers. The town had fifty-three houses, stores and a gas station.

Some of its streets crossed the field, went up Beacon Hill.

Camoufleurs skipped the river.

•••

Below The large, concealed underground parking lot at the Lockheed-Vega plant in Burbank.

camouflage contributions by Houdini, other magicians

Above Roy R. Behrens, Misdirection (©2021). Digital montage.

•••

William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero. New York: Atria Books, 2007, p. 338—

[In April 1917, on the day after the US had entered World War I, American magician Harry] Houdini introduced a resolution at the Society of American Magicians’ [SAM] meeting that was unanimously passed that “its members collectively and individually do hereby tender their loyalty to the President of the United States of America and express a desire to render such service to the country as may be within their province.”…

Houdini led the war efforts of magicians by example. On June 2, Houdini was nominated for president of the SAM and elected unanimously without opposition. Taking control of the house organ, M-U-M, Houdini began filling the pages with news of the SAM members' contributions to the war cause, and even reproduced an article from The New York Times that described how the US government was actively seeking magicians and mystifiers to aid in the wartime effort.

Fellow magicians took up Houdini's call. Archie Engel, a Washington DC, magician, became a secret agent for the Treasury Department during the war. Dr. Maximllian Toch, a chemist and New York City SAM member, was put in charge of the military's camouflage division and, working with other magicians, he developed the battleship gray formula used by the US Navy. Toch’s chemical expertise was also used in devising ways to transmit secret messages. Eventually, a camouflage section of the Regular US Army Engineers was formed and the SAM members from all over the country enlisted in it and shared their expertise for the war effort. An amateur magician named Dr. Charles Mendelsohn, who was an expert cryptographer, was put in charge of deciphering German codes for the U.S. Military lntelligence Division. Even before we entered the war, the Department of Justice hired a magician named Wilbur Weber to do counterintelligence on German spies who were operating in the Northwest. He used his magic tour as a cover for his spying activities.

don't paint your Chevy Blazer in high visibility orange

Above Full-page feature article on WWII camouflage, titled Dazzle Painting Amazingly Effective in Modern Warfare, as published in the Boston Sunday Post in the Color Feature Section, December 17, 1939, p. 4. Large size, readable online text can be found by searching vintage newspaper sites.

•••

The following interview was conducted through email exchanges in the early months of 2013. It was a conversation between Rich Dana, now Special Collections and Archives' Sackner Archive Project coordinator librarian at the University of Iowa, and Roy R. Behrens, now Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. The resulting text was published in Issue Number 8 of Obsolete! Magazine: The Journal of DIY Analog Anarchy (Iowa City IA), which Dana was founding editor of, an experimental magazine that is now apparently obsolete (aha!). In its published form, the interview was a bit longer, and slight adjustments in wording have also been made. Copyright for the text belongs to the interview participants.

•••

Obsolete Magazine [Rich Dana]: I discovered your work while doing some research on dazzle camouflage. You’ve written quite a bit about dazzle patterns as well as the role of artists in the history of camouflage. Can you give us some background on how you became interested in that?

Roy Behrens: I started writing about it in the late 1960s. I got into camouflage because I was a graphic designer. The big “trade secret” in design is knowing how people are likely to see. At some point I realized that I could learn about that by hiding or disguising things. In other words, camouflage uses the exact same principles as design. It’s just reverse engineering.

OM: Was this like subliminal advertising?

RB: It’s certainly not unrelated to that, but they’re not the same. In subliminal advertising, it was claimed that images were concealed in magazine ads and film trailers, to function as “hidden persuaders.” The principles that we apply in design and camouflage are more straightforward, such as pointing, rhyming and lining things up. They are subliminal to some extent, because they influence us, regardless of whether we are aware of it.

OM: Obviously, the idea of camouflage is an ancient one. When did it become a field of scientific research?

RB: We can thank Charles Darwin for that. Scientists and naturalists became interested in animal camouflage in the late 19th century, because they thought it offered proof of natural selection, the survival of the fittest. But a big breakthrough came in the 1890s when an American artist named Abbott Handerson Thayer realized that camouflage is based on the same “tricks of the trade” that he had learned while studying art at the French Academy.

OM: I'm fascinated by the idea that camo is a type of art that is used to defeat technology. It seems that it’s almost akin to magic to me. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Is camouflage art, technology or both?

RB: I think it’s pertinent to both art and technology, but to lots of other stuff as well. The key thing to remember is that camouflage depends on a relationship. It’s a perpetually shifting relation between an observer (these days it could be a drone or whatever) and the object or person that’s being observed. A deer can’t see high visibility orange, but that same color is blaringly obvious to humans. To camouflage something, you have to know what kind of visual system you are trying to conceal it from. In other words, camouflage has to keep up with surveillance, and vice versa—it takes two to tango.

OM: Camo is typically associated with the military. Are there civilian uses for camo, other than hunting?

RB: Actually, there’s a long rich tradition of using camouflage for non-military purposes. For example, you just mentioned magic, which famously works by “fooling the eye.” And there are lots of other uses in stage productions, fashion design, cosmetics, architecture and so on. And of course, some of the most successful camouflage practitioners are in marketing and politics. Camouflage is also used in other forms such as language. Maybe I should mention that recently I’ve been exchanging emails with a university student in the UK who’s working on proposals for benign, non-military uses of camouflage. There’s a lot that could be done in that area. Mostly he’s developing ways to make certain things around us (windmills or cell towers, for example) less like eyesores, and, at same time, to make critical landmarks more conspicuous. But this is a shifting relation as well: Since it’s common now for everyone to walk around in camouflage or high visibility orange clothing, it’s not as easy to be sure who’s really an emergency worker and who isn’t.

OM: Let's talk about dazzle camouflage. To me, dazzle represents very much the spirit of the Modern era. Does that make sense? It seems to be consistent with what was going on at the start of the 20th century, technologically and artistically, and, in some ways, even in psychology, in the use of abstract patterns, and so on.

RB: Over the years, a lot people have said exactly that about the resemblance between camouflage and certain branches of Modernism. During World War I, one of the British Vorticists [Edward Wadsworth] was a dock supervisor for ship camouflage. And there’s the famous story about Picasso seeing French military camouflage for the first time, and saying to Gertrude Stein, “Aha, we invented that. That’s Cubism.” There’s a ton of other examples of this, and my books are attempts to identify those. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of artists, designers and architects served as military camouflage consultants (they ecame known as “camoufleurs”) during both World Wars. But oddly enough,those who were responsible for the most bizarre dazzle patterns had been mostly traditional artists before. And after the war ended, their art careers completely collapsed—because, ironically, their artwork wasn’t Modern enough.

OM: Can you talk a little about how dazzle was conceived and developed, and what made dazzle patterns effective?

RB: The term as it’s now commonly used is more or less synonymous with any pattern that is made up of a hodgepodge of high contrast, distinctively-colored shapes. I call it “high difference” camouflage (because the figure breaks apart), and I distinguish it from “high similarity” camouflage (in which a figure blends in with its background or surrounding). Historically, however, the meaning and purpose of “dazzle painting” was much more specific. It was a kind of ship camouflage that was developed by British artists during World War I. Its primary function was not to hide a ship on the ocean (that wasn’t possible back then), but rather to make it confusing to view through the periscope of a German U-boat. It’s a complex subject, but the idea was mostly to “spoil the aim” (to throw off the calculations) of submarine torpedo gunners. It’s popular now for people to say that dazzle painting was ineffective, but the more you learn about the circumstances, the more apparent it becomes that it did indeed work.

OM: I’ve noticed that dazzle patterns are increasingly used in fashion. Asymmetrical haircuts and face-paint are being used successfully to subvert facial recognition software and surveillance cameras. Any thoughts on this? It's a very 80's cyberpunk dystopian sci-fi look. I love it! But do you think it will be effective? It seems to have a deus ex machina quality to it, in the sense that it undermines digital technology, not with more advanced technology, but with age-old simple tools like abstraction and facepainting.

RB: That’s a curious turnabout, isn’t it. I’ve been following the research on how to prevent digital face recognition, and apparently it works for now. But that too is indebted to Modernism, since it’s related to research that began with the Gestalt psychologists in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, the Gestaltists also wrote about camouflage, and about graphic design principles.

OM: That's really interesting. So essentially it’s about how the brain processes data that it receives from the eyes. Facial recognition computers programs look for geometric specifics of the structure of the face, rather than hair color, skin color, etc, which are really culturally programmed ways that humans see.

RB: Much of what we’re talking about is being confirmed by current brain research. There seem to be aspects of vision that are learned and culture-laden. On the other hand (and this especially interests me), there are also inherent, hard-wired defaults of vision that “come in the box” with everyone’s brain. If we go to war with another country, we can be sure that they will be hoodwinked (to some extent) by the same camouflage patterns that throw us off: figure-ground blending, figure disruption (or dazzle), mimicry, and the combined use of blending and dazzle.

OM: Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think historically there are a lot of examples of technologically “inferior” forces defeating vastly "superior" forces by using the environment to their advantage. Doesn't it seem like the growing surveillance state will always be running to catch up with the low-tech workarounds of the indigenous population?

RB: Well, you could put it that way. Again, the two sides have to correlate, and conditions are constantly changing. But in a way, everything’s a workaround, whether low tech or high. So you could say that, yes, high tech will always be struggling to keep one step ahead of Rube Goldbergian workarounds. But in the same way, low tech will always be struggling to jerry-rig new workarounds. One thing is certain: their dance is unlikely to ever conclude, short of a massive, finite end.

OM: I’m changing direction here: I started thinking about this when I bought an old Chevy Blazer from the National Guard. It is painted "forest" camo, I guess you would call it, mostly olive drab with black and brown. It's a spray can job, so it’s wearing out fast and I need to repaint it. So I began researching other patterns, and thinking about the Iowa landscape. Ideally, what sort of patterns and colors would be most effective in our environment?

RB: It depends on why you’re doing this. If you effectively decrease the vehicle’s visibility by matching it with the Iowa landscape, you might increase your chances of getting hit by another driver. And even then, what is the “Iowa landscape”? Urban, woodland, cornfield, grass? And in what season of the year? Now and then I’ve thought about putting a camouflage pattern on my car, but I’ve always opted out. In relation to choosing a season, if I painted it white for the winter, I wouldn’t want to drive it home during one of those Iowa snowstorm white-outs.

OM: I also considered putting a WWI naval dazzle pattern on it, just as an art project. It would be sort of ironic because it would be the most noticeable vehicle in the parking lot.

RB: I thought about this too, when I was considering my own car. Like you, I have a great fondness for dazzle patterns, so I thought I wouldn’t want my car to blend with the surroundings. I would prefer that it stand out dramatically (like those WWI dazzle-painted ships), and be painted in a clever way that uses confusing brightly-colored shapes to distort the physical shape of the car. But then I thought, that’s really asking for trouble: First, it would stand out in the parking lot and probably get vandalized. Second, when I’m on the road, it might be so confusing to see that I could end up getting hit. Or third, if it’s too distracting to other drivers, they might collide with other cars. Well, whatever you decide, don’t paint your Chevy Blazer in high visibility orange—or you’ll get run into by a deer.

OM: Ha! That would be ironic to say the least! Here's a thought; from what you have said about relationships, landscape and how people see, perhaps a car painted with primer would be the best all purpose camouflage. Culturally, I think people might look past it because primer paint represents lower social status. Just the way people look past a homeless person on the street. Parked in a lot it might be less likely to be broken into. In a field, it might be seen as abandoned. On the flipside of course, driving home late at night, it might be more likely to draw the attention of law enforcement, who are programmed to see something else.

RB: If we continue with this train of thought, we may end up putting antlers on your car, covering it with flocked wallpaper—or better yet, with chia sprouts—and transforming it into an automated jackalope. That might cut down on traffic too, since no one else would want to be seen driving beside it.…

 RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus

Norman Wilkinson / use railway stations as galleries

Above Norman Wilkinson (1884-1934), A FEW CARELESS WORDS MAY END IN THIS, lithographic poster, c.1940.

•••

KMD, Listening in on the World, in Fayetteville Democrat (Fayetteville AR) January 14, 1926, p. 2—

There is an interesting movement on foot in England at the present time. Its aim is to convert the great "railway stations" into art centers for the people. Norman Wilkinson, marine painter of great distinction, is the leader of the group, who are working out this idea.

Norman Wilkinson is a man of many gifts. His name is well-known in the navy for it was he who invented "dazzle-painting." It will be remembered that the introduction of this method of camouflaging ships was one of the turning-points of the war. Along with his charming young wife, Mr. Wilkinson visited Washington in 1918 by invitation of the naval authorities, to whom he explained his system.

In an unusual manner Norman Wilkinson combines the qualities of an artist with those of a business man. When not engaged on his large canvases, one of which sells for many thousands of dollars, he has never been too proud to put some fine work into poster for a shipping company. These posters are naturally much better than the average, and it has been noticed that the crowds in the waiting rooms where they hang, are not, as might have been expected, indifferent to their superiority. On the contrary, the beauty of these marine subjects seems to be much appreciated by "the man in the street." Now artists of the first note are engaged in making the former dingy waiting-rooms into homes of beauty and cheer. Listening In American depots, being large and well-designed, would lend themselves admirably to a similar purpose. They are indeed far more suited to it than those in Great Britain. We are in correspondence with Norman Wilkinson and hope soon to let the readers hear more about his ideas.

SEE ALSO

Camilla Wilkinson article on dazzle camouflage

Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)

WWII US Army camouflage experiments at Fort Belvoir

For years I have searched vintage newspapers, looking for little-known articles on art and camouflage, with the intention of restoring them to a readable state, and sharing them with others who are interested in the subject.

Above is one from the Boston Sunday Post, Your World Section, March 16, 1941 (larger-sized scans with readable text can be found through online searches of newspaper archives). 

Written by James Miller, the title of this feature is The Army Prepares to Disguise the Nation. The article is an overview of wartime camouflage experiments at Fort Belvoir VA, twenty miles outside of Washington DC. Note the large scale illustration of two soldiers concealed in a background of foliage, and, below that, two men demonstrating camouflage-patterned uniforms.

RELATED VIDEO SERIES

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

the cat's pajamas / duplicitious color uses in nature

Until a few years ago, I used to give a slide talk called THE CAT'S PAJAMAS: Animal Camouflage / The Hidden Creatures in our Yards [above]. But the pandemic put a stop to that. So I repurposed the in-person slide talk (with considerable improvement) as a free online video called NATURE, ART AND CAMOUFLAGE: Duplicitous Uses of Color (as shown below), which continues to be popular.

 

as styles evolve, no need to camouflage chunky feet

Above This is strange. It’s a news article from the Boston Sunday Globe, dated July 2, 1939, page 2 (only weeks before the outbreak in Europe of World War II). It’s a discussion of women’s shoe styles in relation to foot size. It claims, in essence, that women are no longer insistent on having small-sized, “dainty” feet. In buying shoes, they are choosing comfort over pain. But then, by means of a curious seque, the author credits this change of attitude to the use of ship camouflage in WWI. Here is the reasoning—

Women have never had an active desire to have dainty feet. Twenty years ago, however, they felt that large feet made them conspicuous; in those days the cartoonists frequently used to jeer at them, call them gunboats and similar names. So dainty feet became the style. Now shoe stores keep sizes 10 and 11 on hand for women who are not ashamed to ask for them.

Shoe manufacturers have contributed more than their bit to this change in point of view. The styles of the last decade have provided for what used to be called gunboats much the same sort of camouflage that the navy paints on battleships in wartime. Color combinations make the large shoe less conspicuous. The sandal type of shoe, with the toe and heel cut out, aimed to make the foot look smaller.

scientists adapt wartime devices for peacetime uses

World War I US Navy camoufleurs

Above This is a wonderfully detailed photograph (digitally colorized) from World War I of members of the US Navy’s Camouflage Section in Washington DC. Headed by Everett Longley Warner, and referred to as the Camouflage Design Subsection, these four men are in process of assembling wooden ship models. When completed, these models were then painted in camouflage patterns, and subsequently tested (in a periscope-equipped observation theatre), to determine their effectiveness in causing German U-boat gunners to make miscalculations in preparing to fire torpedoes.

We were reminded of this photograph when we recently found an article in the New York Sun, dated April 27, 1919, p. 8, as shown below in a restored and rearranged version. It is one of a series of US government photographs that were released to the public for use in news articles, perhaps in 1918 or early 1919. It was reproduced in the top left of what is nearly a full-page article. In the bottom center of the article, I have inserted a much clearer version of the same photograph.

A full-size scan of the original article can be found online, by searching through newspaper archives. The small-scale version posted here is not readable as such, but the topmost headline is: Scientists Hard at Work Turning War Inventions to Peace Uses. It’s a fairly detailed article, and it talks about aspects of camouflage-related research that one rarely sees discussed. During the war, underwater microphones were used by both sides of the conflict as a way of detecting the approach of enemy ships or submarines that were not yet visible. In this article, it is revealed that (now that the war is about to conclude) those same microphones might be used to detect the location and condition of miners who become buried underground when mines collapse.

There is even a brief description of the interior workings of the work area of the Design Subsection, which was located in “the new Navy Building.” The article continues: “At the rear of the office is a door leading into a back room which presents a very unusual appearance. Against the wall appears a collection of miniature ships carefully modeled and painted in curious and bizarre colors. An odd looking instrument is noted which, it later develops, is the periscope of a submarine.” 

detailed account of the process

mouse catcher shaped like harmless paper clip / 1929

Above  RMS Aquitania, showing dazzle camouflage design, in harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia, c1918.

•••

Camouflage for Mice in Earlville Review (Earlville IA) November 28, 1929, p. 9— 

Camouflage, which helped to win the World War, is being employed in Europe to catch mice. On the theory that rodents of today know their traps, inventors have produced, for use In office desks, a mouse-catcher shaped like a harmless paper clip. Another, for general use, resembles an old tin can whose top closes suddenly. Still another resets itself automatically to catch mice all night and dump them into a vat of water.

WWI checkerboard pattern used for object disruption

Above A vintage postcard (we’ve blogged about it before) of a checkerboard-patterned fortress, called Spitbank Fort, built in 1859, near Portsmouth, England. We were inevitably reminded of it when we saw a comparable application of checkerboard camouflage on WWI artillery, shown below.

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus

US ship camouflage as an exact science / 1919 WWI

This article appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe on June 1, 1919, p. 112. It is unsigned, but the information would suggest that the writer had obtained firsthand information from Everett Longley Warner, who was in charge of the Design Subsection of the US Navy's Camouflage Section during World War I. Most articles on the subject then were replete with errors, but this one is an exception to that.

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus

contributions of Hollywood to WWI ground camouflage

Above Camouflage pattern (digitally-colorized, thus historically unreliable) on World War I huge long-range artillery, mounted for railway transport, c1918, unknown source.

•••

G.P. Harleman, News of Los Angeles and Vicinity in The Moving Picture World, December 1, 1917—

Lawson Organizes Camouflage Artists
Lee Lawson, [Hollywood] technical expert, has received from the Adjutant General authorization to form a company of two hundred and fifty men of the [motion picture] studio plants for the camouflage department to be incorporated in the Twenty-Fourth Engineers.

Lawson has been engaged at his trade locally for the past twelve years. He recently asked for authority to organize a company of camouflage artists. His appointment was made by Secretary of War [Newton] Baker.

All the ingenuity of “trick stuff” manifested in motion pictures will be transplanted to the camouflage activities in France. Scene painters, artists, sculptors, property men and numerous other classes of employees in studios will comprise the company.

Lawson already has sixty-four men enrolled. These will leave in a few days for American Lake [near Lakewood], Washington, where they will receive instruction in the most advanced methods of camouflage work.

•••

G.P. Harleman, News of Los Angeles and Vicinity in The Moving Picture World, December 15, 1917, page 1637—

Camouflage Artists Leave for Training
The greatest camouflage company in the world, according to Major George P. Robinson, United States Engineers Corps, left Los Angeles November 24, for an eastern training camp. There wre sixty-five men in the part, headed by Lee Lawson of the Universal. The personnel were recruited almost exclusively from the leading motion picture studios of Los Angeles.

“Nowhere else in the world could a company of men of similar qualifications have been recruited,” said Major Robinson. “The best scenic artists and men of kindred trades in the motion picture industry are here.”

Just before the train pulled out of the station Lee Lawson made a short speech to the crowd. “Friends, we’re going over there to fool the Kaiser, and if Yankee genius counts for anything we’ll be there with the goods,” he said.

The leave taking was different from any farewells given any party of soldiers leaving Los Angeles heretofore. Sixty-five young men, all of them known personally to the five hundred or more persons who bade them goodbye, caused everybody to cry goodbye to everybody else. It was a scene not easily forgotten.

•••

News of Cinema and Film Gossip in The New York Sun, February 2, 1919, p. 39—

Lieutenant Lee Lawson, former technical director, Sergeant Clarence DeWitt and Sergeant H. Divver, formerly of Universal City, for over nine months members of a camouflage regiment in France, has returned to the studio. When America entered the war Lieutenant Lee [sic] assembled scenic artists, sculptors, directors and property men in a camouflage platoon. He was wounded twice, Sergeant DeWitt gassed, and Sergeant Divver wounded twice.

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

 Optical science meets visual art

 Disruption versus dazzle

 Chicanery and conspicuousness

 Under the big top at Sims' circus

Dr. George Washington Carver and WWII camouflage

CARVER WORKS TO BEFUDDLE AXIS ENEMIES: Paint Formulae For Camouflage New Project in Jackson Advocate (Jackson MS), August 22, 1942, p 1—

Tuskegee, Ala., August 20—Students of Tuskegee Institute may soon be walking to their classes over the tops of luxuriant forests and eating their morning cereal under the blue waters of a picturesque lake. The Institute’s purebred Holsteins may be a bit surprised to find that what appears to be murky swamp crosses their familiar lush of kudzu pasture. And the herd of milk goats—oh well, goats are supposed to be silly enough to eat anything, ersatz or otherwise.

President F.D. Patterson has recently turned over a portion of the Tuskegee campus to Austin W. Curtis, assistant to Dr. George W. Carver, internationally famous scientist, as an outdoor testing field for application of camouflage paints to various types of surfaces.

Mr. Curtis is working night and day at the Carver Laboratories at Tuskegee Institute on paint formulae to be used by the War Department for camouflage activities by the US armed forces.

Mr. Curtis recently returned from Detroit, Mich., where he spent much time with the research chemists in the laboratories of the Ford plant, testing various products for use in the war effort.

Previous to the Detroit visit Mr. Curtis went to Fort Belvoir, Va., for conferences with army officials relative to the use of Carver paints for camouflage purposes.  

RELATED VIDEO SERIES

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

disruptive coloration used not to conceal, to advertise

Above An Ambulance Used Effectively in a Wartime Campaign, Decorated Camouflage-Fashion for the Purpose of Attracting Attention. Popular Mechanics (c1919).

CAMOUFLAGE AMBULANCE ADVERTISES “DRIVE” / A striking feature of a wartime “drive” recently conducted in Chicago was an ambulance that had been elaborately decorated camouflage-fashion. Thousands of persons looking down into the city streets saw this truck with its top painted in mottled hues and at once their curiosity was aroused. If the vehicle’s appearance was not strictly in accord with army regulations, it nevertheless served as an excellent advertisement for a good cause.

RELATED VIDEO SERIES

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

WWI proof / children know the meaning of camouflage

Above and below These are two uncredited photographs that appeared in American publications during World War I (c1918). The top one shows the camouflage-patterned wings of a National Service airplane. The patterning works as well as it does in part because it is a grayscale photograph, so the dark disruptive shapes on the wings and tail blend in all too easily with the shadows and other irregular shapes on the ground. In addition, the symmetrical target-like circles contradict whatever confusion is caused by surface disruption.

The photograph at the bottom is even more suspect, if for different reasons. It claims to show three children holding up a toy model airplane on which they have painted a comparable disruptive scheme. The caption for the photograph reads—

Even youngsters soon learn war terms. These three, for instance, are proud to display their toy aeroplane [airplane], the mottled finish of which shows that they know the meaning of “camouflage.”

Today, in an era in which digital photo retouching is epidemic, we may not be surprised to find that this pre-computer image appears to have been retouched by hand. The contours of the chidren’s figures, as well as the shape of the airplane, have undoubtedly been strengthened, and the facial features of the figure in the center look suspiciously like an adult. 

RELATED VIDEO SERIES

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?

 Nature, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

camouflage application / women's limited capabilities

Above This an oddity, to be sure. I'm uncertain where I found it, but I do know that the original photograph (grayscale only, but misleadingly AI-colorized here) was published in The American Machinest (c1918), with the photo caption of "The finished product—American made gun and tractor—Detroit, Mich." The original image is an elongated horizontal, but, in order to show it in detail here, I have sliced it into three parts and stacked the sections. The article which it illustrates describes the process by which the camouflage design was applied to the tractor, which had been driven into a "camouflage room," where it was initially assumed that only men (not women) would be capable of painting the pattern. The article goes on to say—

Here a process never before used was applied. Paint guns had been used for the two coats of olive drab, but it did not stop at that point. One man marked off the camouflage design with chalk and marked each recess with the numbers 1, 2 or 3, number 1 being green, number 2 buff, and number 3 yellow. Each painter was given a number—1, 2 or 3.  Number 1, using green paint, painted every place on the tractor that was marked 1, while number 2, using buff, filled in every place marked 2, and 3 proceeded in like manner. After the first few tractors had been run through in this manner, it was found that women could do this work as well as men, and women were hired, relieving the men for heavier work. The black striping was done by a man at the end of the paint line. The total time required for assembling armor, tool box and camouflaging was one hour.

real burlesque, as you like it, without any camouflage

Oliver Herford (c1880). Public Domain.

Edmund Wilson, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, p. 234-235—

National Winter Garden. Speaking between the acts—someone had said, apropos of some risqué Broadway comedy, that when he wanted to hear “dubble-entenders,” he would rather go to the National Winter Garden. “Because here’s where you get burlesque as you like it, without any camouflage—sincere dubble-entenders.”

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

Joakim Derlow camouflage exhibition in Stockholm

Derlow Exhibition (Stockholm)

Joakim Derlow describes himself as an “artist from Sweden with outposts in Amsterdam and Stockholm.” I think he first contacted me very early this year, because of his great interest in camouflage and especially (myself as well) in art and camouflage compared. Since then we have batted emails back and forth, along with images, research references and quotes. During most of the year, he has been preparing for an exhibition on the subject, as well as a publication in which he collects and assesses a medley of historical finds.

I have just last evening received from him an email with photographs of his on-going exhibition. Two of them are included here. They show the installed exhibition in Stockholm. As he states in his message, and as is clearly evident in the photographs—

Central in the space is a camouflage net made together with Ukrainian refugees living in Poland. The net manifests the artistic quality of camouflage in the art space before it is sent to the frontlines by the end of the exhibition. An object that passes between the decorative and the utilitarian depending on what side of the border it finds itself. Other works are uniforms mounted on stretcher frames to once again become paintings like the artists that made these camouflage patterns in the first place.

If you browse around the visible space in the photographs, you can see quite a few art and camouflage icons. Among my favorites is the elongated black rectangular panel on the wall, very nearly ceiling height. It is a cut-out silhouette of a bird (no doubt a pheasant), like those that Abbott H. Thayer proposed (another bird flies over the top).

Also, among my favorite features is the wall-mounted moulding on the right wall, from which book-like clusters of pages are hung from wooden pegs. I applaud the otherall color scheme. But this moulding with things suspended from pegs reminds me of comparable racks on which the Shakers hung their chairs, to suspend them while they swept the floor.

It is so encouraging to see that Joakim has succeeded in bringing all this together. You may be able to follow his work at <https://derlow.net/>. It’s my understanding that he plans to take this further, to an even more ambitious stage, and perhaps it will become a book.

By wonderful coincidence, last evening, as I was reading Joakim’s email, my wife Mary came in from the garden to tell me that while she was picking beans, she touched what was not a bean but a beautiful praying mantis—same size, shape and color, of course. Now, this morning, she has taken me out to the garden, and we have been able to find the praying mantis again—it is still hanging about in the beans.

Derlow Exhibition (Stockholm)

 

Art and Camouflage books / discount and free shipping

Above and below: Limited supply remaining of new, mint condition, signed first edition copies of three books by author and designer Roy R. Behrens: FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002); CAMOUPEDIA: A Compedium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (2009); and SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook (2012). Available now as bundle for $60.00 (save $27.95 off list price of $87.95) with free shipping at <https://www.ebay.com/itm/294588563287>.

“[False Colors] is the definitive text on, but also the best possible introduction to, the 'social history' of military camouflage and the key role that artists played in its development. Roy Behrens writes beautifully and with complete authority. As a biologist, this is the book that broadened my horizons from an academic interest in animal camouflage to the broader context in which contemporary theories of camouflage evolved.” —Innes Cuthill, Professor of Behavioral Ecology, University of Bristol.

“[Behrens’ False Colors is] simply the best all-around introductory book on camouflage…it is perfect for beginners and a finishing school for veteran camoufleurs.” —Barton Whaley, military deception expert [2013].

“[Behrens’] book False Colors provides a brilliant overview of the subject [of art and camouflage].” —Art Historian Henry Adams, in Art and Antiques [2011].

 

BOOK ART // remembering artist Walter SH Hamady

Shortly after I moved back to Iowa in 1990, I began to correspond with a prominent letterpress book artist, paper-maker, collagist, and assemblagist named Walter Hamady (1940-2019), who was well-known as a teacher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 

Having earlier taught in Milwaukee for ten years, I became aware of Hamady's work in the 1970s. Because of his liking for Ballast Quarterly Review (which I had founded in 1985), he and I began to exchange spirited letters (along with a mix of enclosures) once or twice or more a month. This led to collaborations of one kind or another, eventually resulting in exhibitions, published essays, and an archive of his artist’s books. I saved everything, even all the envelopes and mailing containers, in part because they were always addressed to mutilations of my name, such as Corps du Roy, Rhoidamoto, Trompe L’Roi at Labbast, Royatolla, and so on. This continued for more than a decade, no doubt to the postman’s amusement (I hope).

Among my favorite of Walter’s hijinks was the occasion on which, in the process of publishing one of his 131 handmade artist’s books, he turned a copy of my book on Art and Camouflage into confetti, combined that with paper pulp, and "camouflaged" my book in one of his own.

While looking back on what I have, I recently produced a twenty-minute video talk (a brief memoir-like tribute) titled BOOK ART: Walter Hamady’s Books, Collages and Assemblages, which can be accessed free online on my YouTube channel.

Perkins Harnly / artist and cross-dressing camoufleur

Poster, Index of American Design

Few people will have heard of Perkins Harnly (1901-1986), an obscure American artist who grew up in Nebraska, lived in New York for a number of years, and ended up in Hollywood. I first became aware of him while researching a Depression-era art program called the Index of American Design. In a book edited by Francis V. O’Connor, The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1972), there is an essay by Lincoln Rothschild in which it is mentioned that “a specially gifted artist” named Perkins Harnley [sic] had provided that agency with “amusing views of a Pullman diner and an ornate stable as well as more ordinary interiors” (p. 184).

If people know about the New Deal Art Projects, it is most likely because they’re familiar with the Works Progress Administration or WPA (see poster above), in which the US Government commissioned unemployed American artists to create public murals for permanent installation in post office lobbies throughout the country. A surprising number of these have survived, and some of them remain on view in local post offices throughout the country.

What is less well-known is the Index of American Design (1953-1942), in which other unemployed artists (not studio "fine artists" but men and women who had previously worked as designers and illustrators, commonly disparaged as “commercial artists”) were hired not to make “creative” murals but to document examples of vintage American crafts (including folk art), through precise, detailed renderings. Among the things included in the Index of American Design were historic children’s rocking horses, carved ship figureheads, folk pottery, handmade clothing and fabrics, cast iron toy banks, antique furniture, weather vanes and other architectural ornaments, and so on. 

These were all beautifully documented in watercolor renderings, in exacting detail and in color. Miraculously, 18,257 of these have been preserved, and are housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. These images are in public domain, and can be accessed online here. To commemorate that archive (as well as the graphic designers who made them), earlier this year, I designed and posted online a series of posters about  a few of the items it features. 

Among the artists commissioned to make Index of American Design renderings was Perkins Harnly. In addition, he also served briefly as a wartime camouflage instructor. While working for the Index of American Design, Harnly’s supervisor had been a Harvard-trained art museum administrator named Lloyd LaPage Rollins (1890-1970), who had also been director of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. According to Harnley, Rollins was gay and was an avid collector of outlandish Victorian-era artifacts, which today would be regarded as “camp.” His housemate and associate was, as Harnly described him, “an attractive pet Scotsman.”

Interestingly, as revealed by Harnly’s biographer Sarah Burns, Harnly himself was gay and would later become notorious for cross-dressing and related misbehavior. Rollins was (in Harnly’s words) “my WPA Projects boss.” It was apparently through Rollins that Harnly was commissioned to make illustrations for the Index of American Design, some of which were rather large, measuring twenty-two by thirty-one inches. Harnly greatly enjoyed this assignment, in which he apparently had few restrictions. In an interview many years later, the artist recalled the freedom he had in completing this project that continued for years:

On the WPA I had all the time in the world. Every plate took four weeks at fourteen hours a day seven days a week to paint…just one took four hundred hours to render so meticulously and none took less than two hundred hours.

These fact-based yet fanciful renderings of Victorian interiors were well-received by government administrators, and that success was underscored when they were later exhibited publicly (twice at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and reproduced and written about in magazines. Two examples are posted here.

Perkins Harnly, Index of American Design

Perkins Harnly, Index of American Design

From the little that is known about Harnly’s involvement in camouflage, it appears to have been minor in comparison to the work he did for the Index of American Design. When America entered World War II, as Harnly later remembered in a Smithsonian interview, “we were put on defense projects…” He was assigned to camouflage as a civilian instructor, and sent to Fort Belvoir VA. There, he taught camouflage to officers, among them William Pahlmann, a well-known interior designer, and Gene Davis, the art director at Good Housekeeping magazine. The person in charge of camouflage at Fort Belvoir was Homer Saint-Gaudens, the son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the famous American sculptor. 

When that assignment ended, Harnly was sent back to California, where his supervisor was once again Lloyd Rollins, his former “WPA boss,” but this time he “taught a class on camouflage in the attic of a midtown fire station.” Soon however, that class abruptly crashed and burned when Harnly had a falling out with Rollins’ associate (his so-called “pet Scotsman”), who stormed out in the middle of a work session, whereupon the course was cancelled.

Harnly lived for 85 years. He was colorful, to say the least. Sarah Burns’ recent book about his life is titled The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends (Port Townsend WA: Process Media, 2021). Be prepared for some scandalous content. It is a highly detailed account of the life of a person who grew up in a setting of what he himself described as “trashy Tobacco Road types” in the dregs of rural Nebraska. When interviewed at age 80, he claimed that his birth was premature, by seven months, when he was born in a “pauper’s farmhouse.” With no access to medical care, much less an incubator, he was wrapped in cotton, placed in a shoe box, and kept warm inside an oven.

When he was four or five years old, the family moved to Lincoln NE, where they lived adjacent to the Lyric Theatre. Over the years, his proximity to that stage led to his fascination with linear perspective, painting, and set design. His interest in art had begun as a child, but he did not pursue it intently until he was hired by the WPA for their New Deal art program. It was that opportunity, Harnly recalled, that gave him “the reason, the encouragement, the research, the material, and I really went to town.” In the end, he completed a total of eighty-one renderings of Victorian interiors for the Index of American Design.

There is much more to this story of course, far too much to include in a blog post. But two other aspects of Harnly’s life are of particular interest. First, his paternal grandfather, a Nebraska farmer named Benjamin Harnly, enjoyed considerable success in building elaborate Queen Anne residences in Lincoln. He constructed at least sixteen, the most famous of which was the Bryan House, which he built for William Jennings Bryan. 

Second, Harnly worked temporarily for MGM in Hollywood. This resulted from a showing in New York of twenty-two of his Victorian interior renderings for the Index of American Design. In an exhibition titled “I Remember That,” they were displayed on the mezzanine at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 1942 to April 1943. Among the people who viewed them there was an MGM film director named Albert Lewin. He was just then preparing to produce a film version of Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In that story, circumstances are such that a painted portrait of its youthful, handsome protagonist, Dorian Gray, is reduced to putrefaction—as if by otherworldly means—as the physical man himself decays.

Based on his reaction to Harnly’s renderings of Victorian room interiors, Lewin persuaded him to relocate to Hollywood and to contribute to the film as a set design consultant. At the same time, Lewin also contracted two painters, who were brothers from Chicago, named Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, and his identical twin Malvin Marr Albright. They too were brought to Hollywood to work on site on the film. 

The original agreement was that Malvin would complete a portrait of Dorian Gray (looking both handsome and youthful), to be used at the film’s beginning, while Ivan would provide a comparable portrait of the same anti-hero, in a disturbing state of decay, at the end of the film. Ivan Albright’s (now-famous) painting (reproduced below) was used in the finished film, but the painting by his brother was eventually omitted, and replaced by an alternate portrait by a Portuguese artist, Henrique Medina. The paintings by the Albright twins upstaged Harnly’s achievements as a "sketch artist" and set designer. Ivan Albright’s painting was widely publicized, while Harnly is not even mentioned in the film credits.

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

Ivan Albright, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1943)