Camouflage Skirts: A Sartorial Disaster

Rebecca Palmer (1884), Crazy Quilt

Above An example of a crazy quilt, made with silk and velvet by Rebecca Palmer (1884). Collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Image from Wikipedia Commons.

When Cubist artworks were first exhibited in the US at the Armory Show in New York (1913), followed by the wartime adoption of dazzle painting for ship camouflage (1917), the public compared them to the crazy quilts at county fairs.

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Anon, in “Perth Prattle,” Sunday Times (Perth, Western AU), Sunday, June 2, 1918, p. 15—

The “camouflage” skirt is here, writes “Lady Kitty” in the Adelaide Observer. The cretonne skirt is a sartorial disaster. There is not an article in the whole of ones wardrobe that could possibly “go” with the skirt. It made its first appearance in Sydney, where six and eight guineas were asked—and given—for these camouflage skirts. They are of silk, but such silk! It is most suitably called “crazy.” This demented silk starts at being a wonderful pattern in colors which absolutely pale the gorgeousness of all Eastern color magnificence, when suddenly it is camouflaged with great patches of dullish background. Most weird. Camouflage, you know, is to make things appear other than what they really are—to disguise them, in fact, so that the crazy silk sets out to be a very striking fabric which it is suddenly camouflaged by broad strips of plain color which quite disguise its original identity, but really make it more striking still. Camouflage parties, at which people wear camouflaged fancy dress, have become quite a rage for funding-raising purposes; and if guests are ingenious enough the result is screamingly funny. 

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Anon, in The Week, The World’s News (Sydney NSW), Saturday, April 13, 1918, p. 14—

Dame Fashion is a fool, and that is putting it mildly. She decrees that women must adopt camouflage for their dress. What need is there for any such thing? Hasn’t woman camouflaged ever since Eve took Adam in over the apple? Of course she has, and will continue to do it just whenever it suits her ideas. If she wants to win a post that wheedling won’t accomplish, she camouflages her face with tears, and lo, she arrives at the desired end. And what she can do with rouge and powder passes all understanding. It is camouflage carried to a fine art. What man could tell that the short-frocked, finely-complexioned, sixteen-year-old hatted person at a distance was over forty and the mother of six? This is camouflage, and with a vengeance, and yet Fashion wants to add to it by use of dresses. If it means that plain cotton stuff at 1s 2d the yard, six yards for 6s 6d, can be so faked by the skillful dressmaker as to appear like a silk confection at a guinea a yard, by all means camouflage. But if it means turning a probable ten-guinea costume into a twenty-pounder, then camouflage is a miserable failure. Everything depends upon what that fickle jade, Fashion, is after. Usually she strives to deplete the purse of the hard-working husband or father, but if in this case, as in the case of ships, the object is to save—then camouflage for ever.

Dazzle Camouflage | A Crazy Quilt of Autumn Leaves

View of camouflaged destroyer (c1919)

Above Dazzle camouflage pattern on a US destroyer, viewed from the deck of the USS Maui, as reproduced in Being the Log of the USS Maui in the World War. New York: Brooklyn Eagle Press, c1919, p. 35. The Maui had also been dazzle-painted, as described on p. 34: The usual loading of supplies and cargo went on while camouflage artists completely obliterated the modest impression of a coat of battleship gray which bespoke the vividness of a cube artist's nightmare.

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G.A. Martin, Roundabout Town. CAMOUFLAGED SHIP AT CLOSE RANGE LOOKS LIKE HOUSE AFIRE. El Paso Herald. December 13, 1918, p. 6—

Camouflage is a science. If it were not, nobody would ever camouflage a ship they way they do. To a landsman a camouflaged ship looks as if it would be about the easiest thing in the world to see on the water, but those who have gone down to sea say it isn't and they ought to know. Now that the war is over and secrets don't have to be kept, it is permissible to write of such things.

The docks at Houston, Beaumont and Galveston are full of these ships these days, still in their camouflage coats until peace is really here by signatory treaties, and they are very interesting to the ordinary inland resident. Instead of being some dark color as one would imagine, they are painted in the most fantastic designs and a crazy quilt is a model of accuracy compared to the streaks and stripes of a camouflaged ship. They start at the prow with a black streak, perhaps, that may resemble the figure 7 or something else as grotesque and follow this all the way back with alternate streaks and stripes of white, yellow, pale blue and other colors.

The completed whole very much resembles a futurist or cubist painting and a close view reminds you of looking at a zebra after a session of several hours with a few quarts of champagne, if you can imagine how a zebra would look under such circumstances.

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SHIP HAS DELIRIUM TREMENS. Washington Times. October 14, 1917, p. 19—

New York, Oct. 14—An American passenger ship has arrived at an Atlantic port looking like a serious case of "marine delirium tremens," for she was camouflaged in many colors, among which pinks, pale greens, horizon blues and grays predominated. No two of the color patches were of the same size or shape, and they looked much like a rug of autumn leaves tossed indiscriminately over hull, decks, cabins and masts. The ship is said to present the most effective camouflage yet devised, for at a short distance she is practically invisible.

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CAMOUFLAGE SCHOOL. A Valuable War Service. Australian Brains at Work. Sydney Morning Herald (New South Wales). August 19, 1941, p. 6—

…There is a story of one naval officer who, when the painting of the decks of his ships was proposed, turned indignantly on the camoufleur, saying: "What, foul the teak of my decks! Only a seagul has the right to do that, sir."

USS Maui in dazzle camouflage (1919)

Above The USS Maui in process of loading the wounded at Bordeaux, France, January 1919. Portions of her camouflage coat can be seen on the stack and the life boats. US Signal Corps photograph, National Museum of Health and Medicine.

Removing the Crazy Quilt Camouflage Coat

Charles Grave in Punch (1918)

Above Cartoon by Charles L. Grave (aka Chas) in Punch, July 17, 1918, p. 43. The caption reads: Skipper of Tug (to careless hand): "Ho! So you've caught the blinkin' cammy-flarge 'abit, 'ave year?"

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Anon, in the Barry Dock News, December 19, 1918, p. 8—

Signs of peace are becoming more evident every day. The steamer Island Liard, lying at Barry Docks, is the first ship in Barry to have the old funnel colors, which were obliterated during the war, repainted. The camouflage is also being done away with on many ships.

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 Anon, WOODEN SHIPS TO BE BLACK: Gray Paint To Be Exhausted By Builders First, However, in the Sunday Oregonian (Portland OR), March 16, 1919, p. 20—

…The painting features of wooden ship contracts have undergone changes since the war started. Inasmuch as it was first prescribed that the hulls have three coats of gray paint, while soon after the foremost members of the fleet were afloat the shipping board ordered camouflage designs to be added, that being substituted for the third  coat [of gray]. The lack of positive knowledge that German raiders in the Pacific had all been disposed of and the chance that wooden ships might operate in the Atlantic were responsible for the camouflage. With the signing of the armistice, the "crazy quilt" coat was left off and plain gray provided.

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 Anon, REMOVING THE CAMOUFLAGE in the South Wales Weekly Post, April 26, 1919, p. 4—

Many of the boats detained in Swansea Docks owing to the strike are seizing the opportunity of removing the weird camouflage colors of wartime, and are once more resuming a respectable appearance.

immense saw teeth and cubistic stripes that were not

Louis Biedermann (1918)

Above I was so pleased to find this. It is a very rare full size two-page illustration spread having to do with World War I ship camouflage. Drawn by a phenomenal (if largely unknown) illustrator named Louis Biedermann (1874-1957), it was published as a center spread in the Los Angeles Evening Express, on Sunday, August 18, 1918, perhaps in an entertainment section. This is not its original color (I've colorized it), since presumably it was printed by a four-color halftone process (more or less equivalent to CMYK). Of the very few copies that may still exist, the colors have most likely faded by now, and the newsprint on which it was printed has degraded.

In an online posting by Geographicus, an antique maps dealer in New York, the Illinois Daily Free Express (no date) is quoted as having said—

[Louis] Biedermann is panoramic. He is panoramic in his thinking. His mental as well as his optical perspective presents a complete and extended view of all directions. The breadth of his understanding is more panoramic, perhaps, than his art.

Too bad this illustration cannot be seen more clearly here. It is fantastic and highly detailed, so does not do well at a very small size. See magnified detail below.

In the bottom left corner of the illustration is an explanatory box that reads—

CAMOUFLAGED! How the Erstwhile Merchant Fleet Looks in Its War Paint.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When we practice to deceive

—especially when the web is woven of shuttling ships, and the destined victim of the deception is some U-boat skipper squinting through a hastily protruded periscope and vainly trying to get the range of a moving target from which most of the horizontal and vertical bearing points have been eliminated, while whorls, saw-teeth and triangles of black, white, gray, blue, green and pink blend dizzily into the shifting wave outlines of the seascape. We are well past the practice stage, though, and there are days when the results of ship camouflage turn New York Harbor, for instance, into a floating nightmare. For the benefit of the hundreds of thousands of other readers who never see the waterfront, Mr. Biedermann has indicated here the general effect of the “motley rout,” though purposely avoiding any approach to a portrait of any actual ship.

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HOW NEW YORK HARBOR IS PROTECTED FROM U-BOATS: Every Agency of Naval War Seen: Painted Ships and Weird Effects on Every Hand, but the Business of Getting Men and Supplies “Over There” Goes on as Though There Were No New Menace at Hand, in St Louis Post Dispatch (St Louis MO), January 23, 1918 [from an article published earlier in the Springfield Republican (Springfield MA), no date]—

It was in the lower harbor, below the Liberty Statue, that New York began to show as a port on a war basis. Here were the camouflaged ships at anchor. There were hundreds of them, steamers, schooners, tankers, all ages, shape and sizes. Blue, black and white, all shades of gray, occasionally green, the stripes ran up and down their sides. There were wildly zig-zagging stripes, stripes that spread outward and upward from the center of the ship’s side like a fan, stripes that curved upward, terminating in a superstructure of the bridge in lines like those of the bow; horizontal stripes jagged on their upper edge with immense saw teeth; cubistic stripes that were not, strictly speaking, stripes at all, but like the patterns of a crazy quilt.

But camouflage does not show to best advantage on gray mornings. It does not dazzle at near view, and at the first sight of the ships, coming among them suddenly from around the end of Governor’s Island, the definiteness of outline was a mild shock to preconceived notions. Nevertheless, the purring of the airplane motor overhead was not plainly audible. To the right of the course, off Staten Island, lay a group of old warships at anchor, but with steam up, lookouts posted and guns trained. Far down the harbor, between the anchored shipping and the Narrows, a squadron of patrol boats, lean of bow, square of stern and built for speed, passed leisurely back and forth across the water, one of them dragging with it a captive balloon of the sausage type which perked along with peculiar and rather ridiculous motions, as though resenting each tug of the rope. On nearer view the lookouts on these smaller craft were also seen to be posted, and at their neat little three-inch stern guns, a group of husky sailors invariably “stood by.” Whatever camouflage might be worth at that short range, it was plain that other precautions were all being taken.

A Hole in the Ship
By the time these details of the protecting fleet were visible, the virtue of the camouflage was apparent also. First a ship with a broad blue-gray band zig-zagging up its center through the smokestack seemed suddenly, at a range of perhaps half a mile, to have developed a hole in its middle. One seemed to be looking through it at sky, and, to ocular appearances, except under the closest scrutiny, it ceased to be a ship at all, but some naval monstrosity split in two. At about the same distance another ship which lay with its bow pointed toward us, suddenly appeared to have turned about and to confront us with its stern. So marked was the illusion in this case that no among of scrutiny could separate the real from the illusion. This was the case, too, of another ship whose stern suddenly began to appear as a broadside.

The ship with the bow curve painted on the superstructure demonstrated a unique merit. Instead of one big ship. it gave the illusion of being two smaller ones, the bow of the first—the real one—seeming to be crossing the bow of the second—a fake one—at a narrow angle. Across even this slightly choppy water the saw-tooth design seemed to sink the ship in the wave motion until only the masts and the superstructure had anything like definite form. Only the fan-shaped camouflage and the distinctly cubist patterns retained at a mile, still a very fair torpedo range—anything like their actual outline, and it was easy to believe that with the fan it would be different when the spray was flying, that the crazy-quilt pattern would puzzle the eye of the keenest observer when the sea was a dazzle of bright sunlight and wave shadows. On the whole, right in the harbor, lying at anchor, these ships would form no perfect target at anything like a sportsman’s range.

Aerial Views, Camouflage & Crazy Quilts

Prior to World War I, in part in response to the Armory Show (1913), there was a flood of comparisons (in cartoons in particular) of cubism and futurism with less exalted forms of "art," such as the "crazy quilts" (made of leftover quilting fragments) created unassumingly by America's grandmothers. Above is an especially funny cartoon of grandma and her cubist quilt. Drawn by Clare Briggs and titled THE ORIGINAL CUBIST, it was published in the New York Evening Sun, on Tuesday, April 1, 1913.

After World War I began, camouflage was widely adopted, and inevitably there were comparisons of camouflage and cubism, and, in turn, of camouflage and crazy quilts. More serious, and far more interesting as well, were the various many comparisons of cubism, camouflage, crazy quilts and views of the earth from an airplane (a novelty then). Here's what Ernest Hemingway said in "A Paris-to-Strasbourg Flight" in the Toronto Daily Star on September 9, 1922—

The plane began to move along the ground, bumping like a motorcycle, and then slowly rose into the air. We headed almost straight east of Paris, rising in the air as through we were sitting inside a boat that was being lifted by some giant, and the ground to flatten out beneath us. It looked cut into brown squares, yellow squares, green squares and big flat blotches of green where there was a forest. I began to understand Cubist painting.

Of course Hemingway wasn't the only one to make such comparisons. Journalists and the general public saw it too. Below are two aerial photographs of the French landscape from the same time period. The second view, which appeared initially in Collier's Weekly in 1918, was captioned with a text that read—

NO WONDER CUBISM STARTED IN FRANCE! No one need wonder any longer where the cubists got their inspiration. They must have gone up in an airplane and had a good look at France! This airplane view of an observation balloon floating over a French village is as good a bit of cubist art as anything that Marcel Duchamp ever turned out.

Cubicular camouflage | the blossoming of crazy quilts

Above Still image from a Pathé film titled Rigadin Cubist Painter (1912).

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Caught the Cubist Fashion in Baltimore Sun (Baltimore MD), June 22, 1918—

The camoufleur is having engagements at this port changing the appearance of the local fleet of steamers that enter the war zone declared by the U-boats on this coast. One arrived yesterday from the south so completely disguised by the cubist artist as not to be recognized by agents of her line. Others belonging here are being camouflaged.

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Anon in Sioux City Journal (Sioux City IA), August 29, 1921—

Little is seen or heard nowadays about the writers of vers libre ["free verse"] or the cubist artists. Maybe they have gone where they belong—to Camouflage.

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PARIS PUTS ARTISTS IN ARMY TO CAMOUFLAGE TRUCKS, TANKS, CANNON: Cubists, Surrealists and Futurists Put Fantastic Designs and Theories Into Practice in the Scranton Times-Tribune (Scranton PA), September 22, 1939—

Cubist, surrealist, modernist, futurist, realist, and naturalist painters who once cluttered Montparnasse terraces are in the army as camouflage artists.

Canvases and theories have been put aside. Long-haired, bearded, shabbily-dressed dreamers have left attics to become clean-shaven, neatly-dressed army men.

Trucks, tanks, armored cars, motorcycles, cannon and staff cars are blossoming with fantastic crazy-quilt designs done in reds, blues, greens, and ochres. Many-schooled cafe arguments have turned into a joint pooling of ideas to befuddle the enemy.

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Says "Abstractionist" Painter Should Make Camouflage Experts, in Mason City Globe Gazette (Mason City IA) January 8, 1942—

[Laszlo Moholy Nagy, founder and director of the New Bauhaus school in Chicago], addressing a Drake University audience [yesterday in Des Moines], explained:

"The cubist painters' angular pictures often are the most confusing thing in art to the layman and they are the most talented to turn out camouflage which will confuse the enemy."

"White outs," a system of confusing enemy planes by careful illumination and reflections, would be much more effective than black outs, he declared.

The Perils of Painting a Camouflaged Ship

Hypothetical dazzle schemes (2018)

Above and below. These are not historic ship camouflage schemes. They are hypothetical dazzle designs, produced by simply "looking through" cut-out silhouettes of ships, with various public domain photographs behind them. Produced by Roy R. Behrens (2018).

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Unsigned, THE WHY AND HOW OF DAZZLE. Daily News (Perth, Western Australia). May 19, 1919, p. 4. Reprinted from the Christian Science Monitor—

They certainly did look strange, those ships; patched and lined, like grandmother’s crazy quilt with broad black, white and blue bands and stripes, gray, green, and almost every color save the mythical sky-blue-pink.

Passengers on the ferries lined the rails and made many and varied comments on their strange appearance.

“You see,” said one Solomon to his unwise friend, “that camouflage’ is a great thing all right! Yes, sir, that ship there when she gits to sea will just go plumb out of sight, Pop! You don’t see her at all when she gets to sea, so the Dutchmen can’t shoot her with their periscopes.”

“Seems to me,” said his friend rather doubtfully, “that I can see her better than that gray one over there.”

“Pshaw! That’s because you aren’t in a submarine. When she gets to sea, she blends right in with the waves and matches right-on to ‘em.”

The two in conversation did not know that the dirty overalled man with jointed fishing pole and roll of plans standing near by, an amused listener to the conversation, had just finishing applying a crazy quite design to the steamer in question, and knew that the reason for the lines and patterns was not by any means to hide the ship from the submarine observer.

Early in the war, when the German were sinking everything in sight, stern necessity, ever the mother of invention, evolved many systems of marine camouflage. Several Americans—Mackay, Brush, Herzog and Toch—had systems which were called by naval men “low visibility,” the object imitating the water and sky. This was in some degree successful under certain conditions; indeed in some weathers the ship so painted would disappear at a distance of a mile. But for one thing, this low visibility would have been a great success.

This thing was the same machine set in a shell of a submarine called the “skin hydrophone,” a very delicate and accurate device for detecting the sounds of a ship’s propeller. A ship could be discovered long before she could be seen from the low elevation of a periscope, and her course fairly accurately determined. That is, accurately enough to tell if she were coming toward or going away from the listener. Also, under certain conditions, it could be told if she were going to the right or left.

Such an instrument disposed once and for all of low visibility as an absolute protection, and it remained for an English artist, Norman Wilkinson, Command, Royal Navy, to invent a new and effective way of combating the submarine peril.

Broadly stated, his method of camouflage was a distortion, an optical illusion based on varied elements of perspective and drawing. Ships painted in this manner seemed to be sailing an entirely different course from the one they really followed, much to the confusion of the submarine observer.

Some people seem to think that to sink a ship a submarine has only to sight it. This is hardly the case. Quite complicated computation of the vessel’s distance, speed, and course are necessary together with wind, current, and temperature of the water; and a good many ships were missed only by a few feet, but still missed, and a miss was as good as a thousand miles.

That was the problem for the camoufleurs, when the United States entered the war [in 1917]. The Royal Navy sent Wilkinson across the Atlantic to impart his method. Early last year a Boston advertising man, Henry C. Grover, was engaged by the [Emergency Fleet Corporation] Shipping Board to organize a department of camouflage for all our immense merchant marine which was to be built. The thing was absolutely new and untried, but he got a group of artists and draftsmen together, and with his usual genius for getting results, the thing was humming in a month.

Painting a ship is very simple—theoretically—just take a brush and painting and “go to it”—just like that. Of course we had a plan, a design furnished by the Navy Department, which showed a view of the two sides of the ship (the sides were different, by the way), and a husky gang of painters, but ship painting is different from painting a house; much larger, oh vastly.

Hypothetical dazzle schemes (2018)

When we first stood under the bows of a newly launched tank steamer and looked up at her, she was an appalling thing to a novice. Thirty-five feet out of water the bow towered, a sheer wall of steel, flaring outward at the top to make it doubly difficult. On that curving rampart we had to make accurate lines in curves, and beautiful parabolas (I think that is the word). At any rate, I would have given the old family clock and all my loose change just that minute for a pair of foot warmers.

It wasn’t so bad after we started, though the first ship was far from a model. Slinging stages over the bow, we put two painters on them with poles and chalk, and by gestures and megaphoned instructions from the wharf had them spot in points on the curves and connect them.

It is quite impossible, unless one is highly experienced, to draw these curves and lines when standing close to the ship. One needs to be 100 feet away properly to judge the proportion; and the effectiveness of the design depends largely on its accuracy. Later we learned to use a mirror, flashing the spots on the side one after the other along the course of a curve, and stretching a long chalk line from the straights snapped by a man in the center. Sometimes we used long “battens,” strips of thin board, bending them to the proper curves, and a 20-foot fish pole with a brush on the tip helped to strike in the more complicated forms. Strange as it may seem, the hardest forms to apply to a ship are long parallel straight lines which converge to points near bow or stern. For some reason we never could seem to get the angles just right.

It was no place for a dainty man, when worked on the floats alongside, for a rain of things descended on us. Bolts, hot rivets, scraps of iron, and heavier things like lumps of wood and heavy pieces of rope, when working in the shipyards, come down at unexpected intervals. No use yelling up at the man on the deck to be careful—with 500 men hammering and drilling and reaming, conversation is at a discount. You can only dodge and grin cheerfully at the painters.

Then again tugs and steamers have a way of pulling a heavy wash into the slips when one is on a high staging 12 feet or so above the water. The float rocks violently without the slightest warning, and if you have fallen overboard at the first roll you drop on hands and knees and grip until the float is fairly still again. When this is past, and you are congratulating yourself, some enthusiastic painter tips over his pail of dark blue, or whatever colors he happens to be using, directly above you, perhaps, or the cook happens to think of some refuse that needs disposing of, and then there are holes in the side of the ship where water—hot or cold—pops out without warning. A camoufleur is not a camoufleur unless he falls overboard regularly once a week.

Still, it was a great game while it lasted, taken with the interesting experimental work on little models in a mechanical theatre with a sea foreground and a painted strip to imitate sky—this in the intervals of ship-painting. The dazzle painted ships are now fast disappearing under their peace coasts of gray. May they never again need the services of American camoufleurs.

detailed information sources

 

a broken fragment of rainbow / a crazy patchwork quilt

J. Milo Courzy, A CLIPPER SHIPPER, in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 16, 1927, p. 6—

When the Buccaneer Club of New York combed the seas for a master worthy of their ship, Captain [Thomas Orlando] Moon’s adventurous achievements won him the coveted command. The clubship is the five-masted barketine Buccaneer, now docked in Brooklyn. The club is composed of men of means and artists and writers who have won fame.

Ship-shaped parade float (not the Buccaneer), 1918

…The Buccaneer now lies in a Brooklyn drydock, where she is donning a holiday dress—a dress of many colors, that looks like a crazy-patch quilt. She will be a floating rainbow, a carnival of color that will make the sea dragons pale. With hull painted in broad bands of white, yellow, black and red, with red and ochre sails and masts gleaming in olive and tipped with white, she will resemble a broken fragment of rainbow fallen to the surface of the sea—a chameleon ship, flying a pirate’s flag.

The idea belongs to Joseph Cummings Chase, artist and pioneer in the art of camouflage during the World War; Professor Ezra Winter, former Yale professor [and WWI ship camoufleur]; and Henry Killum Murphy, architect. These form a committee whose task it is to turn the ship into a masquerading privateer in harlequin garb, flying the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger.

…[Captain] Moon scorns the Buccaneer Club’s fantasies. “They’re turning a good ship into a cure for the color blind. The club’s notions have made us all as crazy as a cat without claws in hell!” he growls. 

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Was there really a men's social club in NYC called The Buccaneer Club? Haven't found one so far. And did they dazzle-paint a ship? Don't know. But Joseph Cummings Chase, Ezra Winter, and Henry Killum Murphy were genuine people, although never before have I heard of contributions to camouflage by Chase.

Dazzle-Camouflaged Coffee Cups

Dazzle-painted coffee cups © Roy R. Behrens (2013)

G.A. Martin, "Camouflaged Ship at Close Range Looks Like House Afire" in El Paso Herald, Editorial and Magazine Page, December 13, 1918, p. 6—

Instead of being some dark color as one would imagine, they [WWI dazzle-painted ships] are painted in the most fantastic designs, and a crazy quilt is a model of accuracy compared to the streaks and stripes on a camouflaged ship. They start at the prow with a black streak, perhaps, that may resemble the figure 7 or something else as grotesque and follow this all the way back with alternate streaks and stripes of white, yellow, pale blue and other colors.

The complicated whole very much resembles a futurist or cubist painting and a close view reminds you of looking at a zebra after a session of several hours with a few quarts of champagne, if you can imagine how a zebra would look under such circumstances.

additional information

instead of the frontlne they put me on the subway line

Above Paris-based artist Jean Kisling in his studio.

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PARIS PUTS ARTISTS IN ARMY TO CAMOUFLAGE TRUCKS, TANKS, CANNON Cubists, Surrealists and Futurists Put Fantastic Designs and Theories Into Practice, in Scranton Times Tribune (Scranton PA), September 22, 1939—

Paris, Sept. 21 (UP)—Cubist, surrealist, modernist, futurist, realist, and naturalist painters who once cluttered Montparnasse terraces are in the army as camouflage artists.

Canvases and theories have been put aside. Long-haired, bearded, shabbily-dressed dreamers have left attics to become clean-shaven, neatly-dressed army men.

Trucks, tanks, armored cars, motorcycles, cannon and staff cars are blossoming with fantastic crazy-quilt designs done in reds, blues. greens, and ochres. Many-schooled cafe arguments have turned into a joint pooling of ideas to befuddle the enemy.

The Montparnasse district, with blue-tinted windows and dimmed lights still is doing a roaring business, but most of the artists are gone. Sidewalk tables now are filled with soldiers and others who have found the terrace darkness to their liking.

Some of the artists are unhappy, however. Jean Kisling [whose father, the artist Moise Kisling had a studio in the same building as Amedeo Modigliani], for example, who is known to every terrace habitué, put away his brushes a fortnight ago to fight the Germans. But, as he put it, “I wanted to fight on the Maginot Line and they put me on the subway line.” He was made a subway station guard as a member of the passive defense squad.

He wouldn't mind that particularly, except that he hates the subway and never had ridden on a subway train.

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H. HODIGLIENI in New York Tribune, Febuary 7, 1920, p. 4—

Paris, Feb. 6—H. Hodiglieni [sic Amedeo Modigliani], an artist, who claimed to have invented cubist painting, was found dead in a hovel in the Latin Quarter. He used to frequent Paris cafés dressed in trousers with legs of different colored materials.

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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

Women's Dazzle-Painting Team at NYPL

Above and below are public domain news photographs (1918), showing members of the Women's Reserve Camouflage Corps applying dazzle camouflage to a tank that has been placed in front of the New York Public Library. In the first photograph, the high contrast disruptive shapes are beginning to be evident. In the photo directly below that (apparently taken earlier), one of the tricks of the trade is revealed: they are marking in the boundaries of the colors with white chalk, a method that was commonly used by the teams who painted camouflaged ships.

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Anon, ANOTHER KIND OF CAMOUFLAGE, in Popular Science, November 1918, p. 18—

In war work, as in nature, there are two kinds of camouflage coloration: one is designed to make the camouflaged object harder to distinguish from its surroundings, the other to make it even more conspicuous than it would otherwise be. The latter, however, in war work is restricted to objects used for recruiting purposes. The ocean-going freighters at anchor in the North River, off Manhattan Island, or in any other large harbor, are examples of the first kind. The [object in the three photographs shown here] is an example of the second, undergoing its camouflage painting at the hands of members of the Camouflage Corps of the National League for Women’s Service.

The tank stands in front of the New York Public Library. The young women at work in overalls are making its surface a crazy-quilt of the most violent and incongruous colors imaginable—colors that command the attention of every passer-by. The object is to aid recruiting for the tank service.

The effigy topping the tank’s turret, which seems to be a cross between a puma and a Teddy bear, was put there to make it harder—to overlook the tank.

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ANON, Women War Workers of the World, in The Touchstone and American Art Student Magazine (New York) Vol 3 (1918), pp. 513-514—

The National League for Women’s Service has recently inaugurated a Woman’s Reserve Camouflage Corps. Although the course is unofficial, it is the aim of the corps to be of service to the Government at home and abroad. This division of women’s service is yet too young to have accomplished notable results, although they have helped, under Henry Reuterdahl’s supervision, in painting the land battleship Recruit in Union Square, camouflaged the tank in front of the Public Library, New York City, painted trench tables so that they look like the land and shrubs all around them, and painted snipers’ suits for men to wear when creeping among the rocks and bushes.

Chelsea Arts Club Dazzle Ball 1919

The Sketch (March 19, 1919)

Among artists, designers and architects, there is a long tradition of sponsoring annual costume balls, fancy dress balls, or Beaux-Arts balls (not unlike the Mardi Gras), often amusingly raucous events, for the purpose of fundraising. At a Beaux-Arts ball in New York in 1931, for example, some of the city's most famous architects came dressed in costumes that were modeled after their own famous buildings. Among artists, given their fabled Bohemian bent, these parties typically turned into riotous fests of uninhibited and inebriated revelers, dressed in astonishing costumes (or, sometimes, barely dressed at all).

One of these events was the annual Chelsea Arts Ball in England, which the Chelsea Arts Club (founded in 1891) had sponsored at the Royal Albert Hall. The annual celebration was interrupted by World War I, which began in 1914, and only near the end of the war, in 1919, was it decided that the Chelsea Arts Ball could resume. This time however the theme chosen was the disruptive crazy-quilt patterns that had been applied to wartime dazzle-painted ships, intermixed with the public's bewilderment toward emerging styles of Modern Art: Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Surrealism and Dada. As a result, the 1919 fancy dress ball (held on the evening of March 12, 1919) became known as the Chelsea Arts Club's Dazzle Ball.

The event was widely covered by newspaper and magazine articles, as had been an earlier American "camoufleurs' ball" that took place in the winter of 1917 at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC, and a camoufleurs' "carnival ball" (sponsored by the League of American Penwomen) that was also held in Washington in February 1919. We've discussed these events in earlier blogposts, including an account of a comparable dazzle ball (modeled after the Chelsea Arts Club festival) that took place in Sydney AU on October 7, 1919.

In its March 22 issue, the Illustrated London News featured a spread of illustrations of the costumes and the dancing that had taken place at the Chelsea Arts Club's Dazzle Ball. A few days earlier, in its March 19 issue, The Sketch included on its front cover photographs of costumes that premiered that night (see cover reproduced above). At the bottom of the cover is a headline that reads THE GREAT "DAZZLE" BALL OF THE CHELSEA ARTS CLUB; HUMAN CAMOUFLAGE, and below that is this paragraph—

After an interval of five years, the Chelsea Arts Club once more gave a great fancy dress ball, last Wednesday, March 12. The Albert Hall was decorated for the occasion with a wonderful scheme of "Dazzle," as used in naval camouflage during the war, and a great many of the costumes were designed on similar lines. A good example is seen in the left-hand lower photograph, showing Mrs. Bertram Park (neé Yvonne Gregory), who is well-known as a painter of miniatures.

That portrait of Yvonne Gregory Park (she herself was also a photographer), which was taken by her husband British photographer Bertram Park, is easily the best-known photograph of a costume from the Dazzle Ball. Equally wonderful is the photograph at the bottom right of the cover, showing two women, one draped in the American flag, the other in the Union Jack.

In the same issue of The Sketch (listed by HathiTrust Digital Library as in public domain in the US) is another full page of costumes, on page 353 (as shown below), this time with the page headline ON THE RAZZLE DAZZLE: COSTUMES AT THE CHELSEA ARTS and then at the bottom of the page, a smaller second headline reads: THE "DAZZLE" BALL OF THE CHELSEA ARTS CLUB, AT THE ALBERT HALL: SOME NOTABLE FIGURES, followed by this paragraph—

The Sketch (March 19, 1919)

As already mentioned, the Chelsea Arts Ball on March 12 was a wonderful success. The Albert Hall presented literally a "Dazzling" spectacle. Our central photograph shows Miss Margot Kelly, who recently left "Oh, Joy," at the Kingsway, to appear shortly in a new American comedy. She is wearing a Columbine dress of her own design. To the left of her is Mrs. Barribal, wife of a well-known artist whose work is familiar to our readers, in a costume which she made from an armchair cover.

On page 355 of that same magazine, there is a brief article (attributed to "The Worldling") that is titled The Chelsea Arts Ball and reads as follows—

It was a case of "dazzle-dazzle, joy and jazzle" at the Albert Hall last Wednesday night, when the long-heralded folic of the Chelsea Arts Club came off. As all the world knows, the scheme of decoration was based on the art of "Dazzle," as applied during the war to the disguising of ships and the discomfiture of U-boats. The same artists who did that work for the Admiralty—Lieutenant-Commander Norman Wilkinson, Lieutenant Cecil King, [American] Captain Burnell Poole, and Sergeant [Walter E.] Webster—had undertaken to camouflage the Albert Hall in similar style for the great occasion. The background was a "dazzle" battleship, with a "dazzle" sunset, and all the boxes were hung with muslin draperies in "disruptive" colors. The "dazzling" of the dancers themselves was left, of course, to their own individual ingenuity, and many artists had designed costumes for the camouflage of the human form. The effect was a whirling scene that delighted the hearts of the Vorticists.

In advance of the Dazzle Ball, The Sketch had published a page of preparatory drawings of four of the anticipated costumes, on page 292, on March 5 (in those drawings, Yvonne Gregory Bertram's striped costume is referred to as the "jazzle"). Following the event, a further, briefer note (underscoring the contributions of Cecil King and Walter E. Webster by name) appeared on page xii of the March 26 issue of The Sketch.

Apparently, The Sketch was enjoying a lively reader response to its features on the Dazzle Ball, and indeed it returned to the subject again in a cartoon (attributed to Thorpe) on p. 427 of the June 25 issue. Reproduced below, the headline of the cartoon reads: THE EVE OF THE FANCY-DRESS BALL, while the caption beneath it is worded IT'S A WISE CHILD THAT KNOWS ITS OWN MOTHER.

The Sketch (June 25, 1919)

There's much more to this—but we'll save it for a future post.

Chicago Skyline Camouflage | Merchandise Mart

Camouflaged Merchandise Mart (c1943), Chicago

In its May 23, 1943 issue, The Milwaukee Sentinel included an illustrated article on the “Newest Tricks of Camouflage” (p. 41). Among the featured topics was the application of disruptive patterns to buildings in urban centers like Chicago, to make it more difficult for enemy aircraft to recognize conspicuous landmarks. The article included the above image, a “doctored” aerial photograph of that city’s Merchanise Mart (which had been at one time the world’s largest building) to show the effects of disruption.

The caption with the photograph reads—

The Merchandise Mart in Chicago as it would appear after camouflaging by the Army’s hocus pocus artists. Through a Nazi’s bombsight the single large object would seem a number of smaller innocuous ones—all by the ingenious use of paint.

In the accompanying article, the following paragraph also appears—

If and when Nazis fly over an American city, say Chicago, our camouflage artists are ready for them, along with our anti-aircraft crews. Every large building, such as the Merchanise Mart, will be so camouflaged that even with binoculars from on high the Nazis will see only a crazy quilt confusion that will give their bombardiers trouble in distinguishing steel and concrete from mere razzle-dazzle.

Experiments in building camouflage had been used earlier in World War I, as seen in the camouflage pattern applied to the Victoria Hospital in the UK (shown below). The WWII proposal to camouflage the Merchandise Mart may have originated with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (founder and head of the New Bauhaus in Chicago) and Hungarian designer György Kepes (who taught camouflage at the same school). In 1969, Moholy’s widow, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, recalled the following in her book, Moholy Nagy: Experiment in Totality (pp. 183-184)—

On December 19, 1942, Moholy was appointed to the Mayor’s personal staff in charge of camouflage activites in the Chicago area.…[in the course of which] he pondered how to conceal the vastness of Lake Michigan with a simulated shore line and floating islands…As head of the Camouflage Workshop, György Kepes produced a wider range of new techniques and concepts. When they were displayed for the first time in 1943, they aroused wide attention.

Camouflaged Victoria Hospital (c1918)

Cubism Meets Camouflage

John French Sloan, Cubist Cartoon (1913)

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

Camouflaged Bathing Suit | A Swimming Idea WWI

IT’S HERE ON THE BEACHES AT LAST—THE CAMOUFLAGED BATHING SUIT in Boston Sunday Post, August 18, 1918—

Have you seen it? What does it look like? Is it really invisible? How perfectly absurd!

But yet it’s a fact.

We’ve seen camouflaged ships and camouflaged tanks, and camouflage eats…but it took Leonore Bates at Atlantic City to develop the latest camouflage hit.

It is the camouflaged bathing suit. Hereafter when any of the beach policemen get after any girl who seems to have on not quite the regulation costume, they are more than half apt to be met with the reply:

“Why, of course, this is a ‘proper suit.’ Can’t you see, it’s camouflaged.”

It’s a great thing, the camouflage bathing suit, from many standpoints. In the first place, a person wearing one isn’t near so apt to be submarined by those German U-boats who have taken up their quarters on the coast.

Then again they are ideal for the naval spy, for he can sneak up right on top of a submarine and he can attach his depth bomb or anything else which he brought in his pocket with him without any fear of detection and it may be that through the medium of the camouflage bathing suit we may stop this sort of warfare. And how cheaply it can be done.

What do they look like?

The appearance of some of the milder designs is midway between a design cut from a crazy quilt and a futurist painting of the inferno.

Vivid reds, greens, blues and yellows, etc, mixed in a wavy medley of ghastly pale colors, in utter disregard to color harmony, etc., seems to be the general rule, but camouflage it is called, so why say more.

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DULL DAYS ON SANDS in The Stars and Stripes (France), Friday, July 19, 1918, p. 1—

America, July 18—A lady police corps on the job at Coney Island gives stern moral instruction to lady bathers who think that man wants but little here below or above either.

They spend their time separating many warming embracing couples and altogether spoil the whole day for ardent sea bathers.

A lady camouflage corps has camouflaged the wooden battleship Recruit, in Union Square, New York City, in black, white, pink, green and blue.

•••

CAMOUFLAGE BATHING SUIT IS LATEST STYLE in Boston Post, May 7, 1919, p. 17—

An art of war has survived to these times of peace. It is the art of camouflage which the summertime girl has made her own.  

Even the very bathing suit within which she promenades the sunny sands will not look quite what it is. Camouflaged bathing suits is to be the cry for 1919.

The hot wave brought a striking one to light. It is called the "Sunset" camouflage. This very new suit is black-figured on a white ground with an enormous red setting sun and rainbow colored rays in all directions. So this year the beach frequenters, already grown used to the unusual and the unexpected, may expect to see a hundred setting suns bobbing up and down at sea where once there was one.

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What Was It Like To Paint A Ship In Camouflage?

Above Port side (top) and starboard side of the SS War Magpie, a British cargo ship, painted in dazzle camouflage. The designs on the ship's two sides are deliberately different, in the hope of increasing  confusion and preventing identification, when viewed through a U-boat periscope. The original photographs, made c1919 by Allan C. Green, are in the collection of the Victoria State Library AU. When ship camouflage was first applied, the colors were vivid and sharply defined, but after a few months at sea, it began to deteriorate, as is evident here.

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What was it like to paint a ship in camouflage? We've seen a handful of photographs of ship camoufleurs at work. And now and then we've run across brief eyewitness memories of the process of actually painting a ship. But the following is the most detailed account we've found so far. Its American author is not credited, but it is stated that the essay first appeared in The Christian Science Monitor. We found it in reprinted form in THE WHY AND HOW OF DAZZLE in The Daily News (Perth, Western Australia), May 19, 1919, p. 4—

They certainly did look strange, those ships; patched and lined, like grandmother's crazy quilt with broad black, white and blue bands and stripes, gray, green, and almost every color save the mythical sky-blue-pink.

Passengers on the ferries lined the rails and made many and varied comments on their strange appearance.…

Painting a ship is very simple—theoretically—just take a brush and paint and "go to it"—just like that. Of course we [American ship camoufleurs] had a plan, a design furnished by the Navy Department, which showed a view of the two sides of the ship (the sides were different, by the way), and a husky gang of painters, but ship painting is different from painting a house; much larger, oh vastly.

When we first stood under the bows of a newly launched tank steamer and looked up at her, she was an appalling thing to a novice. Thirty-five feet out of water the bow towered, a sheer wall of steel, flaring outward at the top to make it doubly difficult. On that curving rampart we had to make accurate lines in curves, and beautiful parabolas (I think that is the word). At any rate, I would have given the old family clock and all my loose change just that minute for a pair of foot warmers.

It wasn't so bad after we started, though the first ship was far from a model. Slinging stages over the bow, we put two painters on them with poles and chalk, and by gestures and megaphoned instructions from the wharf had them spot in points on the curves and connect them.•

It is quite impossible, unless one is highly experienced, to draw these curves and lines when standing close to the ship. One needs to be 100 feet away properly to judge the proportion; and the effectiveness of the design depends largely on its accuracy. Later we learned to use a mirror, flashing the spots on the side one after the other along the course of a curve, and stretching a long chalk line for the straights snapped by a man in the center. Sometimes we used long "battens," strips of thin board, bending them to the proper curve, and a 20-foot fish pole with a brush on the tip helped to strike in the more complicated forms. Strange as it may seem, the hardest forms to apply to a ship are long parallel straight lines which converge to points near bow or stern. For some reason we never could seem to get the angles just right. 

It was no place for a dainty man, when working on the floats alongside, for a rain of things descended on us. Bolts, hot rivets, scraps of iron, and heavier things like lumps of wood and heavy pieces of rope, when working in the shipyards, come down at unexpected intervals. No use yelling up at the man on the deck to be careful—with 500 men hammering and drilling and reaming, conversation is at a discount. You can only dodge and grin cheerfully at the painters.

Then again tugs and steamers have a way of pulling a heavy wash into the slips when one is on a high staging 12 feet or so above the water. The float rocks violently without the slightest warning, and if you have not fallen overboard at the first roll you drop on your hands and knees and grip until the float is fairly still again. When this is past, and you are congratulating yourself, some enthusiastic painter tips over his pail of dark blue, or whatever color he happens to be using, directly above you, perhaps, or the cook happens to think of some refuse that needs disposing of, and then there are holes in the side of the ship where water—hot or cold—pops out without any warning. A camoufleur is not a camoufleur unless he falls overboard regularly once a week.

Still it was a great game while it lasted, taken with the interesting experimental work on little models in a mechanical theatre with a sea foreground and a painted strip to imitate sky—this in the intervals of ship painting. The dazzle painted ships are now fast disappearing under their peace coats of gray. May they never again need the services of American camoufleurs.

• This method of initially putting in dots, then connecting them, is comparable to pouncing, a technique used by artists for transferring a design from one surface to another.

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