C A M O U P E D I A

Sunday, December 14, 2025

the camouflage craze / a book on camou mania now

Camou Mania
CAMOU MANIA A stunningly designed, richly illustrated book on inventive applications of camouflage in fashion and other aspects of popular culture. Includes a section that I myself was asked to write. See online details here.

popular fallacy about football / aka pigskin camouflage

image source
Lawrence M. Guyer, Football Camouflage, in Boys' Life (November 1929), p. 16—

"Now, gentlemen," he continued, "I have only a few more words in conclusion of this lecture. I wish to speak for a moment regarding the popular fallacy connected with camouflage. There is a widespread belief that camouflage means to conceal, to hide, to absolutely remove an object from the enemy's view. That, of course, is not at all true. Camouflage means rather to disguise the object in such a way that the enemy is misled. Deception is the end thus to be attained."

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turnip poses as onion / Buck Henry's mother's mimicry

film lobby poster (1928)
Motion Picture Magazine, March-July 1918—

[As leading-lady in Jack Spurlock—Prodigal, Hollywood actress Ruth Taylor (1905-1984), star of the original version of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, and mother of comedian Buck Henry] had to eat an onion in one of the scenes, and she begged Director Carl Harbaugh to camouflage a turnip instead. But a "retake" was necessary, and as there had been only one turnip provided, she was obliged to eat an onion. She canceled a dinner engagement for the evening. Now they have a supply of camouflage onions at the Fox studio.

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Saturday, December 13, 2025

Sir Walter Raleigh makes use of smoke as camouflage

W. Allen Howells, Raleigh Blowing Smoke
Philip Leslie Hale, in his column titled As the World Wags in The Boston Herald on January 24, 1918—

In the definition of "camouflage" the standard French dictionaries are of little or no use. Littre gives "camouflet," the noun, meaning “a thick smoke that one blows maliciously into the nose of one with a lighted paper cone." To give a "camouflet" is to affront, mortify a person. "Camouflet" is also a mining term. This French word is an old one. It is defined in Cotgrave’s dictionary (1678) as "a snuft or cold pie, a smoakie paper held under the nose of a slug or sleeper." Now, a cold pie in old colloquial English meant an application of cold water to wake a sleeper. “To give cold pig" was another form, and it is still used. In dialect a "cold pie” is an accident to a train or carriage in a pit, a fall on the ice, a disappointment of any kind.

In more modern French-English dictionaries, a camouflet is a whift of smoke in the face; a stifler; an affront, rap over the knuckles, snub.

•••

Adrian Margaux, If Our Caricaturists Had Flourished Before: Some of the Drawings They May Have Made, in the Strand Magazine, November 1918, pp. 365-366—

W. Allen Howells, British illustrator. when asked to choose a subject for a comic portrait—"…I should like to [illustrate] Sir Walter Raleigh, as I have an idea he was one of the pioneers of camouflage in this country. A French slang dictionary tells me that the word means blowing smoke through a paper cone into another person's face as an insult, and I can imagine Sir Walter making use of the device between his draws of tobacco smoke."

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camouflage, patriotism and propaganda / a big parade

It was Oscar Wilde who said: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." And surely one might also surmise that some of the world's most godawful music springs from patriotism.

Shown here is the sheet music cover (as well as the record label) for My Dream of the Big Parade, a rousing composition from World War I. The cover is signed by a WWI-era British artist named Starmer, probably Walter P. Starmer (1877-1961).

He was not a camouflage artist, but in the top left background of the illustration you can see that he has included a dazzle-painted British ship, not unlike the RMS Olympia.

Starmer was British, but a note at the bottom left of the sheet music cover says "Made in USA", and the music was created by Jimmy McHugh (1894-1969), a prolific American composer who devised such famous songs as I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby, and On the Sunny Side of the Street.

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Friday, December 12, 2025

countershading and disruption in artillery camouflage

The three photographs in this blog post were originally published in black and white in Scientific American during World War I.

As posted here, they have been restored and AI colorized. They are excellent examples of attempts to camouflage artillery by applying countershading (as proposed by American artist Abbott H. Thayer) and by breaking up the cannon's shape by applying high contrast disruptive patterns, such as stripes.

It is interesting to look at these in comparison to a series of five hand-drawn illustrations (as shown below) by WWII British army camoufleur and eminent zoologist, Hugh B. Cott, in Adaptive Coloration in Animals, which we have blogged about before.

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Thursday, December 11, 2025

striped and splashed and dotted with disruptive colors

unidentified WWI dazzle-painted ship (AI color), c1918
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer. NYC: Harper and Brothers, 1925, pp. 280-281—

The snub nosed transport sludges slowly through the Narrows in the rain. Sergeant-Major O'Keefe and Private First Class Dutch Robertson stand in the lee of the deckhouse looking at the liners at anchor in quarantine and the low wharf cluttered shores.

"Look some of em still got their warpaint—Shippin Board boats.... Not worth the powder to blow em up."

"The hell they aint," said Joey O'Keefe vaguely. "Gosh little old New York's goin to look good to me.…"

"Me too Sarge, rain or shine I dont care."

They are passing close to a mass of steamers anchored in a block, some of them listing to one side or the other, lanky ships with short funnels, stumpy ships with tall funnels red with rust, some of them striped and splashed and dotted with putty color and blue and green of camouflage paint…

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Sunday, December 7, 2025

seasonal animal tracks / fox and vixen flirt and play

Above Book jacket for Judith Krantz, Dazzle. NY: Crown, 1990.

•••

Sy Montgomery, Seasons of the Wild: A Year of Nature's Magic and Mysteries. Buffalo NY: Firefly Books, 1995, p. 74—

In January and February’s snows, fox tracks tell stories more vivid than any other North American mammal’s. To the novice tracker, following a coyote is as daunting as reading a Proustian tome. But this time of year, fox tracks are the Judith Krantz novels of animal tracking: in them you’ll find fast-paced, easy-to-read love stories. In these winter months, fox and vixen flirt and play, cementing and renewing pair-bonds that usually last as long as both survive.

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Thursday, December 4, 2025

a primer of visual literacy—including basic camouflage

book cover
Donis A. Dondis, A Primer of Visual Literary. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1973, p. 56—

Most of our textural experience is optical, not tactile. Not only is texture faked rather convincingly in plastics and printed material and faked fur, but, also, much of what we see that is painted, photographed, and filmed convincingly presents texture that is not there. If we touch a photograph of silky velvet, we do not have the convincing tactile experience the visual clues promise. Meaning is based on what we see. This fakery is an important factor in survival in nature; animals, birds, reptiles, insects, fish, take on the coloration and texture of their surroundings as a protection against predators. Man copies this camouflage method in war in response to the same needs for survival that inspires it in nature.

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Wednesday, December 3, 2025

suspended camouflage nets / gunny sack donations

Above The Maharajah of Patiala examining 9.2-inch howitzer shells under camouflaged netting (1918). Royal collection of the United Kingdom. Public domain.

•••

US NAVY SEEKS OLD GUNNY SACKS in Santa Ana Register (Santa Ana CA), February 4, 1942—

Seattle—If you have any old gunny sacks laying around your house, the 13th Naval District would be glad to get them. Just be sure they're empty, turn them inside out, and ship them to the District Camouflage Officer, Navy Supply Depot, Pier 41, Seattle.

They can be used as "garlands" on camouflage nets, the navy said, for which there is a shortage of such materials.

The navy also asked commercial fishermen to donate discarded purse seine and gillnets for camouflage purposes.

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Sunday, November 30, 2025

firm evidence / when you find a killer whale in the milk

Above Anon, Killer Whale in morning coffee. Pixabay, public domain (2016).

•••

THERE IS a postwar issue of Field and Stream magazine (September 1922) which includes an article by Major Lawrence Mott (Jordan Lawrence Mott IV (1881–1931)), titled "A Morning with Killer Whales," pp. 340ff. In discussing Killer Whales (Orca), it compares their coloration to the "strange" ship camouflage in World War I, and even to the costume of a harlequin. Here's the excerpt—

In the dull light the sharp black, and the very white white of the fish markings made them seem as grotesque creatures from some unknown sphere—and they also reminded one of the strange ways that paint was applied to ships' sides—for the purposes of camouflage—during the late war. The curious part of it was that no two of the Killers were marked alike—as far as we could see—and, at times, one or more of them passed us not forty feet away! Some had long white stripes—mid-body. Others had splashes of white all along their sides. A large bull…had a white saddle just abaft his back fin… Another's head was almost entirely white, and still another was evenly marked in black and white—much as the costume of a Pierrot.

•••

Henry David Thoreau, Journal (1850)—

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

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Friday, November 28, 2025

before camouflage / modernists denigrated as crazy

Above Full-page article on Futurism in The Sun (New York), February 25, 1912.

•••

WAY TO TREAT THEM in The Stanstead Journal (Stanstead, Quebec), March 25, 1926—

"The way to treat cubism and dadaism and surrealism and all the other catch-penny fads is to laugh at them," sald [Guy] Pene du Bois [1884-1958], the art critic, at a dinner in New York.

"A super-realistic painter was giving an exhibition. He buttonholed a well-dressed chap—a good prospect, as they say in the business world—and led him up to a picture and began:

"'This will show you, old man, the thing I'm after. We super-realists, you see, strive for the purgation of the superfluous, we paint esoterically and not exotically, portraying nothing but the aura or inner urge. Do you follow me?'

"'Follow you?' said the prospect. 'Gosh, I'm ahead of you. I came out of the bug house last Monday.'"

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Thursday, November 27, 2025

familiar examples of camouflage in modern motordom

Monte Sohn [later inventor of Borden's trademark Elsie the Cow], in the Washington Times. Saturday, September 1, 1917, Final Edition, p. 6—

Camouflage? Pish! Motorists have known it for years. For almost a dozen calendars, owners of cars have camouflaged license numbers before invading hostile territory in which the wily robber baron had his speed trap by the simple—as the writers say—expedient of sprinkling it with oil. Mrs. Nature, aided by the dust of the road, did the rest.

Then there are the pietry cutouts they slip on small cars which makes the veriest purr sound like the evening ensemble on the western front.

Special bodies have contributed much to the scheme of camouflage as motordom has known it. Some of these most effectually disguise a car. One particular body, with a pointed radiator and bright brass fittings makes a light car look exactly like a Ford.

Goggles. Are they not splendid camouflage!

And who would suspect that a motorcycle with a lady on the rear would have a country bull with a star on his suspenders riding on the front seat?

Camouflage!

Very ancient stuff.

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Native American camouflage / hidden in animal skins

Above Engraving by Dutch publisher Theodor de Bry (1591), based on a drawing by French artist Jacques LeMoyne de Morgues (c. 1533-1588), made during explorations of what is now Florida in the 1560s. It documents the use of animal skins for disguise, as described below by LeMoyne.

The Indians hunt deer in a way we have never seen before. They hide themselves in the skin of a very large deer which they have killed some time before. They place the animal's head upon their own head, looking through the eye holes as through a mask. In this disguise they approach the deer without frightening them. They choose the time when the animals come to drink at the river, shooting them easily with bow and arrow.

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Monday, November 24, 2025

will shoe makers soon decree that shoes be dissimilar

Above Giacomo Balla, Sketches for Futurist clothing (1914). See Caroline Galambosova, How Italian Futurism Influenced Fashion (2025).

•••

Anon, SHOES DIFFER IN COLOR from The Davenport Democrat and Leader (Davenport IA) on March 1, 1925, p. 3—

Futurism, cubism or some other art complex has descended upon French custom boot makers, who insist that they set the styles in women's shoes for the world. These boot makers all are of one mind in turning out symmetrical footwear. The first models of this year styles were shown, a few weeks ago. They seemed freakish, but the boot makers have carried their original ideas further until now one side of a shoe Is quite different, not only in design, but in color, from the other side. Humorists are speculating whether the makers will not soon decree that right and left shoes be entirely dissimilar.

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Sunday, November 23, 2025

how to be a futurist —and the birth of modernist snow

Above A British satirical cartoon about Futurism, published in 1912, one year in advance of the American Armory Show (first US exhibit of Modern Art), and two years before the formation (by the French Army) of a wartime camouflage section. Disruptive camouflage would thereafter be commonly said to have come from Futurism, Cubism and Vorticism.

•••

Anon, THE SNOWSCAPE: Revelation of Modern Art Not Futurism, Cubism or Other Cosmic Urge, but Phase of Nature, reprinted from the New York Herald in St. Joseph News-Press on January 8, 1923—

The great revelation of modern art is not futurism, cubism, vorticism, or any other of the Freudian cosmic urges. Movements of that sort most always belong strictly to the self-elected heirs of an impredicable posterity.

The revelation of modern art is snow. From the brilliant palette of today a new mantle of pleasure has fallen upon the consciousness of cultivated perception lighter and more lovely than the past ever dreamed.

Snow to the Greeks and Romans was merely something cool to put in a beverage. Among the Italian primitives and through the Renaissance snow scarcely existed save on some background mountain top. Here and there a later Dutchman accepted it as a necessary adjunct to a winter genre. But for the most part art excluded it through a convention almost as rigid as that by which the Japanese printmakers ignored shadows.

The Japanese, of course, loved snow and filled their designs with It. But it was never more than spacing or applied white lead. And the snow blindness of Western art persisted far into the last century. Imagine a snow scene by Corot. Some men, perhaps, were attempting it, especially religious painters, who required it to chill their lost sheep, but only in the Christmas card kind of way until Sisley discovered that Paris streets became in winter an opalescent wonder.

And that is precisely the vital modern discovery—that snow is not white. Faint rose, azure, orchid, lavender, primrose, pearl, or any possible combination in the higher keys it may be, but blank white, never! The sky Itself is not more varied or richer in hue or texture. No one who has ever studied a Redfield, for example. or one of the Swedish, can continue to think of the winter landscape as a dull white sheet of other than a prismatic Persian carpet replete with glorious astonishments.

Modern art has excelled in this alone. Snow is probably the only phase of nature that is being painted better and more sympathetically today than ever before. And because the artist is an interpreter who walks only a few feet ahead of his generation thousands upon thousands of us will look from our windows this winter upon a shimmering rainbow tinted world our fathers never knew.

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is that a woman shampooing her cornfield?—say what!

Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette's Letter from London, "River Reflections" in THE SKETCH, June 5, 1918, p. 276—

[I am reminded of] a little true yarn which of course is not apropos (oh, not at all!) but which may make you grin. It is a tale of one of yous, a pre-war painter, a famous one of the future. When war broke out he left his velvet coat for khaki, and went off whistling. He got wounded and was sent back home to a wife who objected to his pipe, and would tidy his studio and took unto herself the right to choose his models! He stood it for a little while, after which he tried to get back into the Army. The doctors, however, would not pass him for active service. A friend in authority advised him to apply for camouflage work, and obligingly took a few of his canvases to show the Red-Capped-One who Decideth one of the Futurist masterpieces.

"Humph, call that painting? What is it, anyway?"

"A woman shampooing her hair, Sir."

"Hair, is it? Looks more like a cornfield to me."

"Well, Sir, isn't that camouflage?"

And the Futurist one was fortunate, and is now camouflaging unflaggingly.

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Friday, November 21, 2025

Dan Campion / camouflage, surrealism and satiric wit

Dan Campion, The Mirror Test

At a recent book reading, I was fortunate to meet an Iowa City-based writer named Dan Campion. We had an interesting conversation, and he kindly shared a copy of his recent book of poetry, The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024).

As an artist and designer, I was immediately drawn to the cover (shown here, designed by Marc Vincenz, using an image credited to Vincenz, Jake Quart and Sonia Santos), which—like the poetry it illustrates—works by a finely hewn balancing act between clarity and confusion.

Ambiguity at its finest pervades Dan Campion's wonderful poems. I myself, as an addict of clarion vision, as well as its famous subversion in the varieties of camouflage, stopped abruptly in his book at Blaze Orange, a quietly elegant comment about the irony of vision, its enablement, yet also its prevention. Here is the complete text of that poem, reprinted with the permission of its author (copyright © Dan Campion)—

Blaze orange, the opposite of camouflage,

creates a bold, conspicuous mirage

of safety, as if iridescence could

not stain with hemoglobin red nor would

it disappear completely under snow

that rushes down with vicious undertow

nor fail to stop or slow a motorist

who'll flat refuse the breathalyzer test.

We bought my blaze orange T-shirt late one year

to spare me being taken for a deer

while walking through the woods. It's comical.

But even so, at least once every fall

I pull it from the bottom of the drawer

and put it on and venture out, secure.

Only recently, maybe ten days before I met Dan Campion, I had given a talk for a conservation group, about animal camouflage, in which one of the slides I showed was that of blaze orange hunter's garb. As for Dan Campion himself, I didn't recognize the name. Only later did I realize that in fact he was the author of a book I so enjoyed, years ago, about the humorous writings of Peter De Vries (1910-1993), titled Peter De Vries and Surrealism, a must read.

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C A M O U P E D I A

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Friday, December 12, 2025

Thursday, December 11, 2025

Sunday, December 7, 2025

Thursday, December 4, 2025

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

Sunday, November 30, 2025

Friday, November 28, 2025

Thursday, November 27, 2025

Monday, November 24, 2025

Sunday, November 23, 2025

Friday, November 21, 2025

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