Camouflage Exhibit at Spy Museum Opens in March

Exhibition Catalog Cover

I am pleased that I was asked to write the introduction to the catalog for a major upcoming exhibition at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. Titled Camouflage: Designed to Deceive, the exhibit opens on March 1, 2026, and will remain on view for three years.

The catalog / book can be preordered at online book sites, and tickets are available in advance on the museum's website.

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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 / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

a panoply of cartoonists' views of WWI camouflage

Roy R. Behrens © 2026

 

alas, Grace Ripley's camouflaged gown has arrived

Ruth St. Denis in costume (NYPL)

Anon, "TIS HERE! THE CAMOUFLAGE GOWN! FAIR ARTIST HOOVERIZES DRESS in Oakland Tribune (Oakland CA), September 2, 1927—

It's here!

The "Camouflage Gown," last word in elusiveness, has arrived. It Is women's contribution to the war economics of today. and the first example of "Hooverized dress."

No matter what the fashions may be in the future, the "Camouflage Gown" will never be conspicuous by reason of being "out of style." No matter what women wear, no matter what the modes of the future will bring, the "Camouflage gown" will always be en rapport.

For the "Camouflage gown," according to its inventor, will never go out of style! Fashions may come and fashions may go, but the owner of this latest invention in feminine accoutrement will not have to pay the bill. She'll just don the "camouflage"—and laugh at the madly changing modes!

The "Camouflage gown" is not invisible, like a camouflaged cannon or lamp-post or army mule. It is just invisible as to details, color and beside other gowns. In other words, everything about it is inconspicuous—and it never can be singled out as being different from the rest, though it is.

Miss Grace Ripley [later on the faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design] inventor of, the new gown, is a visitor here after having been for some time past in Los Angeles designing tor Ruth St. Denis. Her home is in Boston, whee she is famous as a designer of wonderful costumes. She is at present at the St. Francis in San Francisco on a visit, and has promised several of the new gowns to local society women.

"A gown can be so perfectly proportioned, following ancient lines," she declares, "by modernizing the old Greek costumes, and so perfectly harmonized in color, that it can never grow out of style. I have been experimenting, and have gowns that have been in fashion for years.

"In this day of conservation I have decided to offer this system of gown design as my contribution to the war program. It women dress less—that is, more cheaply—they can save material and money—and my system will do it without losing them any of their beauty."

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

German soldiers unseen except when surrendering

WWI German artillery camouflage using overhead netting

Clair Kenamore, From Vauquois Hill to Exermont; a history of the thirty-fifth division of the United States. St Louis MO: Guard Publishing 1919, p. 111—

The invisibility of the Germans was one of their strong points. Their camouflage was good, and they took advantage of every possibility for concealment. Some of our men never saw a German except those who had surrendered. A typical experience was that of Sergeant C.G. McCorkle of E Company, of the 138th, who fought from the "jumping off" day up to the 29th, when he was wounded, but in all that time he never saw a German with a rifle in his hands. All he saw either had their hands high in the air, surrendering, or were using them to work a machine gun.

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

irregular streaks of black and white painted across it

Unidentified WWI American ship with dazzle camouflage

Edward Alva Trueblood, In the Flash Ranging Service: Observations of an American Soldier during His Service with the AEF in France. Sacramento CA: News Pub, 1919—

All the boats in our fleet were camouflaged. The King of Italy had great irregular streaks of black and white painted across it. One of the boats in our fleet had a really remarkable picture of a sinking ship painted on its side. Another had two ships painted on its side and was camouflaged to look like two vessels instead of one. While the camouflaged ships appeared strange at first, we soon were used to the unusual appearance, and thought nothing of them. A camouflaged vessel is visible to the naked eye, almost as plain as one that has not been daubed with paint, but it is through the mirrors of a periscope that the camouflage is effective. In reflecting the picture on the horizon, the mirrors lose some of the rays of light, so officers explained to me, hence the eyes of the periscope are unable to detect the camouflage.

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

camouflage egg / do not begrudge conscientious fowl

Grant Wood, The Appraisal (1931)

Anon, HERE AND THERE in Country Life, January 1919—

Just because the hen has somehow gotten the reputation for being a stupid, flighty, indecisive creature is no reason, it appears, for denying her the right to deep-seated likes and dislikes. And sometimes we find these where we would least expect them, as did the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station when it started an investigation into the relative efficiency of different kinds of nest eggs. As a result of exhaustive tests and careful compilation of data, it was found that above all other types of "camouflage egg" the hen prefers one made of plaster of paris; next in order of acceptability come wooden eggs; next after that real eggs; and lowest of all in popularity stand china eggs, probably the best known and most commonly used. By just what means the investigators interpreted the feelings of their subjects in the matter we do not know; nor does it matter. The point is: so long as the material used has no deleterious effect on the food or other value of the ultimate progeny of the bird, why begrudge the industrious, conscientious fowl the greatest possible solace and contentment during those weeks that she spends in calm, contemplative creation!

•••

Anon, CAMOUFLAGE IN THE WOOD in Brecon County Times, Neath Gazette and General Advertiser (Wales), September 7, 1918 (Supplement)—

The drafting of men for military service has brought to light some queer occupations, but surely none more out of the ordinary than that of the man who makes imitation pheasant eggs. A man before a Surrey Tribunal said his job was to make an egg which hoodwinked the sitting pheasant. The real eggs were transferred to a broody hen's keeping until near the time of hatching, and the hen pheasant kept at her job by means of the artificial "eggs." Then the real eggs were brought back to be hatched out by a mother who could look after them. These artificial "eggs," it seems, mislead the hen pheasant entirely, and cause foxes, hedgehogs and such marauders furiously to think. It seems rather like a yarn, but the Tribunal accepted it, and gave the man six months' exemption.

Also see: Mimicry, Metaphor and Mistake

can you find a camouflaged cat / an embedded figure

Above Can you find the camouflaged cat? A Victorian-era puzzle picture from The Strand Magazine.

•••

Roland Pertwee, "Camouflage" in The Strand Magazine, May 1917, p. 502—

For the benefit of those who may not be acquainted with what camouflage means, it might be truthfully described as a thin veil drawn over great events.

There are endless varieties of camouflage and endless uses to which it may be put. A great white road is concealed from the enemy lines by a hedge of thinly-plaited twigs—camouflage, An observation point hidden in the heart of a haystack—camouflage. A mighty gun masked by an awning of fishermen’s nets sprinkled with dead leaves—camouflage. A corpse brought in from No Man’s Land and replaced by a live man, who watches what is toward in the Hun trenches—again camouflage. But perhaps the subtlest variety of all is the kind that men and women devise to screen their real emotions from each other and the world.

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

geological dazzle painting / as in a certain small island

agate pattern

Author and exact source unknown, in Blackwood's Magazine, c1922—

[The appearance of a certain small island] is very remarkable. It consists of a rounded lump of hills, with three or four central conical peaks, seven hundred feet high. The lower parts, all completely barren, are striped. and patched, and barred with a geological "dazzle-painting" in ochre and red, brown, purple, and buff, while the surmounting cones, in strong contrast, are pure white. The whole effect is that of some monstrous pudding, standing on the blue-and-white plate of the sea, over whose apex has been poured (in pre-war days!) a large jug of thick cream.

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

I Never Met a Morphosis I Didn't Like / Smoke Dreams

Two British comic drawings (c1890s)

As I was growing up, adults used to discourage boys from smoking by saying, "Don't smoke or you'll turn into a cigarette." I never quite knew what that meant. But it was an ancient admonition, of the sort that I grew up on. I confirmed that about ten years ago, when I ran across a Victorian-era cartoon (it's the bottom row in the image above) in which (left to right) a smoking Cub Scout turns into a cigarette. Aha! Exactly as anticipated.

More recently, maybe ten days ago, I ran across another (no doubt British) cartoon, as seen in the upper row, in which a man (not a boy it seems) also becomes a cigarette. It even had a title that read THE EVOLUTION OF A CIGARETTE. No doubt a poke at Charles Darwin.

To me, these are of additional interest because they are Darwin-era examples of comic metamorphosis, which is of considerable interest. I have sometimes tried to write about that subject, not very successfully, and as recently as earlier this year, I gave an online talk about it, titled I Never Met a Morphosis I Didn't Like, as seen in the title slide below.

One might also benefit from my video on varieties of creativity, which is free to view online.

a slide talk on metamorphosis / Roy R. Behrens c2025

Alon Bement's 1925 article on illusions & camouflage

This five-page article on ship camouflage has now been posted online and can be downloaded as a pdf. Its author, American artist Alon Bement, was an important teacher of Georgia O'Keeffe at Columbia University, who served as a civilian camoufleur during World War I. We have blogged about him in the past. Here is the link.

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

Camouflaged Trench Digger in the War Zone / WWI

Above A World War I-era cover illustration for Scientific American by Howard Vachel Brown (1878-1945), titled "Camouflaged Trench Digger at Work in the War Zone." 

We've blogged about Howard V. Brown before, in part because he created an especially wonderful cover for Scientific American (March 1919) that shows a camouflage artist assessing the effectiveness of a ship model, painted in a dazzle camouflage scheme. Of additional interest is that Brown was a student of New York ship camouflage designer William Andrew Mackay, in the development of camouflage for the US Shipping Board, so he was well acquainted with testing devices like the one shown on that cover.

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

a wooden superstructure, we dazzle-painted the sides

Unidentified WWI truck camouflage

Cecil Day Lewis [father of actor Daniel Day Lewis], The Otterbury Incident. London: Putnam's Sons, 1948—

Just then I heard the rumble of the enemy tank coming down Abbey Lane to our right. To be absolutely accurate, it wasn't a rumble, but a clattering, squeaking noise, made chiefly by the old tireless bicycle wheels on which the tank ran. It was a wizard job, that tank. We'd built it in the school workshop. The superstructure was made of wood, and we'd dazzle-painted the sides: there was a bit of camouflage netting, which Ted had got from his brother in the Airborne, over the top of it, and a broom handle sticking out through a hole in the front for a gun. It held three people easily: the driver, who pedaled it; the gunner; and the tank captain. With its high, box-like shape, it really was more like an armored car, but we called it a tank.

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

cleverly hidden in cotton clouds / a cartoon camouflage

Back in 2019, we blogged about and reproduced the drawing from a wartime cartoon by British artist Bernard Hugh. Originally published in The Bystander, it was reprinted in Cartoons Magazine in 1917. It proposed an ingenious method of camouflaging an airplane while in flight: that it could be camouflaged by sandwiching it between large clumps of cloud-like cotton wool. Looks like a fine idea to me. Recently, I fed Hugh's cartoon drawing to an AI processor, and the image above is what it produced.

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

dragon fly camouflage / from muck to flashing colors

Poster © Roy R. Behrens 2019

American Nature-Study Society, The Nature-Study Review. Lancaster PA, November 1918—

The submarine and camouflage have their counterpart in the insect world. Children exploring ponds and creeks for animals for their aquarium circus often find a mud colored monster with an almost uncanny extension jaw. This common dweller below the water is the larva of the dragon fly. When an adult, it earns the name of "Swiftest of winged creatures." Then it is bedecked with flashing sapphire, emerald or garnet. In its nursery in the mud, however, its dress is camouflaged and is the color of the muck in which it awaits its next meal. Children delight in watching it use its extension jaw, which it shoots out to seize unsuspecting prey.

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

khaki-colored dash down the boulevard in Hollywood

Hollywood actor Wallace Reid

Anon, in Picture Magazine (March-July 1918)—

[Hollywood film star] Wallace Reid is busily engaged in studying the art of camouflage so he can paint his new khaki-colored speed demon in such a manner that he can dash down the boulevard without being seen by the ever-watchful eye of the speed cop.

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

camouflage as a less hazardous wartime assignment

US wartime camouflage in France, 1918

It is no surprise to learn that, in both world wars, draft eligible men in the US were apprehensive about the hazards of serving. A good number of them, maybe most, made an effort to be assigned to service roles that were less hazardous than serving as infantry in the trenches. Others, who had worked in civilian life in specialized vocations, were well-advised to look for ways to serve in the military equivalent of those same vocations.

Understandably, in World War I, when the formation was announced of an American Camouflage Corps, and artists were encouraged to apply, applications flooded in. 

We thought about this recently when we ran across a reference in the preface (by Anne Wintermute Lane) to The Letters of Franklin K. Lane (1864-1921) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1922), who served in the US Government when Woodrow Wilson was in office. In the preface, the author recalls that an initial difficulty in editing Lane's correspondence was that it took weeks to find and set aside "just the requests for patronage, for commissions, passports, appointments as chaplains, promotions, demands from artists who desired to work on camouflage…[and so on]."

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

Nov shmoz ka pop / WWI spurious wacko camouflage

an inept attempt at camouflage / WWI

Gene Ahern (originator in 1921 of the Our Boarding House comic strip featuring Major Hoople), "Ain't Nature Wonderful: Camouflage Still Yet" in Fort Wayne Sentinel, August 14, 1918, p. 3—

About this camouflage music, we juggle the camouflage art on themselves so they would be in their seventh heaven, and have their victims turning flip flaps. A book agent could waft into your office camouflaged as a puff of cigar smoke, and could annoy you with special offers, beautiful bindings, subscriptions, etc., and the only way to get rid of him is to purchase a piece of his stock, because you can't get a toe hold on him to throw him out because he's camouflaged invisible.

Insurance posts could wear the same harness, so you're in for it, fellow citizens, and the only exit for you is to take a try at the camouflage trick yourself.

F'rinstance: Have a 6x3 ebony box in your office and when an ill wind shows up, camouflage yourself like you just expired and fall into the silver-handled box and have on your fizz a camouflaged doesn't-he-look-natural expression.

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

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.

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

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."

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