WW1 Commonwealth Ship Camouflage

buy online

Above Dazzle-camouflaged British Commonwealth transport ship SS Australford as photographed by Allan C. Green (c1918). Digitally adjusted. Original in collection of Victoria State Library AU.

•••

American artist Thomas Hart Benton, quoted in Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde and the Great War. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1994, p. 193—

[Working as a camoufleur during WW1] was the most important thing that, so far, I had ever done for myself as an artist. The mechanical contrivances of buildings, the new airplanes, the blimps, the dredges, the ships of the base, because they were so interesting in themselves, tore me away from all my grooved habits, from my play with colored cubes and classic attenuations, from my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns.

detail