Walt Kuhn, the Penguin Club, and ship camouflage

USS Santa Teresa (1918)

Above USS Santa Teresa (1918), painted in dazzle camouflage scheme Type 14, Design E. 

•••

Manya Denenberg Rudina (1895-1975), DEATH STOPS THE SCULPTOR’S HAND: Sensations of an Artist’s Model, in The Pittsurgh Press, May 24, 1919, p. 6 (Chapter XXVII)—

[During World War I] Dozens of my friends entered successively the army or navy and practically all of them eventually went into one or the other division of the camouflage corps. One well-known artist for whom I had posed many times enlisted as a common seaman in the navy and spent his time swinging over the sides of ships putting on the streaks of paint to conceal them from periscopes of the submarines. Many an evening has seen a motley gathering of artists in uniform at the Penguin• [in New York], for many of them were stationed at the navy headquarters here and could get evenings off when their work was done.

We heard in confidence many of the devices that were being used to foil the U-boats, and the artists discussed this phase of the war, and the concealment of military works by means of camouflage, as earnestly as experts in ordinance and engineering discussed their problems of the war. 

• The Penguin Art Club on East 15th Street in New York, had been founded by American artist Walt Kuhn in 1917.

•••

Below A ship in the process of being painted in a dazzle camouflage scheme.

Note There are no full-color photographs of WWI ship camouflage. The originals of the black and white images above have been digitally “colorized” using AI software. While their light / dark values are accurate, the choice and location of colors, even when plausible, may not be literally correct.