RELATED VIDEO SERIES
Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?
Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
elegant patterns / allied with deplorable wartime death
iowa trickster makes photographic camouflage / 1919
Above These three photographs were a reader’s contribution to Popular Mechanics, where they were published in Vol 31 Issue 2 (1919) of that magazine. The photographs were taken by A.J. Viken of Waterloo, Iowa, as examples of makeshift camouflage. Here is the text he submitted—
Antonius J. Viken, Waterloo IA / 1919
Practical examples of “camouflage” are shown in these three photographs. In the upper left-hand corner the man has adopted an effective, if somewhat strenuous means of making his appearance blend with his surroundings [by standing on his head, his belt line coincides with the horizon]. To the right, the small rider on the horse’s back is almost indistinguishable against the background of sky and trees, while the lower picture shows how difficult it may be to distinguish such a striking object as a goat.
A.J. Viken (Antonius Johnson Viken) [Skinderviken] was a Norwegian-American photographer. Born in Norway on October 4, 1885, he came to the US in April 1911, and became a naturalized citizen (in Chicago) in 1924. He registered for the draft on September 12, 1918, at Waterloo, where he and his wife Johanna (nee Hansen) Viken lived at 1123 Mulberry Street. As a photographer, he was employed by Louis A. Wangler at 227 East 4th Street in that city. In 1919, when his humorous camouflage photographs were published, his residence was listed as Waterloo, but in later years he also lived in Sioux City IA, Chicago, Jackson Heights NY, and on Long Island, New York. He died in Nassau NY on September 26, 1959.
Among Viken’s associates was photographer and inventor Donald Cameron Biedler (1885-1943). In 1924, both men listed their residence as 864 Buckingham Place, Chicago, in the vicinity of Wrigley Field.
Beidler was a well-known photographer of wealthy, socially prominent clients (and their children) in Chicago, and later in Manhasset, Long Island NY. Originally from Mt. Pulaski IL, Beidler was a grandson of Jabez Capps, the town's founder. In collaboration with A.J. Viken, he was also invented a special motor-driven children's portrait twin camera, called the Beidler-Viken camera (see below), which they patented in 1925. Although it consisted of two cameras, side-by-side, it was not designed to make stereoscopic images. Instead, it was operated by two photographers, one of whom maintained exact focus on the (squirming) child being photographed, while the other tripped the shutter at the opportune moment. Beidler's Chicago studio was in the Lyon and Healy Building at 64 East Jackson Boulevard, circa 1920. In 1929, he and Viken established the Beidler-Viken Studios in Manhasset on Long Island. Fourteen years later, Beidler died of a sudden heart attack, while Viken lived until 1959. In Biedler’s obituary, his partner Viken was described as “a man highly skilled in the mechanical end of photography.”
Between the years 1925 through 1936, Antonius J. Viken and Donald C. Beider worked together on a number of technical devices related to photography, including various camera stands (1925, 1930), a camera tiltback adjustment (1931), and their Beidler-Viken camera (1931). But Viken obtained patents independently for other inventions, such as a film hanger (1926), a hood for camera finders (1929), a tripod head (1931), and a film holder and hanger (1936). In 1931, Viken also worked with a bacteriologist, acetone expert, and Chicago physician named Dr. Nathaniel Frutkow (described in a research document as “a somewhat quackish physician specializing in pneumonia”) in patenting a diagnostic table and therapeutic lamp.
The following is a list, arranged by date, of some (probably not all) of the patented inventions that are attributed to Viken, Beider and Viken, or Viken and Frutkow. Full pdf patent documents can be found online by searching Google Patents.
Stand for camera and the like, 25Aug1925, w/Donald C. Beidler. Film hanger, 4May1926, 1,583,708. Hood for camera finders and the like, 26Nov1929, 1,737,038. Camera and camera stand, 14Jan1930, w/Donald C. Beidler, 1.743,184. Tripod, 10Mar1931, 1,795,747. Tiltback for cameras and the like, 17Mar1931, w/Donald C. Beidler, 1,796,315. Tripod head for portrait camera, 30Jun1931, 1,812,614. Diagnostic table, 15Sep1931, w/Nathaniel Frutkow, 1,823,534. Therapeutic Lamp, 15Sep1931, w/Nathaniel Frutkow, 1,823,535. Camera and the like, 24Nov1931, w/Donald C. Beidler, 1,833,668. Film holder and hanger, 21Jan1936, 2,028,262.
Friday, June 23, 2023
scientific explanation of the wartime use of camouflage
Above Front page of the Magazine Section, The Tampa Sunday Tribune (Tampa FL), September 15, 1918.
SEE ALSO
Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk)
Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk)
Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)
Wednesday, June 21, 2023
camouflage / everyone's doing it, including hollywood
Above A page from Photo-Play Journal, December 1917, p. 25, featuring an article called CAMOUFLAGE: Everyone’s Doing It, Including the Moving Pictures. In an earlier blog post, we reproduced the article’s text, but not this image of the page.
SEE ALSO
Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk)
Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk)
Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Ellsworth Kelly in relation to overhead garnished nets
Above Cover of Art News magazine (restored), November 1942, with a photograph of personnel and artillery broken up by the shadows of an overhanging net, in which canvas strips (or other materials) have been interwoven. This was widely practiced during both World Wars, and was sometimes known as "umbrella camouflage." For more information on this technique, see "Kelly and Camouflage" (p. 115) in E.C. Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973 (as shown below). Kelly was a US Army camoufleur during WWII.
SEE ALSO
Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk)
Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk)
Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)
intentional duality for concealment and differentation
Camouflage is ostensibly a functional, practical phenomenon, adopted by the armed forces of every country for the purposes of concealment. But over the years it has in fact been transformed into a pattern for differentation. Every national army has its own camouflage pattern, and uses it to tell friend from foe. At the same time that camouflage tries to make its wearers invisible, it is also generating a highly visible signal, intended to identify them to their own side.
patterns in nature as sources of camouflage design
Jean-Philippe Lenclos, as interviewed in Supergraphics: transforming space: graphic design for walls, buildings and spaces. London: Unit Editions, 2010, p. 293—
Crazy Lace Agate (Pixabay)
Q: Your work has alway encompassed strong graphic elements, where does this interest come from?
A: From the start of my studies at the École Boulle, I was fascinated by the graphic elements I found in the urban landscape, such as signs and road markings on the street. The broad stripes used in road markings, for example, are graphical elements that I admired: despite their extreme simplification, I liked their strength of expression. Furthermore, we would go to the aquariums in Paris to draw all sorts of strange fish, which, by their colors and their fabulous “graphism,” made me aware of the extreme freedom of patterns on their bodies. Similarly, the rhythms and forms found on the surfaces of minerals and plants have always inspired artistic creation. | have always observed my surroundings. This brings us also to camouflage used in military hardware. All these observations are at the source of my own research and contribute to a visual mythology that has fed my work.
Bark mimic moth (Pixabay)
Monday, June 19, 2023
concealment of a california aircraft plant during WWII
•••
Donald Albrecht, World War II and the American Dream. National Building Museum, and MIT Press, 1995, p 196—
Because the [Donald Douglas Aircraft] plant was dangerously near the coast, its buildings were camouflaged so that enemy aviators would see only what appeared to be an unbroken stretch of suburban subdivisions. Paint was applied to simulate streets and houses, and nearby trees were trimmed to the height of the plant buildings to present a uniform appearance from the air. The Santa Monica factory featured an even more elaborate deception scheme, with canvas houses, fake trees, and camouflage netting covering the entire plant.
Sunday, June 18, 2023
cubist style condemned as too germanic or boche
Mary Sperling McAuliffe, When Paris sizzled: the 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and their friends. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, page 52—
Monument by WWI camoufleurs Mare, Süe and Jaulmes
Given the [Paris WWI Victory] parade’s many admirable qualities, it was unfortunate that the work of art meant to commemorate the war’s fallen soldiers at the Fétes de la Victoire came to a bad end. The privilege of creating a memorial for the war dead had gone to three men: the painter André Mare, along with his associates, architect Louis Süe and designer Gustave Jaulmes, all three former members of wartime camouflage units at the front. Their creation [shown above, on July 14, 1919, to the right of the Arc de Triomphe], a huge gilded cénotaph, or tomblike monument, thrust upward in the form of a gigantic bier, its sides decorated with Winged Victories, each backed by a pair of real wings from French warplanes. It had been a mammoth undertaking and was unquestionably meant to be patriotic, but critics fiercely derided it as Germanic or “Boche” art. Mare was known for his Cubist style—indeed, he had been painting French artillery with Cubist designs when he was badly wounded at the front—and “l’affaire du cénotaphe” was immediately perceived by Mare’s supporters as an attack by traditionalists on Cubism.
RELATED LINKS
Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk)
Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk)
Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)
Henry Miller on Abraham Rattner as WWI camoufleur
Henry Miller, Remember to Remember. New York: New Directions, 1947, p. 55—
Abraham Rattner and Henry Miller (c1930)
It was in the second battle of the Marne, at Chateau Thierry, while directing the camouflage operations of the 75’s, that [American artist Abraham] Rattner was rendered hors de combat by a concussion which sent him flying into a shell hole. The injury to his back which he then received he still suffers from. Transferred to Camp [de] Souge (near Bordeaux) he took charge of the School of Camouflage which had just been started. All the camouflage work undertaken at the front, and at the experimental field near Nancy, had to do with the utter absence of paint and painted color shapes (known as dazzle painting). His job was to construct actual concealments, structures made of poles, chickenwire netting, garlands of tinted burlap, trees, mud, plants, dummy cannons, and so on. Dazzle painting proved to be too limited a form of deception, ineffective because it did not conceal the basic structural shadow forms. The basis of camouflage was to fool the camera’s eye.
I mention this phase of his [Rattner’s] war experience because, studying some of his earlier work, I had naively concluded that elements of the camouflage technique had crept into his painting. A quality which I often described as “flou” made these canvases contrast sharply with his later work in which the structural element is prominent. It was perhaps the prepossession with disturbing and often dislocating effects of light and shade which created the association. I am particularly fond of the work of this period in which it seems that his watery nature gains the ascendance, for Rattner is a strange mixture of fire and water. In these canvases the human figure blends with the patterns of nature in a sort of shadowy, translucent marine-scape.…
to camouflage the inside—so I don't know where I am
Above Roland Davies, WWII British Short Sunderland Flying Boat.
Roland Davies
•••
James Thrall Soby, “Genesis of a Collection” in Art In America, Vol 49 No 1, 1961, p. 79—
[Abstract Expressionist artist] Matta [Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren] was born in Chile and therefore presumably exempt from American military service. Nevertheless, he worried about being drafted, and came to me in the Museum [of Modern Art] to ask whether he could be assigned to camouflaging tanks if he were called up. I explained that this sort of camouflage was less commonly used in the Second World War than in the First because of improvements in aerial reconnaissance. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t want to camouflage the outside of a tank so the enemy can’t find it. I want to camouflage the inside, so I won’t know where I am.”
RELATED LINKS
Cook: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive
Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film VersionThursday, June 8, 2023
officer's headquarters disguised as refreshment stand
•••
CAMOUFLAGE ARTIST CONVERT LEAR’S POST INTO ROAD STAND in Reading Eagle (Reading PA) September 12, 1941—
Somewhere in Louisiana with the Second Army (AP)—People just walk up and demand service—the place looks exactly like a refreshment stand. But the structure, on closer inspection, turns out to be Lieutenant General Benjamin Lear’s headquarters, artfully camouflaged in cloth.
It solves the problem of placing the directive headquarters of the Second Army in a spot close to telephonic communications without being too conspicuous.
The make-believe soft drink stand can be moved quickly and the general with it. So it violates no secret to reveal this fact as the enemy would have to inspect every refreshment stand in Louisiana to find it.
The job brought to light the work of the heretofore highly specialized group of soliders—the 8th Engineers Battalion, the first camouflage engineer unit ever formed in the army. It is quartered regularly at Fort Belvoir VA and commmanded by Major Ralph Lincoln.
Half-Skilled Workers
Now, the goal of virtually every artist and sculptor taken into the army, the battalion already has 50 per cent of its personnel professionally skilled workers. Each of the nation’s four armies will have similar units within the next few months.
The prize project in camouflage now underway is one by Private First Class Joseph Arasimowicz [1917-], of Pittsburgh, which he calls “new fall colors for snipers’ suits.” This consists of baggy, pajama-like uniforms dyed various shades of reds, browns and green to match the seasonal foliage the sniper picks to hide in. Arasimowicz claims a man in one of these suits is almost invisible at 30 yards.
To reduce worry for soldiers sleeping in the field, Corporal Constantine Dallas [b.1915], of Pittsburgh, who exhibited paintings throughout the East, is trying to figure out how to camouflage a pup tent so airmen overhead can’t spot it.
To cover up an entire sawmill, Corporal F[orest] C. Bess [1912-1977], former Bay City TX landscape gardener, has a crew busy stretching wires from tree to tree, from which bushes are suspended to look like the top of a forest.
The camouflage troops look on these jobs as those of “life savers,” for the reason the less the enemy can see the soldiers the less their chance of killing them.
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
1928 tassle camouflage women's beach wear in france
CAMOUFLAGE FOR SHAPELESS LEGS in The Boston Advertiser, September 9, 1928—
Anon (signature unreadable)
A new Deauville* fashion is for women to wear tassels eight inches long hanging from the kneecap. Maiden ladies must wear pink tassels, while married women wear blue.
* a seaside resort in Normandy in northwestern France
new camouflage method devised by french lieutenant
•••
Below I have no idea what this cryptic news article is talking about. It sounds fascinating—if it were only true.
NEW CAMOUFLAGE INVENTED in Greensburg Daily Tribune (Greensburg IN), April 13, 1932—
PARIS (UP)—A French lieutenant who served through the World War [WWI] has just demonstrated the advantages of his new camouflage invention whereby in a short time, a pedestrian or soldier can be transformed into a shock of grain, heap of leaves, a bunch of newspapers, tree stump or what not while walking. His names is George [probably Georges] Félix, and his invention consists of a kind of net that weighs less than a pound, and when not used for camouflage purposes can be employed in numerous other ways.
camouflage, infrared photography, aerial surveillance
In a Wikipedia biography, it is noted that (in 1930) Captain Stevens “took the first photograph of the Earth in a way that the horizon’s curvature is visible,” and that, two years later, he “took the first photograph of the Moon’s shadow projected onto the Earth during a solar eclipse…”
Friday, June 2, 2023
WWI Ship Camouflage Artist Puts Bullet Into Brain
CAMOUFLAGE MAN SUICIDE, Naval Artist Puts Bullet Into Brain, in Boston Post, March 27, 1919—
Magazine Cover, Arthur Hutchins
The body of Arthur Hutchins [1887-1919], 32 years old, a talented young artist, who had been missing from his home in Wollaston since early Monday, was found lying in his studio at 52 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester, yesterday morning, with a bullet wound in his head.
The discovery of his body was made by a boy in the office of Joe Mitchell Chapple, who occupies an office in the same building, and to whom Mrs. Hutchins telephoned yesterday in an endeavor to locate the missing man, after a search for him among relatives and friends had proved fruitless.
Mr. Hutchins had done camouflage work in the service of the navy during the war and since his dicharge a short time ago, had been engaged in making drawings for several magazines. Twice during the past few months he had suffered from attacks of influenza, and his general health had been poor since leaving his work in the navy. A wife and two children survive.
See other accounts of same incident here