american camouflage expert, both artist and scientist

Charles Bittinger (1946)

Above This is a news photograph of American artist Charles Bittinger (1879-1970). We have blogged about him in the past because he was instrumental in US naval camouflage during both World Wars. 

While trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was not a typical artist, because, as a graduate of MIT, he was equally interested in science, especially physics and optics. Among his achievements were projects in which he made use of both his artistic and scientific training, of which camouflage was one. 

Incidently, he was also the half-brother of the Modernist painter John Marin. He was also a friend and colleague of American Impressionist and ship camoufleur Everett Longley Warner, and was probably responsible for Warner’s wartime assignment to ship camouflage.

This photograph was published in a front page news article (End of War Camouflage Seen By A-Bomb Artist) in the Honolulu Advertiser on May 19, 1946. Bittinger (who was in his late 60s at the time) was passing through Hawaii on government assignment. He was on his way to a test site on the Bikini Atoll, to paint on site the explosion of an atomic bomb. In an interview, he explained that “he would make a few sketch notes just after the missile falls but that most of his painting would be from memory.”

Earlier, Bittinger had taken on other related assignments. In 1937, while working with the National Georgraphic Society, he had painted on site a total eclipse of the sun, which lasted only four minutes. He had also experimented with painted murals that were made with fluorescent paint. When viewed under daylight illumination, they appear to one kind of picture, but look like a totally different scene when viewed in ultraviolet light.

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

WWI woman camoufleur Margaret Anthony Young

Until recently, I don’t think I had heard of an American industrial / interior designer named Margaret Anthony Young. Originally from Jacksonville FL, she studied Applied Design at Pratt Institute in New York (1913-15), and at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (now affiliated with George Washington University) in Washington DC (1916-17). She also studied with the American Impressionist painter William von Schlegell, and worked as a designer for Herter Looms, a famous tapestry and textile design firm that was founded in 1909 by Albert Herter.

This is of particular interest here because Margaret Young is said to have served in the Camouflage Corps of the US Navy, in 1917-18 as a Yeoman First Class. That claim is surprising because we have often written about the limited participation of American women in WWI camouflage (including naval camouflage). We’ve also produced a video talk, and curated an exhibition (see view of entrance banner above) on the same subject. 

But we’ve never run across a navy camoufleur named Margaret Anthony Young. At the same time, we probably shouldn’t be surprised. Very few women were permitted to serve in other than civilian positions (women were still unable to vote), and we do have several photographs of unidentified women working in the Design Subsection at US Navy headquarters in Washington DC. Beginning in 1926, Young was the owner of The Little Gallery in Jacksonville, while also working as an interior designer. In the 1946 edition of Who’s Who in America, she is listed as the second wife of academic administrator Milton Haight Turk.

ship from which Hart Crane committed suicide / 1932

USS Orizaba

The American Modernist poet, Hart Crane, took his own life at age 32, by jumping from a ship into the Gulf of Mexico while en route to New York in 1932. 

Shown here are two views of the ship that he was traveling on, the USS Orizaba. At the time, however, it would not have been camouflaged. These are photographs from World War I (c1918), at which time it had been painted in a multi-colored “dazzle camouflage” scheme. As is evident, the camouflage patterns on the ship’s two sides are substantially different, as was standard wartime practice. The top image shows the port side, while the other shows the starboard.

USS Orizaba

As noted by art historian Henry Adams in The Golden Age of Cleveland Art: 1900 to 1945 (Cleveland OH: Cleveland History Center, 2022), Crane grew up in northeastern Ohio, where his father was a restaurant owner and candy manufacturer. In view of Crane’s suicide, it is a darkly comic irony that his father was the inventor of the candy known as the Life Saver.

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

Burnell Poole's paintings of WWI camouflaged ships

Portrait of Burnell Poole (unknown photographer)

In an issue dated March 28, 1920, an illustrated article appeared in the New York Tribune, titled "Burnell Poole—Painter of Ships." The subject of the article was an accomplished naval artist (sometimes known as Bert Poole), who had been born in Boston in 1884. The full text of the article is as follows—

From the time he was knee high to a grasshopper, Burnell Poole has made ships his hobby with a special passion for the gray sea fighters of Uncle Sam’s navy. To be a painter of ships has been his ambition to have his canvases technically correct, his ideal. Every now and then during the past several years he has managed through friends in Washington to arrange a trip with the Atlantic fleet. And these privileged occasions have been the joy of his life. Armed with speed camera, sketch pad and paint box he has put to sea as the navy's guest. And hundreds of wonderful photos, detailed sketches and unusual canvases were the result.

When we finally went to war, Poole foresaw the wonderful opportunity of studying the great steel seagoing monsters under actual fire. The rules of the navy were unbelievably strict against admitting anyone with a camera or a sketching pencil. It was only through his personal acquaintance with Secretary Daniels and the Navy Department's knowledge of his peculiar fitness for the work that the red tape was broken. He was permitted to go to sea not as an artist, but as a writer. Once the way was opened to him there was no form of martial maritime craft that escaped his attentive and technical eye. With notebook and pencil in hand he went through naval engagements on the high seas. The submarine, submarine chaser, a British mine-sweeping trawler, all these he saw in actual service. Even the air stations were not passed by.

Burnell Poole, RMS Mauritania (starboard view) 1919

 

The result of this unusual experience is a notebook as unique as it is interesting and valuable. For as far as is known, Burnell Poole was the only American artist who served in this capacity during the war. Especially prized is his precise and detailed record of all the various forms of the fascinating art of naval camouflage.

Burnell Poole, USS Leviathan (in background) escorted

His adventure over, Poole has settled down to the important task of transforming long columns of memoranda into colorful canvases. A task for a very conjurer! The deep blue green of the sea, the dark gray lines of the sky fantastically relieved by the brilliantly camouflaged dreadnaughts. But, however strongly tempted for the sake of an artistic effect, Poole never wavers from the mathematical accuracy with which each porthole, gun turret, smokestack and wireless apparatus is pictured. In this lies the historical value of his paintings. Mr. Poole's wide circle of admirers is looking forward to the little exhibition he's planning to have as soon as enough of his war canvases are ready for display.

Burnell Poole, RMS Mauretania (port side view) 1919

 

In April that year, a small exhibition of Poole’s watercolor paintings was featured in Boston in the print room at Goodspeed's Bookshop. As noted in an article called "Wayside Sketches" in the Boston Transcript (April 10, 1920), it is said that “perhaps nothing in the collection will interest the viewer more than three or four small drawings of camouflaged vessels.” These prints and drawings came about, the article notes, as a result of “his recent engagement with the United States Shipping Board as a marine camoufleur…”

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

extraordinary dazzle-related artworks / Michael Miller

Michael Miller, Counterintelligence

Beginning with World War I and the adoption of abstract disruptive patterns for ship camouflage (called dazzle camouflage), it has been commonly assumed that these may have been influenced by Modernists, such as Cubists, Futurists and Vorticists. While there is some measure of truth in that, such patterns were nearly always designed by artists whose pre-war studio work was academic, pictorial, or, at best, impressionistic. It might make more sense to suppose that dazzle patterns were a great post-war influence on abstract art, instead of the inverse direction. By now, more than a century after WWI, that continues to be true, perhaps even more so.

Patterns that may remind us of close-up detailed segments of dazzle ship camouflage are everywhere, so it's a challenge to allude to those, without seeming to be cliché. Only recently have I run across the work of a contemporary Scottish artist whose paintings pays genuine homage to WWI ship camouflage, while also maintaining a freshness. His name is Michael Miller and his artwork can be viewed online at his website. Two of them are posted here. He is undoubtedly well aware of the indebtedness of his work to ship camouflage, and indeed, in 2014, he was a visiting artist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. 

It is of additional interest that he was born in Glasgow, because it was a prominent Scottish zoologist, Sir John Graham Kerr, who was most likely the first to propose the use of disruptive patterns (if not dazzle, technically) for ship camouflage, as I have talked about elsewhere.

As a person who has extensively studied and written about disruptive patterns, in wartime as well as in natural forms, and as one who tried (for 46 years) to teach students "to see" while producing paintings or graphic design, I find much to admire in Miller's work. In viewing the two paintings of his that are reproduced here, I am reminded of a passage by a British zoologist, Sir Alister Hardy (who was also an artist, and served as an army camoufleur during WWI). Here is an astonishing excerpt from The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and its Relationship to the Spirit of Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1965—

I think it likely that there are no finer galleries of abstract art than the cabinet drawers of the tropical butterfly collector. Each “work” is a symbol, if I must not say of emotion, then of vivid life…It is often, I believe, the fascination of this abstract color and design, as much as an interest in biology or a love of nature, that allures the ardent lepidopterist, although all these may be combined; he has his favorite genera and dotes upon his different species of Vanessa and Parnassius, as the modernist does upon his examples of Matisse or Ben Nicholson. The one-time schoolboy collector will in later life be transfixed with emotion for a moment at the sight of a Camberwell Beauty or a swallowtail—I speak from experience.

Michael Miller, Hippocampus

 

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 scenery painter and shipbuilder turns to camouflage

Above This photograph was taken during a 1918 Fourth of July parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City. It shows wartime shipbuilders walking beside a float on which has been mounted a scale model of a dazzle-camouflaged ship. The Scottish-born camoufleur in the news story below may have worked for a comparable shipbuilding plant. Digital coloring.

•••

SEEKS REVENGE IN ARMY: Scot Glad to Fight Germans Who Killed Sister and Brothers, in New York Times, October 16, 1917, p 9—

Drilling with Company B of the 302nd Engineers, not with the light-hearted enthusiasm of the rest of the recruits but with the determInation of a man who sees his day for vengeance approaching, is James Kelly, whose sister and two brothers were killed by the Germans.

Kelly was born In Glasgow, Scotland. He came to this country eight years ago, and found employment in New York as a scenery painter. He made yearly trips to visit his family in Glasgow. He tried to enlist, but was rejected because of tobacco heart [ailment related to smoking]. He returned to this country and entered a shipbuilding plant as a camouflage painter for patrol boats for the British navy.

A year and a half ago Kelly heard that his brother Kenneth had been wounded and captured by the Germans. When questioned by a Prussian intelligence officer, Kenneth Kelly refused to divulge important military information he possessed, and was put in prison. Later he was shot.

On receipt of this news James Kelly sailed for Scotland. He tried again to enlist, and again he was rejected because of his heart. Kelly then returned to camouflage British patrol boats being built in this country.

Ten months ago Kelly again visited Glasgow. This time news came that his brother John had been killed by a German shell. James Kelly for the third time tried to enter the service, but his tobacco heart was against him.

The United States had entered the war when Kelly returned to New York. He tried to enlist in the regular army without success, and then went back to his camouflage work. When he registered for the draft he refused to claim an exemption as an alien, and declared that he had two reasons for wanting to fight. His happiest day came when he was called by his local draft board to Camp Upton. Because of his expert knowledge of camouflage, he was assigned to the 302nd Engineers.

A letter from Glasgow this morning brought the news that three weeks ago his sister Angelina, a Red Cross nurse, was killed in France. Tonight Private James Kelly has three reasons why his wartime service should not be the cunning of camouflage but the steel of trench knife and bayonet.

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

Camoufleur Donates Materials to Brooklyn Museum

US Navy photograph of ship camoufleur Everett L. Warner

Brooklyn Museum. Report Upon the Conditions and Progress of the Museums for the Year Ending 1919, p. 16—

Mr. Everett L. Warner, the etcher, gave to the Library a quantity of material on camouflage consisting of photographs, diagrams, postcards, etc., which was a welcome addition to our file of such material.

RELATED LINK

Disruption versus dazzle

B.J.O. Nordfeldt's connection to WWI ship camouflage

Portrait of B.J.O. Nordfeldt

Above This image is cited on Wikipedia Commons as a portrait of Swedish-American artist Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt. An etching dated 1935, it is presumably a self-portrait since he is also listed as having made it (yet, oddly the signature seems to read Schneider). It is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chicago Society of Etchers.

We have blogged about Nordfeldt before, and with good reason. As we noted in an earlier post in 2019, Nordfeldt designed ship camouflage for the US Shipping Board during World War I in San Francisco. He was a fascinating character, with an all but unbelievable breadth of interests and capabilities. In addition to his involvement in ship camouflage, he was also an early participant in the art colony at Provincetown MA (he designed sets for the Provincetown Players) and eventually settled in New Mexico, where he was associated with the Taos Society of Artists.

Recently we ran across a news article about an exhibition of his artwork, titled “Nordfeldt Shows Interesting Work” in the Oakland Tribune, November 10, 1918, p. 6. That review concludes with this curious note:

Mr. Nordfeldt is in San Francisco at the rquest of the government, in charge of the camouflage department of the shipyards.

Would he tell us, if we cross our hearts not to tell, what the plan is that he and his conferes are following with the ships that go down to the sea?

There are those among us—good Americans at that—who are wondering “Who’s looney now?”

The USS Western Spirit (shown below) was most likely one of the ships whose dazzle camouflage Nordfeldt was responsible for.

USS Western Spirit c1918 (digital coloring)

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

World War I marine camouflage exhibited in Brooklyn

Above An official US Navy photograph (digital coloring) of Lieutenant Harold Van Buskirk, who was head of the Camouflage Section (comprised of two sub-sections) in the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair during World War I. He is applying the finishing touches on the "dazzle" camouflage pattern on a scale model of an American ship. Notice the completed models on the background storage shelf.

Once the model was completed, it was taken to a testing theatre, equipped with a periscopic viewing device and changeable seascape backgrounds. The viewer was challenged to estimate the angle of the model as it was positioned on an adjustable platform (as shown in a photograph of Navy camoufleurs Van Buskirk and Kenneth MacIntire ).

•••

Exhibit of Marine Camouflage in Science, Vol 50 No 1287, c1919, p. 205—

The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly describes a special exhibit held at the museum of models, design. and other objects illustrating the practice and some of the principles of marine camouflage. The exhibition was arranged by the curator of the department of natural science, and was made possible through the interest and cooperation of Mr. William A. Mackay, of the United States Shipping Board, camoufleur of the Second Naval District, and Lieutenants Harold Van Buskirk and Everett L. Warner, of the Camouflage Section, Bureau of Construction and Repair, United States Navy. Numerous other naval officers, members of the American Society of Marine Camoufleurs, and others, also contributed to the success of the exhibit by lending illustrative material.

A aeries of photographs made in the naval laboratories at Washington DC, and Rochester NY, showed successive stages of the experimental work by means of which the colors and patterns employed in the camouflage designs had been arrived at. These illustrations included views of the elaborate periscopic theater at Rochester, in which painted models of ships were tested under conditions which simulated, in all essential respects, the open ocean. The history of marine camouflage was briefly traced by means of labels and colored models, while approved as well as experimental designs of the "low-visibility" type, the British and American "dazzles," and the French system, were shown by means of models, photographs and colored lithographs issued by the Navy Department.

A case in the center of the exhibition room contained a miniature convoy of transports in charge of a cruiser and a flotilla of destroyers, each camouflaged model an exact replica of its namesake, or, rather, the original working model from which the transport or war vessel had been camouflaged. A simple, illuminated theater, equipped with a periscope, enabled visitors to observe a model as if from a submarine point of view, and moreover, demonstrated surprisingly well the distortion and other types of illusion produced by the camoufleur's design. 

confusion afloat / zigzag splashes of patterned color

Above Dazzle-camouflaged Swedish cargo ship during World War I. Public domain. Digital coloring.

•••

Leslie Walker, The American: A Novel. New York: Putnam, 1970, p. 48—

She automatically smoothed down the thin crepe print dress she was wearing. Its zigzag splashes of patterned color were familiar to Palmer—Virginia had one like it—but there was no signature on the fabric, which meant it was an inexpensive imitation. The design reminded him of one of those World War I anti-U-boat camouflage dazzle patterns.

nautical costuming / the effect is weird and startling

Above Page with ship camouflage diagrams by Alon Bement in "Principles Underlying Ship Camouflage in International Marine Engineering (February 1919). It may be of interest that Bement was an influential teacher of Georgia O'Keeffe at Columbia University.

•••

William Charles O’Donnell, Jr., "Over the Bounding Main in War Time" in Educational Foundations. Vol 30 No 3, December-January 1918-19, pp. 133-132—

…With the nations of the world at war, the ocean highway is beset with peculiar dangers and life on the ocean wave is a succession of novel experiences.

I am thinking now of the incidents of the trans-Atlantic trip to Europe in the month of December, 1917, and of the return voyage in the month of May, 1918. [Throughout that ocean crossing] …I tried to appreciate the subtle artistry displayed in the splashings of color and contortions of design on the sides of our steamer and on the other vessels similarly decorated. Camouflage, I believe, is a French theatrical expression. When an actor puts on his wig, elongates his nose, paints his cheeks, and accentuates his eye-brows for the purpose of blending his individuality with that of the character he is to represent before the footlights, he is the original camouflager, if the word may be so anglicised. So the great ships are made up for their part in the world's mighty drama of war. The effect is often weird, and startling. This nautical costuming seems often to reflect more of the spirit of comedy than of heavy tragedy. One does not have to wait until he is on the rolling waves to get the sensation for which ocean travel is famous. Concentration for a minute or two on the attempt to discover the elements of art in these grostesque displays, the geometric values in those wild configurations is enough to produce the brain whirl and the other disturbances supposed to be symptomatic of ocean sickness. The only cue is to close the eyes, to disengage the mind from the occupation, and to wait for the earth's returning to its orbit. Yet, we are assured that there is a discoverable scientific principle upon which the whole process is established. I have read somewhere of the French artist whose observation of the birds in their flight led him to a careful study of color combinations that produced the effect of invisibility. At short distance the black-backed bird with white breast, for instance, quickly becomes but a thin black line against the background of the sky. At a little distance the black line itself becomes invisible. A similar effect can be obtained with a ship at sea if a similar continguity of variation in the colorings of its exterior decorations is effected. Especially as these ships are tumbling amid the waves at sea it is difficult to judge of their size or to know whether they are coming or going. By frequently veering its course the camouflaged ship is a puzzle to the submarine. Especially is this true of the small vessels, such as the torpedo boat destroyers, which have done such valiant work as convoys for transports and ocean steamers. I have watched these little heroes of the deep cutting into the foaming billows when it seemed as though they were entirely submerged and would never appear on the surface again. I have seen them when it was difficult to believe that they were more than half their real size. I remember watching one of our convoys one morning when it was utterly impossible to see the center of the boat at all. Just a small portion of the bow and about an equal portion of the stern was all that could be discerned. At times it seemed as though I must be looking at bits of wreckage being thrown from wave to wave. So fantastic as these decorations seem to be they are the application of an old science newly developed which has contributed largely to the success of the Allies.

The most astounding fact in all the naval history of the world is the transportation of America's mighty army across the submarine infested Atlantic to the surprise and discomforture of the enemy and to the saving of the imperiled forces that champion democracy on the battlefields of Europe.

The word camouflage, its original meaning unknown or forgotten. has already passed into the vocabulary of English speaking peoples and will find a place in the next editions of complete dictionaries like Websters and the Standard. So from the blazing pit of the war this word has come into our language to be used henceforth to indicate all forms of make-believe and deception. It is a word that has been and will be misapplied and abused but it will ever be doubly significant to the man who crossed the seas at the time of the crisis…

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