camoufleur Bérard made Chantecler farm yard scene

costume from Chantecler

Back in 2014, we blogged about the French stage designer Louis Bérard, perhaps best known as "le decorateur de Chantecler," a wonderfully zany satirical play by Edmund Rostand, in which all the actors were dressed in animal costumes (as shown above). But he was also a camoufleur for the French during World War I. More recently, we've found a different news article on his life and work, reprinted below.

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SCENERY FOR WAR: M. [Louis] Bérard of "Chantecler" Fame a Camouflage Artist in The Spokesman-Review (Spokane WA) May 28, 1918—

Camouflage is an art which attracts the best artists who have been engaged for some time in painting scenery for war.

In Paris there are many studios, employing thousands of men and women. In Montmartre there is a studio where young American artists of the Latin Quarter are busy camouflaging for the American front. Not only guns, but motor trucks, buildings—whole villages even—have to be made to appear what they are not, which, indeed, is the essence of camouflage.

A French scene painter, M. [Louis] Bérard, was one of the inventors of war camouflage. For the last 35 years he has been the leading French scene painter, to whose genius was due the scenic triumphs of the Sardou and Rostand plays. It was he who created the marvelous farm yard scene in Chantecler, and it was the trees which he built for this play which gave him the idea for the observation posts which look like trees.

When war broke out M. Bérard had turned 60 years of age, but he at once offered his services to the French government, and asked to be allowed to go to the front to develop his ideas of camouflage.

With the assistance of his expert pupils he created "lakes" where there was no water, "forests" where no trees grow, and thousands of guns, huts and artillery emplacements changed their hue as the seasons advanced. When M. Bérard put the finishing touches to a particular important piece of work he would go up in an airplane to obtain the same view as that afforded to the Boche.

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Note In Cécile Coutin's Tromper l'ennemi (2012) Louis Bérard (1865-1920) is described as an accessoiriste de théatre (property man) who served in the Section de Camouflage (1914-15) as a camouflage instructor at the studio at Amiens. She includes a three-page section on "Louis Bérard and His Contribution to the Invention of Camouflage" (pp. 48-51). It will require translation, since the text is in French.

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

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