like a circus / weird triangles and lines over the hulls

Above Cover illustration by C. McKnight Smith for Scientific American, October 26, 1918.

•••

Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917-1921. New York: Harper and Row, 1985, p. 35—

Having [to] resort to lookouts only when searching for victims, the U-boats [German submarines] enjoyed the advantage of a thin silhouette. Moreover, the U-boat lookout could see the masts of a steamer as far as fifteen miles whereas the steamer’s lookout could discern the sub only at four. The Allies camouflaged their ships by painting weird triangles and lines over the hulls, lending a circus aspect to every harbor.

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 /  

a timeline of developments in camouflage research

Above Opening page of Roy R. Behrens, A Camouflage Timeline 1858-2009. This 16-page chronology has now been posted as a downloadable pdf at Academia [dot] edu. Here's the link. It was produced in 2009 as an exhibition component. Fifteen years have passed; it needs extensive updating.

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 /  

Grant Wood's camouflage service during World War I

WWI French artillery camouflage

It is by now common knowledge that when Iowa artist Grant Wood served in the US Army during World War I, he was assigned to field camouflage. When someone contacted me recently to ask what I might know about that, I replied that the best source might be Darrell Garwood's biography titled Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood (New York: Norton, 1944). Wood's involvement in camouflage is mentioned in other biographies as well, but they tend to be brief and less than strictly factual.

Here's what Garwood's biography says—

Since his [Wood's] mother and sister were dependent on him, he had been placed in Class 3C in the draft and was passed over in the first draft call in September. Later, other family arrangements were made for the very little money Mrs. Wood needed to keep house, and Grant enlisted as a private in the army. He was sent to Camp Dodge, outside Des Moines, where he spent a good part of his training period making pencil portraits of his comrades and officers. He charged privates twenty-five cents and officers one dollar for the portraits—at least these were his prices when anyone offered to pay him. He didn't ask for payment, and the officer didn't think to offer it, when he made a portrait of his company commander, Captain George E. Proud.

Captain Proud was getting ready to go into town when a sergeant came in to say there was a man outside who wanted to make a sketch of him. The captain was in a hurry, but told the sergeant to bring him in. It didn't take Grant more than ten or fifteen minutes to make the sketch. Proud scarcely looked at it at the time, and afterward didn't remember Grant's name; he only remembered that Grant had said he was a mural painter. When he was back practicing law at Arapahoe, Nebraska, however, Proud found the sketch among his things, liked it and had it framed. It hung on his office wall for fifteen years before someone happened to notice it was a Grant Wood portrait.

Grant's stay at Camp Dodge promised to be pleasant. He was excused from the more onerous military duties, given a sidecar motorcycle, and told to go about making historic records. Then he contracted anthrax, and nearly died. When he recovered, he was sent to Washington to do camouflage work. He served as a private in Company B, Regiment 97, United States Engineers, and was in charge of the paint tent. He made clay models of field gun positions and helped camouflage artillery pieces. Before-and-after photographs of a cannon he helped camouflage were on display for several years at the Smithsonian Institution.

He was still in Washington when the war ended, and was transferred back to Camp Dodge. He arrived home on Christmas Eve, 1918.…

Like Norman Rockwell and other artists who served in the military, Wood was often asked (or offered) to make portraits of his fellow soldiers, including officers. The Nebraska attorney who was Wood's company commander was George C. Proud, not George E. Proud. Other artists in the infantry (Walt Disney being one) were able to earn extra money by painting camouflage or other designs on the helmets of other soldiers.

It’s interesting that in Wood’s WWI draft registration, he lists himself as a "contractor and builder” not as an artist. After regaining his health at Camp Dodge, he was presumably transferred to Camp American University in Washington DC, where, as Garwood notes, he camouflaged artillery (field guns or cannon).

A different Wood biography claims that he painted the artillery for the purposes of making it "blend in" with its surroundings. But that may be misleading, since by 1918 it was common practice to camouflage nearly anything not by blending but by applying “disruptive” (high difference) patterns. The goal was less to blend in than to break apart the shape, making it harder to see as a “thing.”  

Some of these guns were genuine functioning cannon, while others may have been non-firing dummies, made of logs and wagon wheels (known as Quaker guns), that looked like cannon from the air, and were used to divert enemy fire. These might also be camouflaged, to make them more convincing. By that time in the war, when field guns were manufactured in the US, the disruptive camouflage patterns (all the same) were automatically applied at the factory during production, so it is somewhat surprising that the patterns would have to be painted.

WWI camouflage applied during production process

The war ended before Wood was sent overseas. He was never stationed in Europe. Two artists who served with him as camoufleurs were Orrin White and Charles P. Killgore, with whom (long after the war) he later exhibited artwork at Younkers in Des Moines. See details here.

It seems to me that all of this misses the point somewhat of Wood's connection to camouflage. The most important convergence is that camouflage relies on the same "grouping principles" that artists and designers use. I've explained all this in an online video talk.

•••

Anon, in ART CIRCLES, in Long Beach Independent (Long Beach CA), March 27, 1949, p. 10—

[A retired oil-field worker turned artist Carl R. Walline’s] interest in painting dates back to the first world war, when he drummed up a lively business on a returning troop ship painting camouflage on the helmets of soldiers at a dollar a helmet.

With this leftover camouflage paint he did his first landscape.

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 /  

Shoeless Joe Jackson was a ship camouflage painter

Shoeless Joe

JACKSON DOING BIT BY PAINTING SHIPS: FORMER WHITE SOX OUTFIELDER OBTAINS POSITION IN SHIPYARD: Not Only Man in Baseball Who Discovers He Could Better Be Employed Elsewhere Than on the Firing Line in The Postville Review (Postville IA) no date, 1918—

Joe Jackson, until recently of the White Sox ball team, besides possessing extraordinary athletic talents, is a man of unusual physical development. Presumably he would make an excellent fighting man. But it appears that Mr. Jackson would prefer not to fight.

The facts seem to be that Jackson was about to be drafted into the army, whereupon be obtained a position in an eastern shipyard. He is said to be doing his part to beat the Huns by painting ships. Whether this work is camouflage—we refer to the methods of painting—has not been announced.

Jackson is not the only man in professional baseball who has discovered special gifts that apparently could be employed to special advantage elsewhere outside the firing line. It is to be hoped that the American public will keep these men in mind. We need shipbuilders to win the war, but when a man on the eve of being drafted into the army suddenly finds that he can best serve the nation by painting ships, good Americans will not be very enthusiastic over seeing him play baseball after the war is over. The special gifts that disqualify him for the army will likewise disqualify him for special popularity in the great American game.

A word of praise should be said for those ball players who have entered the military forces. They will undoubtedly make a good record, and it is these men in particular that we shall want to see back on the diamond.

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 /  

oddly festooned cubist quilts / dazzling pictorial archive

THE BRADFORD ERA (Bradford PA), April 5, 1918, p. 2—

The stanchest upholders of the academic in art can scarcely carry their opposition to cubism into its new field as a basis for ship camouflage. It has been evident, for some time, to people living near Atlantic ports, that cubism had been pitched upon as the most valuable system of reducing the visibility of ocean liners. The seemingly systemless way in which greens, blues, grays, and pinks are painted on in bands and blocks of color has quite puzzled persons who have gained close views of these ships; but at a distance of a mile, another story is told, for the various masses of color set up a curious and disconcerting dazzling effect. Painting with gray has been largely superseded by the new method, which escapes the silhouette effect that too often betrayed the gray ships.

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 /  

a cubist romance / 'mong the cubes i'd love to ramble

Above Cubism predated WWI French Army camouflage, more or less. This still image is from Rigadin painter cubist [Rigadin the Cubist Painter] a film by Georges Monca (1912), Pathé. See online detail. 

•••

All Aboard, a musical comedy that opened June 5, 1913 at Lew Fields' 44th Street Roof Garden in New York, as reviewed in The Sun, July 27, 1913, p. 12—

It is Ralph Riggs and his wife Katherine Witchie, who do the Cubist dance. The scene is in a studio of a Cubist and a Futurist painter and the lyrics of the song are as follows:

Said the Futurist boy to the Cubist girl

As they met on a poster blue:

"I don't know who the dickens I am—

and who in the deuce are you?"

Said the Cubist girl to the Futurist boy:

"We both were born, I think,

On a dark and dismal night last week

When the cat tipped over the ink."

Said the girl, "You must agree

We're awful sights to see."

Said the boy, "You seem to be

The girl that's made for me."

CHORUS

Oh, you Cubist girl, in cubes that curl

You little, wiggy-waggy, riggy-raggy,

ziggy-zaggy maid—

Picture puzzle queen,

From what I've seen

I think my style will suit you.

In the future when I'm painted

in every shade, like a crazy quilt,

although you're built,

to find you in the scramble

'Mong the cubes I'd love to ramble

A while some future day you'll be

My jumble ju-ju bee

My riggy-raggy,

Ziggy-zaggy,

Cubist girl.

free and open to the public / art and camouflage talk

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