Dazzle Camouflage Exhibit at St Barbe Museum UK

Poster for St Barbe Museum Dazzle Exhibition Workshop (2018)

Above Just recently posted is this magnificent poster, featuring a WWI-era painting of a dazzle-painted ship by British artist Harry Hudson Rodmell (1896-1984).

The poster is advertising one of the events that supplement an important exhibition—titled Dazzle: Disguise and Disruption in War and Art—at the St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, in Lymington, Hampshire UK. This major exhibition, curated by author and historian James Taylor (working in liaison with Steve Marshall) opened on June 16 and continues through September 23, 2018.

It features original ship models, ship camouflage plans, and historic artworks, including unforgettable views of camouflaged ships by Norman Wilkinson, Edward Wadsworth, Montague Dawson, and John Everett. What a remarkable opportunity—to think that these important works will be on view at one time in a single place. Don't miss it.

Exhibition webpage at St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery

We would have hoped to have been there, to particpate in a day-long "dazzle study day" from 9:30 am to 4:45 pm on Saturday, June 30, at the University of South Hampton. See schedule on website.

There are seven major speakers, including James Taylor (the exhibition curator), architect Camilla Wilkinson (granddaughter of dazzle system originator Norman Wilkinson), Simon Stephens (National Maritime Museum), Ed Yardley, Gwen Yarker, Sue Prichard, and Liv Taylor.

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Don't forget the on-going French camouflage exhibit as well (mentioned in an earlier post) that continues through December 31, 2018, at the National Maritime Museum in Brest, France.

New Find | Edward Wadsworth's Ship Camouflage

Above What a complete surprise to have found this, on the cover of the magazine section of The Detroit Free Press (Sunday, July 20, 1919). We've blogged about it before, seven years ago in May 2011, because we had a found a photograph of British Vorticist painter Edward Wadsworth in the process of completing this famous painting. Wadsworth was one of the few Modern-style artists who had actually served as a ship camoufleur during World War I. Most were academy-trained traditionalists, or Impressionists at best. To experience its full impact, you can see a color version here.

When this black and white reproduction was published, there was a caption below it that read—

Above is a reproduction of Lieut. E. Wadsworth's striking Navy picture, entitled Dazzle Ships in Drydock at Liverpool—dazzle, of course, being English for camouflage. This is a big, vital and realistic piece of painting, notwithstanding the necessarily cubistic look of its angular, geometric pattern, scientifically designed to confuse the eye of the hostile range-finder at sea. This reminds us that the invention and application of dazzle camouflage is perhaps the greatest of several factors contributed by artists to the winning of the war, as it enabled Canada and the United States to transport their armies to France in comparative safety, and then, after putting them into the fight, protected them with more camouflage of the military kind.

Dazzle | Wilkinson, Kerr and Archibald Phillips

Above This is the wonderful cover of the 4th issue of a UK publication called Stages, an online journal produced in connection with the Liverpool Biennial 2016.

Go here to find the website, where the entire issue (except the introduction, which is only on the site) can be downloaded as a pdf. It offers seven articles, with full-color illustrations, on various aspects of historic British ship camouflage (which originated in World War I), beginning with the story of how vorticist painter Edward Wadsworth became one of the ten dock officers who supervised the painting of the actual ships. Following the war, Wadsworth created the well-known painting that is featured on the cover, in addition to a series of black and white woodcut prints.

There are also several accounts of UK-based commissions to apply dazzle-paint camouflage schemes to a small number of ships today, as one way of observing the centenary of the war. They've been good tourist attractions for sure, even if the new designs haven't much resemblance to genuine WWI dazzle-painting.

It is heartening to see the attention that this publication affords to two important contributions to the development of dazzle-painting (although they didn't call it that), both of whom came up with comparable methods two or more years in advance of its officially sanctioned proposal by Norman Wilkinson in 1917. They were Scottish zoologist John Graham Kerr and a Liverpool art dealer named Archibald E. Phillips. The latter, who submitted a number of ship camouflage proposals to the War Office in May 1915, actually described his designs as having a "dazzle effect" and "dazzling the eyes of the gunners of enemy submarines."

For a detailed and persuasive account of Kerr's dazzle-like proposals, see Hugh Murphy and Martin Bellamy's "The Dazzling Zoologist: John Graham Kerr and the Early Development of Ship Camouflage," which is available online here.

Of the many illustrations in the issue, among the most inviting is an oblique installation view of a camouflage exhibition at Riverside Museum, titled Nowhere to Hide: Camouflage at Sea (as shown below).

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"Edward Wadsworth" in The Glasgow Herald (February 2, 1951)—

[Wadsworth's influences] can be traced, of course, here and there, Cubism and Vorticists, the portrait drawings of Wyndham Lewis, later on the flat, polished, cheerfully dreary patterns of Léger; much more important, probably, the engineer's training, the work on dazzle camouflage during the First World War, and everything else, from a first acquaintance with the high, cold light of the Aberdeen coast to the decorating of the Queen Mary, that had to do with ships and the sea.

Dazzle: Disguise and Disruption in War and Art

Above The wonderfully appropriate cover of a forthcoming book by British historian James Taylor (former curator of paintings at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich UK), featuring one of the woodcuts of dazzle-painted ships by Vorticist Edward Wadsworth. The book, titled Dazzle: Disguise and Disruption in War and Art, won't be available until mid-September 2016, but it can be pre-ordered now on Amazon, on both US and UK sites. Unprecedented in its detail, it is a significant new account of the development of dazzle ship camouflage in World World War I. The following is the publisher's note on its contents—

While it is a constant throughout history that conflict has inspired and engendered great art, it is a much rarer event for art to impact directly upon the vicissitudes of war. Yet, in the course of the First World War, a collision of naval strategy and the nascent modern art movement, led to some two thousand British ships going to sea as the largest painted modernist “canvases” in the world covered in abstract, clashing, decorative, and geometric designs in a myriad of colors. Dazzle camouflage had arrived.

Heavily inspired by the Cubism and British Vorticism art movements, dazzle was conceived and developed by celebrated artist and then naval commander Norman Wilkinson. Dazzle camouflage rejects concealment in favor of disruption. It seeks to break up a ship’s silhouette with brightly contrasting geometric designs to make a vessel’s speed and direction incredibly difficult to discern. False painted bow-waves and sterns were used to confuse and throw off the deadly U-boat captains. The high contrast shapes and colors further made it very difficult to match up a ship in the two halves of an optical naval rangefinder. This new book traces the development of the dazzle aesthetic from theory into practice and beyond.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 5

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Random House, 1933—

Another thing that interested us enormously was how different the camouflage of the french looked from the camouflage of the germans, and then once we came across some very neat camouflage and it was american. The idea was the same but as after all it was different nationalities who did it the difference was inevitable. The color schemes were different, the way of placing them was different, it made plain the whole theory of art and its inevitability.

Answers (top to bottom) John Everett Mallais, Salvador Dali, Edward Wadsworth, and Max Beckmann.

Centenary of World War 1 Camouflage

14-18-NOW website

Above Throughout the UK, Europe and elsewhere, starting this year and continuing through 2018, all sorts of things are being planned in connection with the World War 1 Centenary—exhibitions, events, publications and online information blogs. Shown here for example is the opening page for an extensive website on 14-18-NOW: WW1 Centenary Art Commissions (a convenient way to keep updated), maintained through the efforts of the Imperial War Museum and the Department for Culture, Media & Sport. The image above is one of a series of woodcuts by British Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth who, as a dock officer during World War 1, supervised the painting of more than 2,000 dazzle-painted ships.  

Below is the colored camouflage plan for the starboard side of the HMS Highflyer.

Dazzle camouflage plan for HMS Highflyer

Another helpful current source is the BBC's multimedia guide to WW1, with an especially rich section on ship camouflage, including the diagram posted below.

Diagram of HMT Olympic camouflage

WWI Dazzle-Painted Cafe Buses

Camouflaged British café buses (1933)

Years ago, we ran across a news photograph (above), with a note explaining that, after World War I, unemployed British navy veterans were given jobs as servers on mobile café buses. As a reminder to the public, these buses were painted in striped ship camouflage patterns. Last week, we found a brief news article in the La Porte City (IA) Progress Review (dated June 15, 1933, p. 9) with a headline that reads CAFÉ BUSES CATER TO MOTORIST TRADE. Part of the rest of the article reads—

Traveling cafes on British roads are the latest development in catering for motorists, says Answers Magazine. A scheme for a fleet of these has been worked out as a means of providing employment for retired naval officers.

These traveling cafes are really super coffee stalls, fitted out with the most up-to-date equipment for providing refreshment for hungry wayfarers. The first of them are already on the road and may be recognized by their blue and white exteriors, in the style of the wartime "dazzle" camouflage for merchant ships. 

books & historic prints and photographs

Sea Classics | Ship Camouflage

Edward Wadsworth, Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919)

In the June 2012 issue of a newsstand magazine called Sea Classics, there is a pictorial article on "The How and Why of Warship Camouflage." A friend of mine, a WW2 navy veteran, told me about it, and I excitedly tracked it down. On the cover is an exquisite painting (although substantially altered) by British artist Edward Wadsworth, who was hand-picked by Norman Wilkinson during WWI to oversee the painting of camouflage schemes on dry docked ships in the harbors. Most likely, Wadsworth himself did not design any of the  dazzle painting schemes that were used; he simply adapted provided designs to fit specific vessels.

Wadsworth was a prominent Vorticist artist, and this particular painting (above) is his largest, best-known work. Titled Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919), the original oil painting (which measures 120 inches high by 96 inches wide) is in the collection of  the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Unfortunately, the editors of Sea Classics decided not to give Wadsworth credit for his work (he isn't even mentioned), nor is there a note about its title and its whereabouts. That information is easily found—it only takes a minute—in the Wikipedia article on dazzle camouflage.

Equally disappointing is the article itself, which repeats old information (including mistakes) from forty years ago that has since been corrected and amplified by new research. For example, there is the familiar error of referring to American artist George de Forest Brush as Robert De Forest Brush (there was no person by that name). The naming error first occurred in US Navy records (c1899), and in 1971, it was repeated in an article on World War I ship camouflage by navy historian Robert Sumrall. At the time, a letter to the editor from a Brush relative pointed out the error, and the mistake was later reaffirmed by a penciled notation on a navy memorandum in the papers of Everett L. Warner, the American artist who directly oversaw a unit of marine camouflage artists in both World Wars. On his copy of the document, Warner circled "Robert" with a link to a note in the margin that reads "correction George." So why repeat that error and others? It looks like the answer is probably due to the amazingly outdated sources that were used in preparing the article. There's no bibliography for it, but at the end there is list of three books for "further reading," the most recent of which was published in 1975 (37 years ago). How unfortunate—ship camouflage is a fascinating aspect of modern history and one that deserves to be covered in a balanced and genuinely accurate way.

Edward Wadsworth | Camouflage

Wadsworth in process of painting (1919)

What a glorious find! In an old issue of the New York Herald on April 20, 1919 (p. 13), we've located a news photo of British Vorticist painter Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949), poised on a stepladder, in process of painting his famous large-scale painting of camouflaged ships, called Dazzle-ship in Drydock at Liverpool (1919), now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. The news caption reads as follows—

Mr. Ernest Wadsworth [sic], a British artist, paints a portrait of a camouflaged ship which is a study in Cubism. Mr. Wadsworth, during the war, was in charge of ship camouflaging at Bristol and Liverpool, where he designed the futurist coat in which disguise the Aquitania eluded U-boats.

Not only is the artist misnamed, the facts are probably also skewed. Wadsworth had been handpicked by British head camoufleur Norman Wilkinson to supervise not the design of ship camouflage but the painting of the ships. For the most part, he followed prepared diagrams that were designed, tested and distributed by a small team of artists under Wilkinson's supervision. For further information, see the "Edward Wadsworth" entry in Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (2009).