Picasso, camouflage, and the moth known as Picasso

Above This is, believe it or not, an insect called the Picasso Moth, known scientifically as Baorisa hieroglyphica. It was discovered by the British entomologist Frederic Moore in 1882, when artist Pablo Picasso was one year old. Surely, it was given his name (probably after World War I) because people came to believe (thanks to Gertrude Stein in part) that he had invented wartime camouflage. Not so, but the error continues. That assumption was emboldened by rumors (as in quotes below) during WWII that Picasso had somehow served as a camouflage advisor for the French government—I do not believe that's true.

That there are resemblances between certain aspects of Cubism and WWI camouflage is undeniable. And yes, Picasso (and untold others) saw those resemblances. But he did not originate the practice during WWI. See my earlier online essay on this.

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Anon, from Le Devoir (Montreal), May 30, 1940—

The godfather of camouflage
Camouflage, which has truly become an official weapon of war since there are now regular sections to which specialists are attached, is a French invention of the other war. It began with the substitution of conspicuous uniforms, from red, to blue and gold, to horizon blue, to the colors of the earth and the sky, then to khaki, less messy, and especially less lamentable as it becomes increasingly worn.

What few people know is that the official godfather of camouflage is none other than the inventor of cubism, Pablo Picasso. An official asked that artist, with tongue in cheek, for his advice on how to make men invisible to the enemy. Picasso, in all seriousness, replied, "Dress them as harlequins..!" It was a joke which others took seriously and was soon adopted, for it is indeed in harlequin patterns, in effect, that the factories, the cannons, the vehicles, and even the ships, are now disguised.

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Anthony Marino, in “He’d Like to Hear What Artists Think,” a letter to the editor in The Pittsburgh Press, November 26, 1944—

I was not surprised when [Pablo] Picasso was placed at the head of the camouflage department in France; nor when [Homer] St. Gaudens was placed at the head of the same department in this country. Both were given the job of making “something” look like “nothing.” Both had already demonstrated their aptitude at the much more difficult task of making “nothing” look like “something!”

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 / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Source

a checkered tablecloth / the man Picasso hated most

Juan Gris, Still Life with Checkered Tablecloth (1915)

Above An especially masterful painting by Spanish artist Juan Gris, titled Still Life with Checkered Tablecloth (1915). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain. 

To a designer, what better proof is there that the most accomplished of the cubist artists was Juan Gris, not Pablo Picasso. What an extraordinary composition—how is it possible? I stand in awe. No wonder Gris was despised by Picasso: He was, according to Gertrude Stein, “the only person whom Picasso wished away.” Indeed, he was the only genuine threat.

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Anon. Sioux City Journal (Sioux City IA), August 29, 1921—

Little is seen or heard nowadays about the writers of vers libre or the cubist artists. Maybe they have gone where they belong—to camouflage.

philosopher Monroe Beardsley / cubistic camouflage

decanter and goblet / Monroe Beardsley

Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. NY: Harcourt Brace and World, 1958, pp. 95-96—

A line that turns upon itself so that its ends are fused, and is therefore endless, defines a figure, or what is often called a form. It may be a continuous, unbroken, line-area— that is, an outline— or a circular row of dots, or a group of sketchy line-areas that fuse into a broken line and make a triangle, a pitcher-shape, or an elephant-shape. Consider, for a moment, a square, each of whose sides is a line-area. It does not matter much whether you call this outline a single line, or say that it consists of four lines, one for each side. If we speak in the latter way, we shall want to say that when two lines—as any two sides—fuse together in such a way that they both become parts of a single figure, then they “go with” each other. Line X goes with line Y when they are parts of the same figure.

To explore this concept a little further, we may consider the multiple relevance of lines—a phenomenon much exploited in modern nonrepresentational painting, but one that also throws light upon principles that have always been important in painting. Suppose we draw a large goblet bulging at the top, and a small decanter bulging at the bottom, in such a way that the same line-area serves as the right-hand side of the goblet and as the left-hand side of the decanter. This line belongs to two distinct figures at the same time, or, in other words, goes with two distinct sets of lines. It binds the two figures in a particularly intimate way, by guiding the eye from any point on the outline of either figure continuously to any point on the outline of the other. It is interesting to distinguish varying degrees of intimacy in the connection between two figures, depending upon the connections of their outlines. (1) The figures may be entirely separated as in Italian primitive painting. (2) There may be a broken line that goes from one to another, as in a painting by Rubens or El Greco, where the line of one figure’s leg or back will be picked up by the arm or side of another figure. (3) The same line may belong to both figures, as in the decanter-goblet example, or in paintings by Ozenfant, Gris, Braque, or Picasso in one period—see his Seated Woman (1927)…. (4) There may be strong lines that cut across both figures, throwing their actual outlines into the background, so that in fact the figures are actually submerged and tend to lose their character as figures. This is the principle of camouflage.

related observation by Gestaltist Fritz Heider

 

 

 

Picasso on camouflage / we originated it with cubism

Cook: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive

Above Roy R. Behrens, Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Northern Iowa and Independence (Iowa) native has released a new 60-minute online documentary film about Iowa expatriate artist William Edwards Cook, and his close long-term friendship with American writer Gertrude Stein.

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Gertrude Stein (speaking in the pretended voice of Alice B. Toklas), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933—

[In 1907, Pablo Picasso went back to Spain for the summer] and he came back with some spanish landscapes and one may say that these landscapes…were the beginning of cubism.…

…In these pictures he first emphasized the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of the camouflage the guns and the ships in the war. The first year of the war, Picasso and Eve, with whom he was living then, Gertrude Stein and myself, were walking down the boulevard Raspail a cold winter evening.…All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C’est nous qui avons fait ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified.

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

Gestalt Psychology, Cubism, Art and Camouflage

In 1973, Fritz Heider, a Viennese-born American psychologist, published a memoir on "Gestalt Theory: Early History and Reminiscences." Near the end of the article, Heider talks briefly about Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer's research of "unit-forming factors" (or perceptual grouping tendencies) and the explicit use of comparable strategies, during roughly the same time period, in the Cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso…more>>>

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)

Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk)