Chapter One / Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

Chapter One of FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002) can now be accessed online.

Art and Camouflage books / discount and free shipping

Above and below: Limited supply remaining of new, mint condition, signed first edition copies of three books by author and designer Roy R. Behrens: FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002); CAMOUPEDIA: A Compedium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (2009); and SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook (2012). Available now as bundle for $60.00 (save $27.95 off list price of $87.95) with free shipping at <https://www.ebay.com/itm/294588563287>.

“[False Colors] is the definitive text on, but also the best possible introduction to, the 'social history' of military camouflage and the key role that artists played in its development. Roy Behrens writes beautifully and with complete authority. As a biologist, this is the book that broadened my horizons from an academic interest in animal camouflage to the broader context in which contemporary theories of camouflage evolved.” —Innes Cuthill, Professor of Behavioral Ecology, University of Bristol.

“[Behrens’ False Colors is] simply the best all-around introductory book on camouflage…it is perfect for beginners and a finishing school for veteran camoufleurs.” —Barton Whaley, military deception expert [2013].

“[Behrens’] book False Colors provides a brilliant overview of the subject [of art and camouflage].” —Art Historian Henry Adams, in Art and Antiques [2011].

 

GTA Links to New Gestalt Theory Related Videos

We were recently pleased to learn that the website for the GTA (International Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications) has set up a page of online links to New Gestalt Theory Related Videos, including active links to our own short documentary films on art, design and camouflage in relation to Gestalt. This is greatly appreciated. 

There is a list of all of all our films  on our YouTube Channel here. There will soon be more.

British Gestalt Journal / gestalt and camouflage videos

Links to four videos have been posted on the Features section of the British Gestalt Journal at <https://www.britishgestaltjournal.com/features/2022/1/25/roy-behrens-gestalt-theory-and-camouflage>.

Jan Koenderink / to see is to sneeze—in this respect

Jan Koenderink, “Vision as a User Interface” in Proceedings SPIE 7865, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XVI, 786504 (February 4, 2011)—

Visual awareness is proto-mind stuff. Here I am thinking of the Gestalts or the classical illusions, which are cognitively inpenetrable. Even if you are an expert on a certain illusion, you still see it, cognition doesn’t make it go away. Likewise, a Gestalt like the famous Kanizsa triangle [as shown above] is stubbornly there—in your visual awareness, even though you know that “there is no triangle.” Visual awareness is presentation in the sense that it simply happens to you. Nothing you can do about it, nor are you responsible for the presentations you have. It is much like sneezing in this respect.

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

Franz Marc as a WWI German artillery camoufleur

Franz Marc, Animals in a Forest

Above Franz Marc, Animals in a Forest (1914). In earlier paintings by Marc, figures are easily distinguished from their backgrounds. As his work evolved, animals and landscapes increasingly merged, progressing toward embedded figures. 

•••

Tim Newark, Camouflage. London: Thames and Hudson, 2007, p. 68—

[During World War I, the German army] recruited artists to disguise their weaponry. The most famous of these was Franz Marc, an Expressionist painter who served initially as a cavalryman. He wrote a revealing letter to his wife in February 1916 in which he told of the creative pleasure he derived from painting military tarpaulins by adapting the styles of great modern painters.

“The business has a totally practical purpose,” said Marc, “to hide artillery emplacements from airborne spotters and photography by covering them with tarpaulins in roughly pointillistic designs in the manner of bright natural camouflage. The distances which one has to reckon with are enormous—from an average height of 2000 meters—enemy aircraft never flies much lower than that…I am curious what effect the ‘Kandinskys’ will have at 2000 meters. The nine tarpaulins chart a development ‘from Manet to Kandinsky.’” 

Franz Marc (1910)

 

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)

Art | an illusion of reality that tells the truth by fibbing

Leon Dabo (1909)

Above Portrait photograph of Leon Dabo by Emil O. Hoppé (1909). Public domain.

•••

Rollin Lynde Hartt, CAMOUFLAGE in Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1918—

As their train nears Chicago, passengers note a low, murmurous hum. It is the Chicagoans saying “Camouflage.” Those of us who once confined our remarks to “Skiddoo! Twenty-three!” and more recently to “I should worry!” and “What do you know about that?” peg along at present on “Camouflage,” though a bit wearisome it grows. Declares a neighbor of mine, “The next time I hear ‘Camouflage’ I shall make my will, kiss my friends and relatives good-bye, and jump in the wastebasket!”…

[Camouflage] borrows its technique from a humble enough source. It is the Chamber of Horrors over again…Some steal their technique from the impressionists. Some repeat the antics of cubism. Others depend for their success upon certain very curious principles of optics. It takes an artist to invent them and an artist to explain them, and Mr. Leon Dabo* is never more entertaining than when holding forth on their theory and practice.

In order to understand the enormously important part impressionism plays in camouflage one must first define impressionism. Aesthetically, it is a simple matter, merely an attempt to reproduce, not nature itself, but the side of nature that appeals strongly to the artist. Technically, however, it involves profundities. Instead of counterfeiting reality, it creates an illusion of reality. It tells the truth by fibbing…

It was to cubism that the camouflageurs had recourse when they wanted to hide ships from view. Painting them gray was a poor device, they found. From habit, the eye would still recognize the silhouette of a ship even at a great distance. But it turns out that the eye had come to depend almost wholly on habit. Break up the familiar silhouette by dappling it with inharmonious colors in huge, shapeless masses, or—better yet—by covering it with immense cubist triangles and with cubist rectangles as immense—and the eye of the seasoned mariner would report no ship at all. The eye sees what it is accustomed to seeing and balks at learning new tricks.…

And why resent that low, murmurous hum of the Chicagoans saying “Camouflage”? Let the hum continue. It is just now a foolish hum, to be sure; it reflects a quaintly naive sense of novelty, as if camouflage were a new thing under the sun instead of being a modern recourse to trickery as old as “Quaker” cannon and the painted portholes on merchantmen, and, for that matter, the celebrated wooden horse at Troy. But it popularizes an idea. It gives it prominence. It backs up the army’s determination to put camouflage where it belongs. France has thousands of camouflageurs. So should we.…

•••

* Note The following entry was featured in a column titled Fifty Years Ago 1918, in the August 25, 1968 issue of the Asbury Park Press (Asbury NJ)—

Aug. 27—Leon Dabo, American painter who has been serving on General Pershing’s staff designing camouflage, was the principal speaker at a war rally in Ocean Grove Auditorium. He described enemy atrocities.

Article on Gestalt Theory Chosen for Chinese Journal

Leonardo: Journal of the International Society of Arts, Science and Technology (published by MIT Press) is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

To commemorate that, Zhuangshi: The Chinese Journal of Design (published through Tsinghua University in Beijing) has published a special issue in which it has translated into Chinese and reprinted in its pages six selected articles (chosen by the Chinese editors) from all past issues of Leonardo.

We were pleased to learn that one of our articles, titled "Art, Design and Gestalt Theory" (Leonardo 31, No 4, 1998) was among the six articles chosen.

Link to articles on Gestalt theory