Camouflage Artist | Jean-Louis Forain

Camouflage artist Jean-Louis Forain (left), c1914-15

Above At the beginning of World War I, Jean-Louis Forain was a well-known and immensely popular French artist, who in his youth had been close friends with Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Edgar Dégas, and Édouard Monet. Known chiefly as a caricaturist, he had been strongly influenced by Honoré Daumier.

When the war began, Forain was already in his sixties. Nevertheless, he volunteered for the French Army’s camouflage section. In the photograph shown here, he is on the left, applying disruptive camouflage shapes to a field cannon, c1914-15.

A comparable image is reproduced in Cécile Coutin, Tromper ‘ennemi (p. 27), where it is credited to the Musée de l’Armée, Paris. As a side dish, below is a passage we recently found in which a prominent British nurse recalls her wartime meeting with Forain.

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Kathleen Burke, The White Road to Verdun. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916—

We lunched with General [Philippe] Pétain and his État Major. A charming and most interesting addition to the party was M. [Jean-Louis] Forain, the famous French caricaturist, and now one of the Chief Instructors of the French Army in the art of camouflage—the art of making a thing look like anything in the world except what it is! He has established a series of schools all along the French Front, where the Poilus [French infantry] learn to bedeck their guns and thoroughly disguise them under delicate shades of green and yellow, with odd pink spots, in order to relieve the monotony. Certainly the appearance of the guns of the present time would rejoice the heart and soul of the "Futurists." It was most interesting to hear him describe the work in detail and the rapidity with which his pupils learned the new art. For one real battery there are probably three or four false ones, beautiful wooden guns, etc., etc., and he told us of the Poilus' new version of the song Rien n'est plus beau que notre Patrie ("Nothing is more beautiful than our country"). They now sing Rien n'est plus faux que notre batterie ("Nothing is more false than our battery").

Kathleen Burke

Camouflage Hoodies | Sinister French Artillery Robes

early WWI French camouflage (c1914)

In earlier blog entries (such as one on camouflaged robes, and a second on French camouflage and criminals), we've posted information about the hooded outfits that were devised by French artists who were serving in artillery teams at the beginning of World War I. As I've described elsewhere—

…what we call camouflage was first promoted by artists serving in the French Army in the early years of WWI. While there is some confusion about which individual initiated the ideas, the reasons are not in contention. Soldiers assigned to artillery teams were dismayed by the ease with which airborne enemy spotters could find and report the positions of their field artillery. In response, they initiated two countermeasures: the application of disruptive ("broken color") patterns on the surface of their cannons, and the donning by those in artillery teams of sinister-looking hooded robes, called cagoules (they closely resembled the outfit worn by a French crime novel character called Fantomas (c. 1911) or darkened paint-stained versions of Ku Klux Klan ceremonial robes).•

A surprising number of photographs of these hoodie-like camouflage outfits have survived, including a handful of full-color images in the collection of the Bibliothéque Nationale de France, and can be accessed online (posted here are restored, cropped and cleaned-up renditions of those). Other images of these outfits, whether black and white photographs and drawings, or painted illustrations by artists, were also commonly reproduced in contemporaneous magazines, such as on the cover of Scientific American (September 29, 1917). Even a few of the robes have survived.

• From Roy R. Behrens, "Khaki to khaki (dust to dust): the ubiquity of camouflage in human experience" in Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas, eds., Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the Art of Disappearance. Sydney AU: Sydney University Press, 2015, pp. 1-15.

 

Futurist Togs For Sniper Camouflage (1917)

US proposal for disruptively-patterned sniper suit (1917)

Above This photograph of an American soldier dressed in a disruptively patterned sniper outfit (this is a detail of a larger scene) was one of a series of official government photos that were provided to US news agencies in 1917-18. It was subsequently published in various newspapers and magazines throughout the country, including, for example, in a feature titled CAMOUFLAGE DEVICES FOR DECEIVING ENEMY in the Washington Times, January 5, 1918, p. 4.

Later, as shown below in this post, the same figure was one of several components in a photomontage that appeared on the cover of a French magazine, Lectures Pour Tout, on May 1, 1918.

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Anon, FUTURIST TOGS FOR SNIPERS in Chicago Daily Tribune, July 24, 1918, p. 6—

Artists of the [Blackhawk] division [at Camp Grant IL] camouflage department today gave free rein to their imagination and color fancies when Lieutenant Roy Shinew, whose studio at 3714 West Grand Avenue was closed when he entered the service, began experimenting on a series of sniper uniforms.

Types of uniforms so far turned out by the class resemble nothing more than futurist paintings of a nude falling down stairs. They are streaked with paint in broken lines and seem a joke until fitted to the body of a man and seen from a short distance in the open.

Cover of Lectures Pour Tous (1918)

French Camouflage and Criminals

WWI French camoufleurs wearing hooded cagoule outfits

In an earlier post, we reproduced various images of French camoufleurs dressed in paint-streaked hooded outfits, the term for which was cagoule. These were adopted early in World War I by artists in the French infantry, to prevent themselves from being seen by aerial observers as they manned field artillery. Above is the cover of a French magazine (dated June 5, 1915) in which soldiers are wearing uniforms that look eerily like a mottled variation on the sinister ceremonial hoods of the American Ku Klux Klan. At the time, the French public was disturbed by this radical change of attire. This was described thirty years ago by art historian Elizabeth Louise Kahn in The Neglected Majority: "Les Camoufleurs," Art History, and World War I (University Press of America, 1984)—

Hidden beneath camouflaged cagoules…was a ghoulish image of the modern soldier, whose finely fitted and brilliant red and blue clothing was replaced by an amorphous costume of drab greens and browns that turned the individual into a frightening form.

Later on the same page, she mentions that one of the reasons for the initial disdain for camouflage was that "the very term camouflage held a devious and unseedy [sic] meaning for French readers of popular literature…" Prior to the founding of the first camouflage unit, it "was a word used to describe evil criminals who lurked about city streets and hid themselves from the police" (p. 148).

We were reminded of this when recently we ran across various images from French popular literature and film, before and during WWI, of a fictitious criminal named Fantomas. Created in 1911 by French writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, the character was central to more than forty crime novels. The popularity of the books was amplified by various adaptations for film, television and comic books.

French crime character Fantomas

I mention this because in some of the images (such as those posted here), this crime character has an uncanny resemblance to a WWI hooded camoufleur. If Fantomas was on the minds of the French public at the outset of the war, no wonder they viewed with suspicion the cagoules (the "hoodies") of the camoufleurs.

books & historic prints and photographs

Still More on H. Ledyard Towle | A Hue Guru

Women's Reserve Camouflage Corps (1918

H(arold) Ledyard Towle was an American artist and industrial colorist, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1890. After studying art at Pratt Institute, and at the Art Students League (under Frank Vincent DuMond and William Merritt Chase), he embarked on what he thought would be a career as a painter of portraits and landscapes. However, as he later admitted, his experiences as a camouflage artist during World War I changed many of his attitudes, including how he looked at art.

During WWI, Towle was a camouflage instructor in the 71st Infantry Regiment of the New York State National Guard. In that capacity, he provided camouflage training for troops who were preparing to fight on the battlefields in Europe. He also taught a course about camouflage at the Columbia University Teachers College. Before the war ended, he himself shipped off to France as a machine-gunner and camoufleur at the Front.

While still in New York, he also took on an unusual task, which led to a flood of news articles. In early 1918, approval was made to establish a Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps, and Towle was designated as the instructor for a unit of about thirty-five to fifty civilian women volunteers. The training was largely conducted out of doors in New York, on the grounds of the Billings Estate, which is now the museum The Cloisters.

Full-page article on Towle's women camoufleurs (July 1918)

Towle’s course for women was not only about camouflage, since it also offered training in military drill, boxing, and pistol and rifle marksmanship. Because (or so it was commonly said at the time) women were naturally inclined toward sewing, one of their primary challenges was to make hooded camouflaged “observation suits,” with which they could blend in with natural settings. There was no shortage of news stories about the unit’s activities (enlivened by photographs, along with appropriate quotes from Lieutenant Towle). In July 1918, there were widely published stories about these women camoufleurs (jokingly referred to then as “camoufleuses”) because they had applied a camouflage scheme to a scaled-down wooden battleship (called the USS Recruit) in the middle of New York City in Union Square. In fact, it was not a genuine ship, but a landlocked replica built in 1917 for use as a novelty recruiting station. It was someone’s suggestion that it would be even more novel, generate more publicity, and encourage more recruits to join if its surface was totally covered in brightly-colored, abstract shapes (in “dazzle camouflage”). The women camoufleurs in Towle’s course were chosen to accomplish this. They did the whole thing overnight—and it was the talk of the town the next morning.

When Captain Towle returned from the war, surely he was discouraged to find (like others of his generation) that American Impressionism was no longer in vogue, having been swept aside by Modernism that had begun with the Armory Show in 1913. Beginning in 1919, he worked for the US Treasury Department in Washington DC, in connection with the Victory Liberty Loan Committee, then moved on to positions at several advertising agencies, including one at which he was in charge of the DuPont Company account.

A breakthrough in his career took place in 1925, when he was hired by DuPont (working in cooperation with General Motors in Detroit) to establish a Duco Color Advisory Service in New York. As documented in a book by Regina Lee Blaszczyk on the history of color use in industrial production (The Color Revolution), this enterprising artist-turned-camoufleur became phenomenally influential at DuPont, General Motors (where he worked with other former camoufleurs, and with Harvey J. Earl), and Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, as industry’s first and foremost “color engineer.”

Towle moved from New York to Detroit in July of 1928, when General Motors launched an “art and color section” and appointed Towle its “chief color expert.” He talked about his career transition in news articles at the time. “I went into the war,” he explained, “thinking art belonged to the chosen few. I came out knowing that it belonged to every urchin in the street. Working on wartime camouflage problems taught one how to use color with a purpose. I saw the futility of painting portraits to collect dust in museums, and turned to camouflaging industry and its products of everyday life.” His disdain for the art world is evident in his statement that “The automobile manufacturers and plumbing magnates are rivaling the Medici of old as patrons of art, and the resources of modern corporations are unlimited.”

In Blaszczyk’s book, she concludes that Towle was “America’s top automotive and paint colorist.” In the 1928 news article (cited earlier), he is described as "a pioneer in the movement which has brought lavender tea boxes, turquoise alarm clocks and a host of vivid motor cars…," a hue guru who “is now studying the 'color consciousness' of each section of the country, hoping to perfect hues which will satisfy the particular desires of each district."

In December 1934, Towle joined the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company as director of its Division of Creative Design and Color. In 1941, he was interviewed in a news article about his proposal to set up a Pittsburgh civilian camouflage committee, for the purpose of determining which facilities in that city were most vulnerable to attacks by enemy aircraft, and “to design methods either to hide these places by breaking up their shadows or by making them harder to hit.”

From 1945 through 1950, Towle was a lecturer in Business Administration at the College of William and Mary. He died on November 8, 1973. His papers are housed in the Manuscript and Archives Department at the Haley Museum and Library in Wilmington DE.

...

Sources

Roy R. Behrens, False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2002.

_________, Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2009.

_________ ed., Ship Shape: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2012.

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012.

“Color Engineer Sees New Epoch of Vivid Utility” in Waterloo (Iowa) Courier, April 10, 1929, p. 14.

“Raid Defense Gets Impetus in Pittsburgh” in Sandusky (Ohio) Register and News. September 16, 1941.

H. Ledyard Towle, “What the American ‘Camouflage’ Signifies” in New York Times. June 3, 1917, p. 14.

_________, “Projecting the Automobile into the Future” in Society for Automotive Engineering Journal, July 29, 1931.

_________, “Here It Comes” in American Magazine, September 1932.

“Ledyard Towle” (obituary), in New York Times, November 11, 1973, p. 73.

Cagoules | WWI Camouflaged Robes

From Roy R. Behrens, CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (Bobolink Books, 2009), p. 79—

Cagoules were paint-splattered hooded cloaks devised by the first French camoufleurs, to prevent themselves from being seen by aerial observers as they manned long-range artillery. A wonderful painting of this [shown above] was published on the cover of Scientific American on September 29, 1917. Some of these cloaks still exist, including prototypes designed by French camoufleur Eugene Corbin, and reproduced in Blechman• (2004:126-127) and Newark•• (2007:83). They are also described in Kahn••• (1984:148), who states the following: "Hidden beneath camouflaged cagoules, hooded uniforms…was a ghoulish image of the modern soldier, whose finely fitted and brilliant red and blue clothing was replaced by an amorphous costume of drab greens and browns that turned the individual into a frightening form."
A photograph of a group of hooded artillerymen was also published in the Popular Science Monthly, Vol 93 No 3, September 1918, p. 335, as shown below. The headline reads "Not Monks, But Camouflaged Artillerymen."

Amazingly, full-color French photographs of comparable outfits have also survived (see adjusted example below), and can be found online by searching "camouflage" at the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

•Hardy Blechman, ed. (2004), DPM: An Encyclopedia of Camouflage. London: DPM. ••Tim Newark (2007), Camouflage. London: Thames and Hudson. •••Elizabeth Louise Kahn (1984), The Neglected Majority: "Les Camoufleurs," Art History, and World War I. Lanham MD: University Press of America.