an abstracted equivalent of an animal's typical haunts

Roy R. Behrens, Seeing through Camouflage: Abbott Thayer, Background-Picturing and the Use of Cutout Silhouettes, in Leonardo, Vol 51, No 1, pp. 4046, 2018, pp. 41-46—

In collaboration with his son, artist and naturalist Gerald Handerson Thayer, at some point Abbott Handerson Thayer began to espouse a new kind of camouflage called background-picturing. With that concept, he contended that the appearance of animals had evolved toward being well suited for their customary habitat.

As he put it, the patterns on their bodies are "a picture of such background as would be seen through it if it were transparent."

But animals are rarely immobile. They move from one setting to another, and Thayer was not suggesting that an animal's pattern is a literal pictorial image of a single background. That would be counterproductive. Instead, he reasoned, it is an average of a range of typical settings, a generic abstracted equivalent of the appearance(s) of the animal's usual haunts. In Thayer's words, the patterns found on animals are "a sort of compound picture of their normal backgrounds—a picture seemingly made up by the averaging of innumerable landscapes.”…[more]

Del Ames, Ballet Mécanique & WWI ship camouflage

online video link

In 2021, I produced a three-part video about the life of Adelbert Ames Jr. (aka Adelbert Ames II), the American artist, psychologist and optical physiologist who became well known (in the 1940s and 50s) for having devised the Ames Demonstrations in perceptual psychology. That trilogy has been available on my YouTube channel (@camoupedia) for the past five years.

Regrettably, I've never been happy with the third video in that series. The voice-over narration was awful. Finally, after years of wanting to replace it, I've now been able to reconstruct that third segment. The new version is greatly improved, and I have posted it online (the link is above), although it has now been retitled as Adelbert Ames and Anamorphosis / New Version / Part 3. It is entirely free to watch and to share with others.

Ames served in the US Army Signal Corps, and was involved in research that pertained to optics and vision. As far as I know, he did not contribute directly to the development of wartime camouflage, but as this video explains, he did have some connection to camouflage, in part because an artist / friend (who designed frames for Ames' paintings) named Hermann Dudley Murphy was an inspector of ship camouflage for the US Shipping Board.

Hermann Dudley Murphy

Another surprising link is this: Murphy's son was Dudley Murphy, a young Hollywood filmmaker, and an expert on lenses and cameras, who (at his father's suggestion) was hired as Ames' technical assistant at Dartmouth College during the summer of 1921. 

The younger Murphy then moved on to Europe. In the UK, he befriended the poet Ezra Pound and the Vorticist photographer Alvin Langdon Colburn. In France, he met the Surrealist artist Man Ray and the French painter Fernand Léger. It was Murphy and Léger (not just Léger, as if often mistakenly claimed) who made the famous experimental film called Ballet Mécanique. 

This video tells the story of that, and ruminates about the link between that film and Ames' later experiments in vision. It's really quite interesting.

Ames distorted room

architects / they have an eye for the looks of things

Above Photograph of Homer Saint-Gaudens, by De Witt Clinton Ward.

•••

HOLLYWOOD PROP MEN ABLE AT WAR CAMOUFLAGE in The Boston Globe, January 15, 1942, p. 12—

WASHINGTON January 15 (AP)—Hollywood “prop” men—the chaps who design the stage sets for the movie stars—make the best prospects for military camouflage work, an Army expert on strategic concealment asserted today.

Lieut. Col. Homer Saint-Gaudens, Harvard-educated head of the camouflage branch of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, said in an article in the Military Engineer:

"Our best men are moving picture property men. They not only have camouflage ideas, but they understand the application of those ideas. They are resourceful; they are disciplined; they have an eye for the looks of things: they can build you the answer."

The colonel, who was himself stage director for actress Maude Adams. and is director of fine arts, Carnegie Institute, says that when a would-be camouflage worker comes to his desk and declares he is a marvellous painter, he (Saint-Gaudens) makes this reply:

"That's okay. But let me have a look at your hands. How are your feet? Can you lug 60 pounds 20 miles and do it again the next day?

"Yes, I remember that set where Robert Taylor makes love to Hedy Lamarr. You say you designed it and helped build it, too? You are just the young man we are looking for."

Saint-Gaudens, who received numerous decorations for his camouflage work during the first World War, said the best camouflage officers, the ones who direct the workers, are young erst-while architects."

Such men, he declared, have "already learned to cope with the builders of new houses who insist on having the stairs and the clothes closet in the same place.”

•••

Below Page spread from an article by Edwin Schallert, Trick Photography in the Gold Rush, in Science and Invention (December 1925), pp. 714-715, showing various special effects and scenic props used in the filming of the Charlie Chaplin comedy The Gold Rush.

  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

ship camouflage as practiced to some slight extent

Above A public domain photograph of the USS Constitution in 1919. The informative, lengthy text below is a letter submitted by a Boston-area ship model maker and ship historian named Edwin E. Ottie. It was featured as part of a column titled "As the World Wags" by Philip Hale, as published in The Boston Herald, May 19, 1928, p. 18. It may be one of the better accounts of ship camouflage at the end of the 18th century—

PAINTED FOR BATTLE

Recently there has been some discussion in The Boston Herald of the original color scheme of the frigate Constitution, now undergoing restoration at the Charlestown navy yard.

At her launch In 1797 the Constitution was probably painted in the mode then practically universal for ships-of-war of all classes in the navies of England, France and the United States. The bulwarks inside and the inboard works, such as ladders, capstans, etc., were painted red or vermilion. Outside the hulls were coppered to the waterline. At or just above the waterline were the “wales,” a strake of extra-heavy planking running the length of the vessel. To preserve them they were daubed with a mixture of lamp-black and tar, which gave the effect of black paint. Above the wales and in the line of the ports, the ship's sides were left unpainted, or scraped bright and then covered or varnished with a composition of turpentine, linseed oil and yellow ochre, which produced the effect of a broad yellow streak or band. Above this streak to the rail the sides were either black, red or blue, sometimes decorated. The ships of this time generally carried elaborate figureheads with much carving and gilt-work about the bows, and equally elaborate and highly-decorated stern and quarter-galleries.

This was the general style, but there were many variations from it, up to Nelson's time there being no uniform rule for painting ships. At the Nile In 1798 the sides of the British ships varied from light yellow to dark yellow, some of them with horizontal black stripes between the tiers of ports. The Zealous had broad red sides with a black streak between the upper and lower deck ports. The Theseus had light yellow sides with a black streak between the upper and lower deck ports and hammock cloths yellow with ports painted on them to resemble three-decker. Even then, camouflage and deception were practised to some slight extent.

In their painting the French ships seem to have been almost indistinguishable from the English, as their sides also ran from light yellow to dark yellow, while several of them, like the English, had red sides. Le Genereux had dark red sides, Le Timoleon very dark red sides and L'Aquilon red sides with a black streak between the upper and lower deck ports.

To avoid the obvious confusion Nelson ordered all the ships of his fleet to be painted alike. He was the first to insist on this practice, ships In his fleet being given black hulls with yellow streaks along the line of the gunports and black portlids. As the ships were chequersided, this system of painting was called "double-yellow" or "chequer painting"; it was also called the "Nelson stripe,” or [Nelson] mode.

The French painted their masthoops black; as a further distinguishing mark Nelson had his masthoops painted white.

After Trafalgar the yellow streaks in the line of the gunports gradually merged into white, thus giving the black-and-white effect of the old "wooden walls."

By 1812 the Constitution probably had a broad white stripe along the line of her main-deck battery. Colored reproductions of two of Pocock's engravings of the action of the Constitution and the Java (Dec. 29, 1812) show both vessels with white streaks along the line of the lower deck guns.

Camouflage on the whole was but little known and less resorted to in Nelson's time. Cannon-range was very short; ships fought at a hundred yards distance or less, and half the time commanders depended on boarding and carrying the other vessel by sheer weight of muscle and hand-to-hand fighting with cutlass and boarding-pike to win the day. In this, the British had a peculiar advantage over their traditional enemies the French, as the French seamen being not infrequently undernourished and sickly stood little chance against the brawny English jack-tars. This led the English to neglect their marksmanship with the great guns and in 1812 the Americans, through superior gunnery and seamanship, repeatedly defeated them at sea.

Ships as a rule fought in a huddle, their yard-arms locked, sometimes so close aboard each other that the supports could not be triced up and the guns run out. So on the first volley the gun-crews fired through their own port-lids and blew them away, and ran their swabbers and rammers into the enemy's ports to load their guns after the discharges; they fought stripped to the buff, sometimes bare-footed, with buckets of rum by the train-tackles of each gun, their pig-tails whipping about their shoulders as they loaded, aimed and ran out the long eighteen or twenty-four-pounders on their cumbersome wooden carriages. Under the pull of the tackles and the roll of the ship the guns brought up with a crash against the oaken sides, and when fired the recoil drove them back into position for re-loading and firing again.

Seamen wore their hair long in those days and elaborate accounts are to be found in old books for powdering, greasing and braiding pigtails, in which they took great pride. Sometimes the pig-tails were encased in snake-skin or oiled silk; prime seamen were known by the first class condition of their pig-tails.

Engagements between single ships sometimes were conducted with all the ceremony and punctilio that marked duels ashore between gentlemen or officers of the two services.

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

Jack Frost as master camouflage artist / WWII cartoon

Sorry. I don’t find this terribly funny. Nor interesting. Nor do I know the artist, whose cryptic signature (which I can’t read) is at the bottom left. Dame Nature is the lady on the left (as evidenced by the label), while Jack Frost stands beside her. It was published with the heading THE MASTER CAMOFLEUR [sic, should be camoufleur] in the Divide County Farmers Press and Crosby Review (Crosby ND), November 19, 1943.

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

construction of a WWI dummy tank by british in france

Above Dummy tank being constructed in France by British forces, 1916.

•••

SWANSEA'S TANK in The Cambria Daily Leader (Wales), October 23, 1919, p. 8—

Somebody at the War Office is evidently deeply concerned that towns' war savings presentation tanks shall be properly maintained and prevented from deterioration into rust and desuetude. Swansea's unattended and unapproachable. because of the trivial paling round it, evidently would not please him, to judge from the following note from the W.O. Publicity Department on tank presentation:—"Each city and town so honored should arrange for proper care and attention to be bestowed upon its charge, so as to keep it always a proud and fitting memorial to an arm of the Service which did so much to save the lives of many thousands of citizen soldiers. The tank should rest upon a firm concrete foundation of ample area, so that on wet days visitors may not carry mud into the interior. The exterior of the hull and the roof should be well cleaned and thoroughly painted at regular intervals, and the wonderful 'dazzle' and 'Futurist camouflage effects may be used with advantage. But if camouflage is not possible, a good serviceable brown color may be used without departing from realism, as, indeed, many tanks went into action plainly painted and with no attempt at cunning disguise. The tracks or road chains should be very thoroughly treated, else they will soon show signs of rust and decay and, as it is not practicable to keep them bright, they should be painted a color as near the natural steel as possible. A tank crew dearly loved to have all the inside of the machine white in color, and it is doubtful if their choice can be improved upon, with a dull black for the engine. For the rest, brass work and steel rods should be kept bright and. clean, and this duty could well be included in the daily routine of an employee of the local council. In wet weather, and at night, the roof of the machine should be covered with a tarpaulin." All this, emanating evidently from a man who knows his tank well, contrasts strangely with talk of using the presentation for scrap iron. It is a counsel of perfection, of course, but Swansea ought to get some useful tips from it.

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

tacoma builds phony tank for WWI liberty loan parade

Above WWI American dummy tank in Liberty Loan parade, 1918

•••

CITY TANK IN LOAN PARADE in Tacoma Times (Tacoma WA) April 06, 1918, p. 8—

One of the novel features of Saturday’s Liberty parade was a miniature “tank” furnished by the city streets department. The tank was built from a new caterpillar tractor just purchased by the city. Although the caterpillar tread of the city machine does not go over the top of the body, as it does in the battle tanks, the machine was camouflaged by scenic artists so that it bore a startling resemblance to the new war terrors. It was armed with a half dozen fierce-looking guns. Commissioner Atkins announced that he would guide the city tank through the streets.

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

women's contributions to wartime camouflage / WWI

It is difficult to know to what extent American women contributed directly to the design of wartime camouflage. A case in point is the artist Constance Cochrane (1888-1952), whose father and grandfather were career military officers. As a painter, she had a lifelong interest in seascapes and coastal views. In one source it is said that “she joined the navy during both the first and second World Wars to design camouflage for ships.” Another claims that “during World War I she, like Frederick Waugh [a prominent seascape artist], designed camouflage for navy battleships.” A graduate of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (Moore College of Art), she was associated with an alliance of women artists known as The Ten or The Philadelphia Ten. During WWI, she was a member of the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps, whose activities we’ve discussed at length in earlier posts and in an online video talk.

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

the cat's pajamas / duplicitious color uses in nature

Until a few years ago, I used to give a slide talk called THE CAT'S PAJAMAS: Animal Camouflage / The Hidden Creatures in our Yards [above]. But the pandemic put a stop to that. So I repurposed the in-person slide talk (with considerable improvement) as a free online video called NATURE, ART AND CAMOUFLAGE: Duplicitous Uses of Color (as shown below), which continues to be popular.

 

fires in American camouflage section buildings in WWI

Moulin de la Galette, Paris

GASOLINE EXPLODES IN CAMOUFLAGE SCHOOL in Seward Gateway Daily Edition (Seward AK), February 2, 1918, p. 4—

PARIS, Feb. 2—A gasoline can exploded this morning as some American soldiers were filling an automobile tank at the famous Moulin de la Galette dancing hall [as pictured above], now used as a camouflage school for the American army. The tank also exploded and two American soldiers were seriously wounded.

•••

OFFICIAL PAPERS BURNED Mice and Matches Blamed for Fire in Washington, in Indianapolis News (Indianapolis IN), April 6, 1918, p. 9—

WASHINGTON, April 6—Fire of unknown origin last night destroyed the upper floor of a building near the great State, War and Navy Building [as pictured below], occupied by the Navy Bureau of Construction and Repair and the Camouflage Section. Some supplies and papers were burned, but the damage is said to be insignificant.

No one was in the building except a watchman, who thought the flames started in a piles of papers beneath a stairway, and that mice and matches probably were responsible.

State, War and Navy Building, Washington DC

Marcel Breuer / smuggling banknotes out of Germany

Bauhaus, Gestalt and Problem Solving

Bauhaus, Gestalt and Problem Solving: Thinking Outside the Box , a recent online video talk, includes an old familiar joke about a factory worker who left work each day with a wheelbarrow full of packing peanuts. The joke is a prime example of a switch of attention (as in, for example, misdirection in magic acts). The worker was suspected of smuggling factory components, but nothing was found. In the end it was determined that he was stealing wheelbarrows. I was reminded of this when I ran across the story of how Bauhaus furniture designer and architect Marcel Breuer succeeded in smuggling banknotes through customs when he left Germany for London. 

•••

Jack Pritchard, View from a Long Chair (London : Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1984), p.111—

Carola Giedion [wife of Sigfried Giedion] and Sybil Moholy [wife of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy] were sharing a flat [in London] for a while, and Sybil had received a book from [Marcel] Breuer which , when opened, was found to be [Adolf Hitler’s famous book] Mein Kampf. It was worse than a poor joke, she and Carola were furious and threw it away wtth the rubbish. Breuer arrived soon after, apparently happy at being away from Nazi Germany, only to find two furious dames attacking him wtth no mercy. When he could get a word in he explained that, in order to get some of his money through German Customs, he thought it would be a bright idea to interleave their leader’s great book with banknotes. They would surely not examine it with any great care. There was immediate pandemonium, all rushed down, hoping the rubbish had not yet been taken away. When they found the book, all was forgiven.

magic motorways / camouflage / norman bel geddes

Christopher Innes, Designing Modern America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 147—

During [World War II] the army borrowed part of the Futurama model [designed for the 1939 New York World's Fair by Norman Bel Geddes] for a camouflage school, where it was used to demonstrate techniques of deceptive coloration and the effectiveness of visual illusion.

In addition to his Futurama landscape being used in the camouflage school, Bel Geddes himself designed camouflage patterns for military vehicles and aircraft.

dazzle camouflage meets John Cage's chess pieces

Below is an excerpt from “Composing Chess,” an essay by Paul Franklin and Lowell Cross, as published in Larry List, ed., The Imagery of Chess Revisited. New York: George Braziller, 2005. The book’s cover is reproduced above. 

The passage refers to a musical composition (embedded within a painting) by American composer John Cage titled Chess Pieces (1944). It suggests a possible link between the chessboard pattern of Cage’s painting and geometric (sometimes checkerboard) color schemes used for so-called dazzle patterns used in World War I and II ship camouflage. If there was in fact a link, the writers surmise, the younger Cage may have learned about "high difference" camouflage from his father, an inventor named John Milton Cage, Sr. The extent to which wartime camouflage was “Cubist-inspired” (a common claim) has long been debated.

•••

Even though neither the structure nor the mechanics of Cage’s score refer specifically to chess, in choosing Chess Pieces as his title, the composer punningly associated its twenty-two movements (pieces) with the pieces of the game. The visual prominence of the notes in the painting also suggests a correlation between the shorthand language of musical notation and that of chess notation. The sixty-four-square chessboard format of the artwork reiterates these ideas. Sixty-four became sacrosanct for Cage in the early 1950s, when he embraced chance operations derived from the sixty-four symbolic hexagrams found in the ancient Chinese I Ching (Book of Changes) as his principal method of composing. He later identified the rigor of chess as “a balance with my use of chance operations.” In addition to the checkerboard pattern of Chess Pieces, the white and black inks Cage used for his musical notations evoke the common colors of the game’s two opposing armies, not to mention the palette of the piano keyboard on which the notes were meant to be played. This alternating gridlike color scheme also calls to mind Cubist- inspired “dazzle” camouflage developed during World War I and redeployed in World War II to disguise naval vessels. Repeating geometric schemes of highly contrasting tonal values, often black and white, applied by artists known as camoufleurs created dramatic optical illusions that prevented ships from being targeted. In Chess Pieces, the staves and musical notes function similarly, veiling the chessboard beneath their shimmering warp and woof. Cage may have been familiar with dazzle camouflage thanks to his father, an inventor who obtained patents for submarine air-delivery, steering, and propulsion systems just before World War I and during World War II researched and developed, with his son’s assistance, a radarlike system to help pilots see through fog. This activity constituted the younger Cage’s sole contribution to the war effort; in late 1942 or early 1943, he received a Class III-A deferment from the draft (“hardship for dependents”) due to the ill health of his wife, Xenia. An avowed pacifist and anarchist in later years, Cage condemned the conflict, admitting: “As a child I was very much impressed by the notion of turning the other cheek. You know, if someone struck me on one cheek, I actually did turn the other cheek. I took that seriously.” 

•••

Mrs. P.R. Woodhouse (source unknown)—
A hefty whaler, after some discussion with [British missionary Samuel] Marsden, remarked: “Your religion teaches that if a man is hit on one cheek, he will turn the other.” And he hit Marsden on the right cheek. Marsden obediently offered his left cheek and received a second blow. “Now,” said Marsden, “I have obeyed my Master’s commands. What I do next, he left to my own judgment. Take this.” And he knocked the man down.  

RELATED LINKS ship camouflage online video talks

blending / assuming the look of an overturned stump

Above  Cartoon from Lilliput Magazine, date and artist unknown.

•••

Arthur Henry Howard Heming, The Drama of the Forests, Romance and Adventure.  Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Co, p. 61—

As regards trailing game, whether large or small, he [a Canadian Native American] cautioned me to watch my quarry carefully, and instantly to become rigid at the first sign that the game was about to turn round or raise its head to peer in my direction. More than that, I should not only remain motionless while the animal was gazing toward me, but I should assume at once some form that suggested the character of the surrounding trees or bushes or rocks. For example, among straight-boled, perfectly vertical trees, I should stand upright; among uprooted trees, I should assume the character of an overturned stump, by standing with inclined body, bent legs, and arms and fingers thrust out at such angles as to suggest the roots of a fallen tree. And he added that if I doubted the wisdom of such an act, I should test it at a distance of fifty or a hundred paces, and prove the difficulty of detecting a man who assumed a characteristic landscape pose among trees or rocks. That was years before the World War had brought the word camouflage into general use; for as a matter of fact, the forest Indians had been practicing camouflage for centuries and, no doubt, that was one reason why many of the Indians in the Canadian Expeditionary Force did such remarkable work as snipers.

a modern bus like noah's ark with 12 pygmies inside

Tudor Hart's WWI tank camouflage

Above A couple of years ago, we blogged about the World War I camouflage innovations of a Canadian artist named Percyval Tudor Hart (1873-1954). It was a detailed, fairly lengthy blog, and may merit being revisited here. He proposed a style of camouflage in whch he covered the surfaces of a ship, tank and sniper's cloves with multi-colored, high-density zigzags. I actually saw the camouflaged gloves many years ago in an exhibition in Ontario. Above is an AI-colorized photograph of his tank camouflage proposal.

•••

Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life: memoirs of 1891-1917. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1961, p. 184—

Here is how in 1916, I described the first tank I had seen: “There is about it something majestic and nauseating. It may be that once there existed a breed of gigantic insects; the tank is like them. It has been brightly decorated for camouflage; the flanks resemble the paintings of the Futurists. It creeps along slowly, like a caterpillar; trenches, bushes, barbed wire, nothing can stop it. Its feelers twitch: they are guns and machine guns. In it, the archaic is combined with the ultra-American, Noah’s Ark with a twenty-first century bus. Inside there are men, twelve pygmies, who innocently believe that they are the tank’s masters.”

she was not only good in math, science & philosophy

Frida Kahlo

Barbara Mujica, Frida: A Novel. Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2001, pp. 102-103—

“Everyone said I had an eye for color,” she told me, very impressed with herself. “Only that stupid Lorenzo, you know what he said? He said I should become a dress designer!” Obviously, she thought dress designing was beneath her, although as an adult she actually wore a lot of her own creations. I can understand how someone might have thought that Frida would become a dress designer. She was so particular about her clothes—the jewelry, the colors, the ribbons in her hair. Everything had to match. Clever Frida. I have to admit it; she was good not only in math and science and philosophy, but she knew how to doll herself up in order to camouflage her defects. I mean, Frida wasn’t really pretty—I told you that before—but she was very particular about her appearance. She took hours to get dressed and do her hair. It was important to her to divert people’s eyes from that ugly, deformed leg. More>>>

amazing how war finds use for anything—even artists

Gerard Woodward, Vanishing. London: Picador, 2014, p. 466—

Shortly after this, back at the barracks, I was called in to see the major. He said the following: "I've had a request for your transfer, Private Brill. It seems someone somewhere in the higher echelons of command thinks you might have a use. The army is forming a Camouflage Corps, and they have specifically asked for you to be part of it. How does it feel to be loved, eh? Well, I suppose they're looking for anyone with artistic credentials. You used to be an art teacher, didn't you? Amazing, isn't it, how war finds use for anything, even artists? Here's your travel warrant. You'll be leaving tomorrow."

landscape camouflage as flat pattern abstract design

Above Collier’s: The National Weekly. January 10, 1914. Artist unknown. This cover design and illustration do not pertain directly to Louis B. Siegriest or military camouflage. But the jacket the person is wearing, with its “flat pattern” abstract design, seems entirely consistent.

•••

Louis Siegriest in Louis Bassi Siegriest Reminiscences: Oral History Transcript. Interview conducted by V.L. Gilb. California: Bancroft Library, 1954—

 [At the time that the US entered World War II in 1941]…I knew a man [in San Francisco] who had been in the First World War as a camoufleur. He called me up and asked me if I would like to come down and join the camouflage outfit. So I thought that would be a thing I would want to do, and I went down and joined the camouflage outfit.

…This was with the US Engineers [Army Corps of Engineers]. That was I think the third day after the war [was declared]…

…they were looking for camoufleurs at that time, and they were very hard to get because very few people had experience, which I myself didn’t have, but this man, he was in the First World War [in France], and he was with [Homer] St. Gaudens and Abe Rattner, the painter.

…So he sort of took charge of the training of the men to be camoufleurs because the men who were head[ing] the department knew nothing of it. They had to read all this time while this fellow took over and trained us to do this type of work.

…His name was Stanley Long [1892-1972]. He is an artist, himself. He has a show at the present time [1954] at the Maxwell Gallery of cowboys and horses. He’s pretty good at it, too, Western type of painting…

…I stayed with them [the camouflage unit] until practically the end of the war…

[Question: How did your work at a WWII camoufleur contribute to your eventual work as an abstract painter?]

…Well, all this time we were working on the drawings of camouflage installations, [and] it had to be worked out in flat pattern. And they all worked into sort of abstract patterns, and that sort of interested me because I had never worked that way. But I had a feeling all the time that that was something I would like to do. So it sort of changed my painting, after working in this camouflage work. I saw things with a different view than I had before. And I still don’t paint as an abstract [artist], but I use an abstract pattern as a base in practically everything I do. I mean I start that way, in more or less flat pattern. And then I work my realistic [components] into the pattern. I found that it works out better than the way I used to work, just straight painting and trying to pull it all together. This way I start out with a pattern, and I worked into it that way.

•••

In a later interview, conducted in 1978 for the Archives of American Art by Terry St. John and Paul Karlstrom, Siegriest gave a slightly different account of the same experiences:

Question: …Some time in 1941 you went to work for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. What did you do for them?



 LS: I went into camouflage at that time. There was that cowboy artist by the name of Danny Long [sic, Stanley Long], whom I knew.  He was a friend of [Maurice] Logan’s. I met him over in San Francisco on the second day of the war, I think. He said they had just called him back. He did camouflage during the First World War, and he said they called him back to teach the younger fellows camouflage. He said, “Why don’t you join up?” I said I would love to. It took me a couple of days to go through the process, but I finally went in and it was easy for me. You were assigned to a job and you made these designs and then they were handed out to different companies to do the work.

Q: Now you did a design like a flat abstract pattern. Would it be an aerial view?



LS: An aerial view.  

Q: And then your design would be sent out to...

LS: Different companies. They would do the painting, nets or whatever. 

Q: What was it like over at Fort Cronkite and around there? Didn’t they use different colored plants and things like that to create patterns?

LS: Yes, but I did the Benicia thing up there, Benicia arsenals. That was designed mostly in there and I wouldn’t have a great deal to do. I’d look at how it looked and then I would fly it. 

Q: They’d put you in an airplane?



LS: Yes, I’d go to Hamilton Field, get a plane and go up there. At 6,000 feet I’d look at it. 

Q: How did it look?



LS: It was okay, sometimes I’d change the design.

Q: What did it look like at 10,000 feet?

LS: It looked like an abstract design. The way I did it was to go up there first and see what the land looked like on the outside. Then I’d bring the land in to the buildings; if there was a green patch over there I’d bring the green patch into the buildings. If there was brown, or dark, I’d bring it all in. So I’d go up and look down and see if that was right. And then there were other ways of doing it. I went up to Klamath, which was a radar station, and bought an old barn and moved it down (the barn) over the top of the radar station. We were on the coast.

Q: How did it look?

LS: Oh, it looked like a ranch, I’d build fences all around.  

Q: What was your experience as an artist?… Did this turn you on to any ideas for your later paintings?



LS: Well, more or less, I guess it did. At that time I painted. I even took my paints along.

Q: What kind of paintings did you do?

LS: I’d do things along the coast, you know.

Q: More straightforward kind of landscapes?

LS: More straightforward landscapes.

Q: Previously when you were doing landscapes you were looking straight ahead at them, and that’s a very abstract way of looking at landscape, like looking down.

LS: I even painted some of the installations.  I got into a lot of trouble by doing it because the Army thought I was giving secrets away. They took all the paintings from me and locked them up. I got them back. Well, that was good, working for the camouflage. And then, during that time, Life and Time had war artists.…

Postscript It may also be of interest that Louis Siegriest's second wife, artist Edna Stoddart (1888-1966), née Edna Lehnhardt, was the niece of Josephine Earp, the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp.

Ding Cong / camouflaged wit and humor from china

Above is his illustration of the following traditional story, as told by Chinese artist Ding Cong (who signed his work as Xiao Ding) (1916-2009).

•••

Ding Cong, Wit and Humor from Ancient China: One Hundred Cartoons. China Books and Periodicals, 1986—

92. Camouflage with Leaves—

A poor man from the state of Chu once read the following in a book: “A mantis camouflaged itself while waiting to pounce on a cicada.” The man then gathered some leaves under a tree and used them to camouflage himself. When he asked his wife if she could identify him she spoke truthfully and said, “Yes, I can.” The man then changed his posture and asked her several more times. Becoming annoyed by this practice, she finally told him that she was unable to identify him. The man was very glad.

Thus camouflaged with leaves the man went to the market and stole things from the open stalls. But he was caught and summoned to the magistrate’s court. After the man confessed, the magistrate burst into laughter and set him free. He found the man’s conduct so inane that he decided not to punish him.

WWII charming camouflage fashions for mothers to be

Margaret Brentnall, John Hutton, Artist and Glass Engraver. Philadelphia PA: Art Alliance Press, 1986, pp. 40 and 45—

The [World War II British] camouflage soldiers were, on the whole, the most unwarlike collection of men imaginable—painters, sculptors, designers, and architects. They had, in fact, been drawn from the very section of the community that, in warfare, the regular soldier regarded as a bit of a joke.…

An example of the regular army’s attitude in dealing with the camouflage men…was described by Geoffrey Barkas in an article written in 1952 for the Royal Army Ordnance Corps Gazette. Barkas, as chief camouflage officer, Middle East Forces, had been informed that an expeditionary force was being assembled under the code name Lustre Force and that he was to be responsible for its camouflage equipment. He asked where Lustre Force was going, but for reasons of security such information could on no account be divulged. Could he have some clue on suitable tones and colors—was it a yellow, brown, or green country, lumpy or flat, with trees or none? Certainly not. That would be telling him where Lustre Force was going. What was the size and composition of the force, and how long did he have to assemble the material? But this was expecting the planners to reveal the date of embarkation! Barkas did, eventually, make an accurate guess (the destination was Greece) and by direct approach to the director of Ordnance Services he got the support he needed. Although only a few weeks remained for assembling the camouflage supplies, Lustre Force was equipped.