Sir Walter Raleigh makes use of smoke as camouflage

W. Allen Howells, Raleigh Blowing Smoke

Philip Leslie Hale, in his column titled As the World Wags in The Boston Herald on January 24, 1918—

In the definition of "camouflage" the standard French dictionaries are of little or no use. Littre gives "camouflet," the noun, meaning “a thick smoke that one blows maliciously into the nose of one with a lighted paper cone." To give a "camouflet" is to affront, mortify a person. "Camouflet" is also a mining term. This French word is an old one. It is defined in Cotgrave’s dictionary (1678) as "a snuft or cold pie, a smoakie paper held under the nose of a slug or sleeper." Now, a cold pie in old colloquial English meant an application of cold water to wake a sleeper. “To give cold pig" was another form, and it is still used. In dialect a "cold pie” is an accident to a train or carriage in a pit, a fall on the ice, a disappointment of any kind.

In more modern French-English dictionaries, a camouflet is a whift of smoke in the face; a stifler; an affront, rap over the knuckles, snub.

•••

Adrian Margaux, If Our Caricaturists Had Flourished Before: Some of the Drawings They May Have Made, in the Strand Magazine, November 1918, pp. 365-366—

W. Allen Howells, British illustrator. when asked to choose a subject for a comic portrait—"…I should like to [illustrate] Sir Walter Raleigh, as I have an idea he was one of the pioneers of camouflage in this country. A French slang dictionary tells me that the word means blowing smoke through a paper cone into another person's face as an insult, and I can imagine Sir Walter making use of the device between his draws of tobacco smoke."

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

Chalk Talk / Iowa's Herb Hake Meets Old Man Camouf

Above Herbert V. Hake (1903-1980) was a well-known faculty member who taught scenic design in the theatre department at Iowa State Teachers College (now University of Northern Iowa) in Cedar Falls. He was also a pioneering contributor to radio and television broadcasting, a writer, and a cartoonist. Using his cartoons, he gave amusing, informative “chalk talks” on various topics, including local history.  In 1968, he published A Cartoon History of Iowa, in which (as is common in chalk talks) he drew comic figures which, by adding a few select details, were transformed into different things. Shown above is one of those drawing sequences, in which he begins with what appears to be a meaningless drawing on the left, while on the right it turns into an upsidedown portrait (made of potatoes, wheat and corn) of Tama Jim (US Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson). Below is the same drawing viewed upsidedown, which some people may mistake for Mister Potato Head.

•••

Roy Moulton, LEM EXTEMPORIZES ON CAMOUFLAGE IN BIG BURG in The Boston Post, May 17, 1918—

Somewhere in New York.

Dear Folks—Old Man Camouf or whoever it was in France who invented camouflage, started something. Maybe M. Camouf knew what he was doing, but I doubt it.

It has spread over this town like a pest of locusts. Of all conditions attendant upon the war and which have been gently wafted across the pond as a direct result of war, camouflage is the most generally in the limelight.

It is being used for purposes never intended by its inventor.

After the New York people forget all about the war they will remember the wave of camouflage which attended it.

Not New to the Ladies
Not that camouflage is anything new. Of course not. There's nothing new under the sun. Men
were practicing camouflage long before this war and the ladies, too, bless 'em, but they didn’t know what they were doing. It took M. Camouf to come along and tell them and to name the art after himself. Maybe he is proud of it.

The first waiter in the world who used the first "dicky" shirt front, practiced camouflage, although he didn't know what he was doing at the time. Then there were the Ascot ties, which effectually concealed the absence of a shirt; then the cuffs, which could be cleverly fastened inside the coat sleeves. In fact there were a million just such contrivances before M. Camouf came along.

When M. Camouf invented his famous art, he meant it merely to cover military appurtenances. By the use of camouflage, a Ford could be made to look like a mere garbage can, sitting serenely on the landscape and minding its own business. A large gun could be made to look like a shock of corn. A soldier could be made to look like a pacifist, etc. So far, so good.

But, during its journey aross the ocean, M. Camouf's art became inflated with its own importance and enlarged its scope. In France it confined itseif to the military. In America it confined itself to nothing.

It spread out like a fan covering every phase of human life and every form of human endeavor. It covered art, letters, religion, politics, society and vers libre. It stopped at nothing.

It was imbued with the spirit of liberty as soon as it struck the land of the free and when it started cutting up it didn't know when to stop. It is going yet.

35-Cent Dog Sells for $600
Just the other day on Broadway a man took a 35-cent mongrel pup that he had found shivering behind an ash barrel, put a $7 blanket on him with “Prince" embroidered in gold letters, and sold the dog to an actress for $600 as a genuine Norwegian fish-hound. That shows what M. Camouf's art can do with the aid of American genius.

A $15-a-week telephone adJuster thought he would like to be a French marquis. So he dressed up like two or three French marquises and borrowed about $100,000. He tried to borrow $50,000,000 from J. P. Morgan & Co. and nearly got away with it.

By the aid of M. Camouf's gentle art, cabaret managers have been able to paim off genuine East Side Hawaiian dancers on an unsuspecting public. The shredded wheat skirts and the brown stain for the skin and the trick is done. In these cases even old M. Camouf, himself, would be hoodwinked.

I don't know of anybody in this village who has the art of camouflage down finer than my old friend Hank Stevens. He is in reality 95 per cent camouflage and 1 per cent Hank. He can take a
$9 bank roll and make it look like a Belgium indemnity. He seems to have a natural affection for money which expresses itself eloquently in his unwillingness to part with any of it, even
under the most favorable circumstances.

Why Hank Gets Nervous
I have never seen Hank when he had not been laboring under a terrific nervous strain. Something has always just happened to him. He has either just lost a tremendous sum of money on the curb or somebody has wished a couple of maiden aunts on him for life. 

Accidents of this sort befall him so rapidly that he never has time to get to work at a regular job. It is natural for those who feel sorry for Hank to do something to express their sympathy. They either feed him a good dollar table d'hote lunch or buy him a few internal applications over the mahogany.

I will never forget the first time I met Hank. I thought he was the saddest looking man I had ever seen. He was hanging over the edge of the mahogany like an umbrella somebody had left, down near the dried herring and clove dish. I had been introduced to him by a mutual friend who suddenly found something to do up in the other end of town.

"I am shad, tonight,” said Hank, by way of opening the conversation.

"That sounds fishy," I said, in my well-known jugular vein.

"No, it's no joke," said Hank. "I am shad. I had a great shorrow. I've had a lotta trouble."

I immediately felt sorry for Hank and bought him a 23-cent present. He cheered up for a moment but soon suffered a relapse which called for another treatment.

"It's tough," he said. "Gosh, I’m blue tonight. I buried the best uncle I ever had—21 years ago and I never got over it."

Hank began to weep and I stole quietly away and left him. At the door I met another friend, who asked: "Who has Hank lost now?”

"His favorite uncle,” I said.

"You must be a beginner with Hank," said the friend."He tossed me that favorite uncle over three years ago. Since then he has used up five aunts, seven cousins and at least 11 grandparents on me. If Hank ever runs out of deceased relatives, I figure I will save a lot of money. But he probably never will. He tells me his family came over In the Mayflower and he can trace them back to the 14th century.”

He Likes Athletics
Hank was the original little office boy who had a grandmother die every time there was a game out at the Polo Grounds.

Another sort of camoufleur is my friend Pete Henkle, Pete is the best-dressed man in New York and he does it all on one suit of clothes. I never got a note from Pete in my life, which was not written on Ritz or Waldorf stationery and if Pete ever had $4 at one time in his career as a Broadway ornament none of his friends ever knew it. He has been known to have $2.67 at one time or even perhaps $3.98, but never more. He can give the best imitation of Vincent Astor I have ever seen.

Pete has always just had a great stroke of luck. Either somebody has just met him in the Biltmore and handed him a check for $8,000,000, or he has just invented a patent submarine torpedo catcher and sold it to the government for a cool billion. If he is not organizing a billion dollar corporation to take over the potash mines or Guatemala, he is organizing a company to build a railroad from Rio de Janeiro to the City of Mexico. He never knows exactly where he is going to sleep that night, but wherever he does sleep, he dreams tremendous dreams.

His engraved calling cards are wonders. "Peter Stuyvesant Henkle, broker,” is what they say, and when he presents them at the desk in the Waldorf and asks to have Senator James Frothingham Frisby paged, he arouses a good deal of sincere admiration.

It is his habit to rush Into the St. Regis or the Gotham and ask if the Punjab of Afghanistan is
stopping there, and has inquired for him. Pete never misses a meal nor a night's sleep and he hasn't had a pay envelope placed in his hands since he was 13 years old. If a general shake down of all the citizens of New York were ordered suddenly to meet some great emergency, Pete would assay one suit of clothes, a pair of cuff links and, in his more prosperous moments, perhaps $1.76 in real money.

His High Marks
He has been interviewed at variousi times as "the last man who talked with the late President Diaz of Mexico,” "one of the few survivors of the Messina disaster," "an eye witness of the Black Tom explosion" and “the only man who ever interviewed the Grand Lama of Tibet."

Last week he started out bright and early Monday morning to pose as a personal friend of the late Abduli Hamid until some kind friend told him what was liable to happen to him and he desisted.

Pete quotes his friends freely, from General Joffre to former President Castro of Venezuela, and generally gets away with it.

Camouflage covers this village like a pall, from the imitation Russian marmot overcoats of Washington Heights to the bone-rimmed glasses and long hair of Greenwich Village and
the “genuine" Vermont maple syrup made on South Water Street, Chicago.

When ladies of 60 pass for 16 with their short skirts and cute hair and venerable old gentlemen of 70 get by as 35, with their toupées and raven-black mustaches and cigarettes, well may we
say that M. Camouf started something. Even if he didn't start it, he gave it a name, so he is partly responsible.

Even the financial reports are camouflaged. They tell us there is plenty of money in this country.

Sure there is, but somebody has got all of it.

Hoping you are the same, I remain,

Yours
LEM

metamorphosis / shape shifting from pitcher to pitcher

Above Anon, Evolution of a Pitcher (1889). Library of Congress.

•••

CAMOUFLAGE LIQUOR TO SOLDIERS AROUSES JUDGE NEW YORK, in Boston Globe, April 13, 1918, p. 15—

Discovery of camouflage in the disposal of liquor to soldiers and sailors in uniform Ied to the announcement by United States Judge Hand today that imprisonment and not fines would be the punishment hereafter of persons convicted of violating the Federal law forbidding the sale of intoxicants to Army and Navy men.

Stomachs of Teddy bears, paper bags left on mail boxes, taxicab rides around the block at $1.50 a ride, and cigar boxes passed over the counter at cigar stores are some of the methods through which service men here have been served with liquor recently, according to testimony in the Federal court at the arraignment of more than 300 persons, many of whom are now in prison.

There is much more to know about Walt McDougall

Everglades Poster (©2018) Roy R. Behrens

American cartoonist Walt McDougall (1858-1938) was the subject of the previous post, in which we reprinted the full text of a newspaper story he wrote about his attempts to persuade the US military to adopt the use of camouflage during World War I.

As it turns out, there is much more to know about him, and part of the information is in his autobiography, titled This is the Life! (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926). In that book (full text available online), he talks about how he became interested in protective coloration in nature when he was appointed the Game Protector of Florida, under the Migratory Bird Act. During his tenure in that role, the population of white egrets (which had been nearing extinction before) grew substantially, and manatee (then commonly known as the “sea cow”) became “more plentiful than the real cow, which is rather rare in Florida.” He goes on to describe how he also became interested in wartime camouflage—

Shortly after hostilities began in France, I encountered some badly wounded Canadian officers who had been sent South to recuperate, and often took them out boating. From them one day I learned about “camouflage” as practiced in the European armies, The prospect of this novel application of paint to warfare excited me immensely; I seemed to glimpse an opening whereby many aged artists could be of service to their country [p. 307].…

…In July I went to Washington…to preach camouflage to an incredulous and derisive lot of official dumb-bells who thought I was trying to introduce a new brand of French cheese. I was dubbed “Camouflage Walt” in the Press Club. I wrote a couple of page stories for the [Washington] Post that helped to make the word familiar, but alas, the reputation of humor is ruinous to any serious purpose; I got a few laughs but no consideration, although seven hundred French and English artists were even then engaged in developing the new defensive art. General Joe Kuhn, head of the War College, assured me it “was mere frills and piffle” [p. 308].

Aside from his camouflage efforts, there are other interesting aspects of McDougall’s life. In 1902, while he was a cartoonist for The North American in Philadelphia, a fellow cartoonist named Charles Nelan satirized the Governor of Pennsylvania (Samuel Pennypacker) by depicting him as a parrot. Rather like current political ploys, Pennypacker responded by calling for a legislative rule (called the “anti-cartoon act”) that would make it unlawful to portray politicians “as birds or animals.” In response, McDougall created new caricatures of the governer and other hacks—not as birds and animals, but as trees, vegetables, and a beer stein, as reproduced below.




Another, far more somber, aspect of McDougall’s biography took place decades later, when, destitute, forgotten, and living alone, he ended his life at age 80 by shooting himself in the head with an old pistol. This is how the story was told in HE MADE OTHERS LAUGH in the Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro KY), on March 12, 1938—

He had amused unnumbered thousands with his facile pen, helped elect one president with a masterful cartoon, been associated with another, and been employed by a third, yet when Walt McDougall came to die it was all alone and with a pistol clasped in his good right hand. At 80 the cartoonist, author and humorist found himself at the end of the road; money gone, friends forgetful. He had been dead a week, the coroner said.

…[US President Woodrow] Wilson commissioned McDougall to study camouflage in Europe and the report he made was the basis for much this country did in that direction during the early days of the war.•

With age and adversity upon him, the maker of laughs for other people turned to painting and his diary. If McDougall was quite frank with his pages they should have a worthwhile story to tell.

In other accounts of his passing, there are repeated references to his diary, but so far we haven't found it. It would be interesting to read, although assuredly painful. We have found only one published entry, described as having been one of his last. It reads—

Stove won’t work—tough times.

•••

• This claim seems to contradict McDougall's own account of his limited success.

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 Sourcebook

The wizard of oz becomes schooled on camouflage

Walt McDougall (1904), Land of Oz comic page

There is no denying that American artist Walt McDougall (1858-1938) was an extraordinary cartoonist. His work is funny and beautifully drawn. Above is a single full-color newspaper page (1904) for L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz. And at the bottom of this blog post is another full-page comic (1897), amazingly structured, in which works by a number of cartoonists are featured—McDougall's work is inside the triangle on the left of the page. Both of these cartoons are in public domain, and can be accessed as image files on McDougall's Wikipedia page.

McDougall was also interested in camouflage, and he wrote a long newspaper account about that subject during World War I. I've republished the entire text below. But I haven't republished the illustrations he made for it. None of those drawings are of the quality of his cartoons, and one of them is blatantly offensive: it shows military brass having drinks at the Army and Navy Club (where I once lectured—on the subject of camouflage) in Washington DC. An African-American waiter is shown as a clueless black-faced minstrel, as was thought to be funny back then. It brings up painful memories of my own childhood when, as recently as the early 1950s, the movie theatre in the small Iowa community in which I grew up was still featuring "minstrel shows" in which white musicians (there were no black residents at the time) would perform in blackface. With that as a timely disclaimer, here is the text of McDougall's article—

Walt M’Dougall, TRAILING THE CAMOUFLAGE IN WASHINGTON JUNGLES: Certain Adventures of a Patriot Who Endeavored to Do His Bit for Our Newest Art: An “Inside Story” of the Incident That Gave Birth to Camouflage, Written and Illustrated by the Man Who Hereby Sets Forth His Claim to Rank as the Original “Camouflager,” in The Washington Post, June 10, 1917, p. 3—

Camouflage is pronounced as it is spelled, with the “g” soft and mushy, as in “garage,” and with the accent on the “cam.” The art and mystery of concealing batteries, roads and large, important officials by means of artificial scenery was given this name by the French, who knew that it would be a long time before people could determine whether it was a new kind of cheese or a bit of feminine wearing apparel.

Some time ago I became possessed of certain reliable information regarding camouflage through a returned Canadian officer and promptly addressed the War Department a fervent appeal to send me to the French front to gather further information, models, data, and insect parasites for the instruction of our own army. I realized that the task required the imagination of a playwright, the art of a scene painter, the skill of a stage carpenter, the strength of a blacksmith, the nerve of a literary agent, the stomach of a hyena, and the nerve of a motion picture substitute.

Nobody knows what became of that appeal.

New York Got the Edge
Two weeks ago I arrived in Florida in response to a suggestion from a high official to present my plea in person, and almost immediately discovered that while I had been dreaming under the orange blossoms a national camouflage division had been organized in New York, with units in various other cities, and that a number of able-bodied artists already were drilling at night in vacant lots. It was even said that they were wearing uniforms. Now, New York usually tumbles to a new thing only after all the rest of the country has tried it out, and then it starts it off as a new and original fad, but in this case, it seems to have got there first.

Somewhat startled and nervous, I devoted my initial efforts to ascertaining just how far the movement had progressed. Hastily seeking the aforesaid prominent official I was guided to the War Department, where we consulted a bland and amiable Major Blank, who, after candidly admitting that he had never heard of camouflage, said that from what I had revealed to him he didn’t think it quite fair to pester the department about such piffle when it was so busy with really important matters.

“Major, on my word of honor as a gentleman,” I repeated, “I assure you that while camouflage is a new war game, it isn’t piffle. It is saving thousands of lives and guns and military material in France.”

Patting me soothingly on the shoulder, he suggested: “Why not go over on your own account as a private citizen and study it?”

When I asked him, rather testily, I admit, how long he thought I’d last gumshoeing around the French front with a camera, a sketchbook, and a tape measure, picking centimeters and calories off the big guns, he appeared a trifle hurt, but when he got his breath he said that the War Department couldn’t bother with “frills” at this time and that perhaps I might manage to get away with the second or third division of troops going over.

I asked the next man who was consulted, point-blank, if he had ever heard of camouflage.

Thought It a New Insect Powder
“Yes,” said he in a flash; “It is the new insect powder they’re getting from the Phillippines.” However, he was only a civilian.

I began to see, dimly, that my task was going to difficult. We went to the Cosmos Club to dine, where I met an African explorer, who wanted to bet me that camouflage was a subspecies of the dingo family. Late at night, reduced to a sort of dumb despair, I went to the Press Club, where I encountered artist Felix Mahoney, [a cartoonist as well] who proved to have at his finger-ends all the knowledge there is about “Who’s Who and Where” in camouflaging. He formed the local unit and invited me to witness the evening drill the following night. I was surprised to learn that they were not drilling with paintbrushes, but actually learning the military manual under the instruction of a real army officer. This looked like something really tangible.

I also learned that evening that among other things it is supposed that “the camouflage artist is like any other soldier. He goes where he is sent, and, in addition to his arms, he carries a 6-inch sketch box, which is his palette, one-half of the box fitting on his thumb in true palette fashion, while the other half holds his little sketch boards and colors. The scene to be ‘camouflaged’ is sketched exactly as it appears in colors that match the true ones. This sketch is conveyed to the base of operations, where other artists copy it upon a large canvas. The framework, if there is any, is designed and the finished ‘scene’ is rushed to the spot it is intended to conceal.”

When I pointed out that if the scenery was already there in situ it scarcely needed to be disguised by an artificial creation precisely imitating its details to conceal it from the enemy, I was regarded with pity.

He Is the Original Camouflager
Now, I need to explain, perhaps, my interest in this matter. Long before the famous bank robbery where the burglars painted a fake safe and robbed the genuine one behind it, in my boyhood days, in fact, I cleverly painted a life-size effigy of my slight and skinny self and set it up in the cornfield where I was supposed to be watching the crows, and while mother thought I was on the job, I was lying under a willow by the creek fishing for perch. While I expose past duplicity with regret, my mother being long dead, I feel it needful to establish my claim as the original camouflager.

Well, I had already begun to suspect that I stood a swell chance of getting to the front, but I persisted. The next day I met a man in another department who confessed that he had heard that the French used artists in the army to “stimulate scenery” in deceiving the enemy. Needless to say, he meant “simulate.” I saw the young and enthusiastic artists drill that evening and conferred with them. They expected, every one of them, to be sent to the front, but they were rather misty as to how they were to be instructed, and where, in their special form of military art.  I took occasion to explain that I deserved to be sent over in order to qualify as an instructor for just such lads back here at home. None of these boys wanted to be generals or even captains—they wanted to camouflage.

After three days I got so that I found myself in the Army and Navy Club ordering camouflage cocktails for an aged major general and I realized that I had reached a critical stage. I proceeded to obtain a new slant on the subject. Armed with a note from Mr. Tumulty I sought the Assistant Secretary of War, but his private secretary, an alert and observing young fellow, seeing the wild, haunted look in my eyes, the hectic four-flush mantling my cheeks and my ill-concealed impatience, steered me up against some husky colonels in a remote part of the building. These officers, kindly and genial, humored me by listening to my ravings, and finally Mr. McKenna sent me by the department bus to the War College, having previously telephoned General Kuhn that I was coming.

They Treated Him Kindly
Right here I want to express my appreciation of the unfailing kindness, cheerful patience and delightful good humor of every official whose valuable time I monopolized during the week. Although they uniformly refused to take me seriously, they took me in and made me at home in every case. I lunched with the general staff on Friday, after walking many miles across country to the War College, a point usually reached only by airplane and wireless, and although I had neither guide, compass or chart, I got there before everything was eaten.

Here I received another shock. I found that General Kuhn actually knew all about camouflage! I mean, all that is known in the United States. That is nearly nothing, but the general had heard about what had been revealed. His delightful personality eased the pain I felt when I saw that he also regarded camouflage as frillery and military lingeries, as it were, but when he kindly enlightened me as to the number (something like 76,000) of eager, earnest souls who ardently desired to sail for France this week in order to study gas-bombing, trench ventilation, painless starvation, cathedral reconstruction, explosive frankfurters, dog training, the German system of converting their dead into toilet soaps, smokeless tobacco and the like on the battlefield, I saw a great light. I now perceive why departmental business proceeds slowly and painfully. If officials are as invariably polite, courteous, and obliging to every crank, bug, and jobseeker as they were to me it is wonderful that anything is accomplished, and it follows that camouflaging the departments is as necessary as anything else.

He Gave Up the Quest
The last man I interviewed on the subject was the celebrated sculptor, Mr. Paul Barlett, chairman of the executive committee of the Washington camouflage division. He assured me that a small army of artists, eminent and otherwise, was preparing to go to France, where they were to take up this pursuit.

“Do you mean that the government will send this division over as an actual organization of artists?” I asked.

He intimated that such was his understanding.

“And when this army, well-drilled and qualified as soldiers, arrives at the front, will it be marched somewhere and proceed to become students of camouflage, under the instruction of 700 busy scene painters now occupied in disguising France, or will they just camouflage around, picking up the art between the barrage fire and the hospitals?” I persisted.

Mr. Bartlett’s manner suggested that my question peeved him, or, at least, so it seemed to me, and I obtained no answer to the question of how our earnest seekers after knowledge would become qualified to proceed to camouflage. However, this finished my efforts to inject my own personality into the movement. I will not see France until the war is over, and I will never know more about camouflaging than anybody else does.

Walt McDougall and others (1897)

Do you follow me? That's someways behind I'd say

Above Little Pal comic strip by Leo O'Mealia, in The Sacramento Bee, January 10, 1918.

Camouflage used as film theatre entrance advertising

Theatre entrance for The Geezer of Berlin (1918), NYC

In a wartime issue of Motography (November 10, 1917, p. 975), a brief article appeared in which it was asserted by a Hollywood advertising executive that “There is absolutely no excuse…for making motion picture posters deceptive.” In the article, titled Camouflage Has No Place in Poster Making, the executive goes on to say that ”Camouflage has its uses but it does not lend itself to the theatre lobby.”

Almost a year later, this was contradicted by a full-page article in Motion Picture News (October 5, 1918, p. 2189) titled Lobby Display Gets Laughs and Pulls in Crowds to See “The Geezer of Berlin.” It describes a successful advertising ploy devised M. Kashin, theatre manager of The Broadway Theatre in New York.

In an effort to increase attendance at the showing of a propaganda film (the “geezer” in the title, of course, is Kaiser Wilhelm II), Kashin transformed the theatre entrance, as well as the inside lobby, by installing "dazzle camouflage" designs, cartoons, and humorous posters.

The “vivid colors” of the “real camouflage” on the facade, the article states, “are enough to stop anyone in their tracks,” and in turn to lead the audience to a cut-out of “Der Geezer,” as well as satirical posters about “The Clown Prince,” “Gott of Germany,” “Hindebug,” and “Turpentine.”

Reproduced above is a photograph of Kashin’s design for the entrance. In an article published elsewhere (titled Inexpensive Lobby Displays), Kashin discussed his methods for devising this and other advertising novelties. He wrote: “I have found that the lobby display, worked out to its finest detail, will bring more results than any other form of advertising…”

Maurice Ketten | Grandpa hoodwinks Grandma

Camouflage Cartoon by Futurist Felix Del Marle 1919

Felix Del Marle (1919)

Above Felix Del Marle, cartoon titled "League of Nations" (predecessor to the United Nations), as published in Le Rire (April 19, 1919). An accompanying caption reads—

The President: No more wars! Those who want to provoke will have to dread the big cannon of the League.

A Voice in the Crowd: Yes, if it's not just camouflage. 

Felix Del Marle, Self Portrait (1913)

Why Not Try Women Camouflage Artists?

Artist unknown (1917), newspaper cartoon

Above The use of artists as camouflage designers in World War I coincided with the Women's Suffrage Movement. It led to sardonic comparisons of wartime camouflage with the historic use by women of cosmetics, dyes, clothing and fashion-based adjustments. Would it not make sense, this cartoon asks, to assign the task of camouflage to women?—After all, "they've been doing it all their lives." The social context of all this is discussed in an essay published recently, titled "Chicanery and Conspicuousness: Social Repercussions of World War I Ship Camouflage," which is available online. The cartoon above was widely published in American newspapers, such as in The Ogden Standard (Ogden UT), December 3, 1917, p. 11.

•••

Arthur “Bugs” Baer, CAMOUFLAGE in The Daily Missoulian (Missoula MT), September 2, 1917. Special Features, p. 1. Even when the content is offensive, you have to admit that Bugs Baer had a way with words. He was a well-known American journalist and humorist, and indeed it was Bugs who came up with the nickname the "Sultan of Swat" for Babe Ruth—

This war is being fought on words that ain’t in the dictionary. Old man Noah Webster knew a few spoonfuls, but he didn’t know any more about camouflage than a hog does about Sunday. You can lamp his dictionary until you sprain an eye, but you won’t apprehend anything about camouflage in his unabridged word garage. Camouflage is a bilking industry with the libretto and music written by the French. The theory is to swindle the Germans’ eyes. The Frenchmen cover themselves with lots of leaves. They got the theory from Adam and Eve, but ain’t paying royalties.

•••

After he is camouflaged up in a set of form-fitting leaves, the Frenchman ankles off for a short vegetarian stroll toward the kaiser’s trenches. Some husky boche tosses his optic toward him, but figures him out for a dododendron bush goes democratic and poor old Haus is listed among the slightly killed, totally wounded or partially missing.

•••

The idea of camouflage is to gyp the enemy. Give him one five for two tens. You heard about the cowboy who called on his best girl and found her bivouacking in another cowboy’s lap. He pulled out this 45-caliber revolver to shoot the beauty spot off her false, deceiving chin, when she looks at him like page 256 in any of Ouida’s novels.

“Do you believe your dearie, or do you believe your eyes?” she piped.

The poor fish believed his dearie, and they got married and lived snappily ever after. She had that fool cowboy all camouflaged up with her metropolitan tongue and city ways.

•••

Still, camouflage is no novelty among the unfair sex. A flapper will high-heel along the macadamized turf, all ambushed up in a swarm of Djar Kiss. She will have a gang of summer furs lurking on her shoulders and a mob of paint, powder and other beauty utensils loitering on her face. She will have a complexion fairer than a supreme court decision. But when she gets home and starts to uncamouflage, she puts on ten years for everything she takes off. She has one of those removable complexions. By the time that she has moulted her blonde hair, shed her automatic teeth and discarded her mechanical eye, she is older than hieroglyphics, and gaining every lap.

She has one of these folding complexions that you can carry in your handbag. The French have no monopoly on that camouflage institution. Yea bo.

•••

Under the modern regime of beauty camouflage, everything about a woman’s complexion is detachable except her ears.

There are different branches of study in the camouflage curriculum. In Washington the senators have oratorical camouflage down to a science. Their speciality is painting word pictures, using their chin as a brush. There isn’t a battle that the senate can’t win with a few maxillary calisthenics. Rhetorical camouflage is great stuff, but you can’t bridge the ocean with a pontoon of words. Any union senator with his vocal camouflagers on can guild a fleet in three paragraphs or raise an army with a few chin excursions. Aesop’s jackass had the camouflage idea when he attended the zoo bal masque wearing the lion’s coat and vest, but a few chirps of his fool mule tongue gummed his camouflage.

•••

The gent who disguises himself behind a camouflage of women’s skirts in order to escape military service is smaller than the republican vote in Alabama. A guy that little can ambush himself behind a cancelled postage stamp. The slackers are utilizing a camouflage of women’s skirts, dependent relatives, conscientious objections, flat feet, weak heart and weaker knees. Which is a camouflage that fails to camouflage by quite a few flages. And a culprit who tries to hide behind a woman’s petticoats would have to pass his career in a bureau drawer. That’s where the ladies are wearing their pettiskirts. Nope, we ain’t married, but we read the Delineator.

•••

By camouflaging yourself as a porcupine with a flat wheel, you can secure enough elbow space in the subway to draw in a breath edgeways once in a while. But as drawing in a subway breath is suicide at a nickel a ticket, this camouflage is rather intricate.

Peace hath her camouflages as well as war. With a little cranial dexterity and a few cerebral gymnastics, camouflaging can be utilized to alleviate the inconveniences of civilization.

There will be a camouflage for every ill.

Of course, in the case of a poor henpecked husband we can paint no disguise with a brush.

The only camouflage will be distance. And you will have to point that with your heels.

•••

Camouflage Artist | Ivan Opffer

Homer St-Gaudens (c1918) by Ivan Opffer

Ivan Opffer was born in Nyborg, Denmark, on June 4, 1897, to a family of Danish scholars and journalists. His brother was Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant seaman and journalist who was known for his relationship with American writer Hart Crane.

Ivan was raised in Mexico City and New York, where his anarchist father was the editor of a radical Danish-language newspaper. His involvement in painting and drawing began at an early age. At a summer workshop, he met and studied drawing with Winslow Homer, then went on to study at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League of New York.

When the US entered World War I, Opffer was one of the members of the American Army Camouflage Corps, headed by Homer Saint-Gaudens (whose mother was a relative of Winslow Homer), the son of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. As a camoufleur, Opffer served with other artists and architects, some of whom became well-known, including Barry Faulkner, Sherry Edmundson Fry, Kimon Nicolaides, Robert Lawson, Abraham Rattner, Kerr Eby and others. It was this same unit, while still in training in at Camp American University in Washington DC, that launched a camp newspaper called The Camoufleur. Only three issues were published before the unit’s deployment to France in late 1917. In the October 31 issue, a satirical portrait by Opffer of Homer Saint-Gaudens (titled “Our Boss”) was published on page 5 (as reproduced above).

After the war, Opffer returned to New York, where he became known for his caricatures of leading Modern writers, among them James Joyce, Edgar Lee Masters, Siegfried Sassoon, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Sandburg, G.K. Chesterton, and Thomas Mann.

In the years between the wars, Opffer married Betty à Beckett Chomley, and settled in Paris, where he was a student at the Academie Julian. He also lived in London and Copenhagen, where his drawings were frequently published in newspapers and magazines. With the outbreak of World War II, he and his family returned to New York and lived in Greenwich Village. Among his friends in that era were William Butler Yeats, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Ernest Hemingway. He and his wife Betty are said to be portrayed in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

When he retired in the 1960s, Opffer moved back to Copenhagen, where he died on March 3, 1980.

•••

This account is partly based on an online information page that was written by Ivan Opffer’s granddaughter, Yvonne Opffer Conybeare. Accessed on January 17, 2018 at <http://www.oocities.org/yconybeare/>.

A slightly different version of this biographical note has also been contributed to askART.com.

Metamorphosis and Camouflage | Visual Pun

Anon, a 19th-century visual metamorphosis

In the Victorian era, there was considerable emphasis on and appreciation of wit, including visual metamorphosis (as in this example), consisting of sequential drawings in which one thing evolves into another. Here, in a series of seemingly logical steps, a musician is transformed into a stringed instrument. This process has everything to do with what is commonly known today as creativity or metaphorical thinking (cf. Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation), but it also pertains to camouflage, which frequently works by disguising a thing so that it resembles another, called mimicry. Perhaps the best book on natural mimicry is Wolfgang Wickler, Mimicry in Plants and Animals. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

Hirschfeld's Camouflaged Ninas

Above Photograph by Carl Van Vechten (1955) of American caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003), widely known for his pen-and-ink comic portraits of Broadway stars and other New York celebrities. Public domain image from the Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Hirschfeld was also noted for embedding or camouflaging the name of his daughter Nina in his drawings, and inviting his readers to find them. Regarding this, the following is an excerpt from his online biographical entry on Wikipedia—

Hirschfeld is known for hiding the name of his daughter, Nina, is most of the drawings he produced since her birth in 1945. The name would appear in a sleeve, in a hairdo, or somewhere in the background. Sometimes "Nina" would show up more than once and Hirschfeld would helpfully add a number next to his signature, to let people know how many times her name would appear. Hirschfeld originally intended the Nina gag to be a one-time gimmick but it soon spiraled out of control. Though Nina was a popular feature in his illustrations, with many enjoying the game of searching for them, on more than one occasion Hirschfeld would lament that the gimmick had overshadowed his art. On occasion he did try to discontinue the practice, but such attempts always generated harsh criticism. Nina herself was reportedly somewhat ambivalent about all the attention. In the previously mentioned interview with The Comics Journal Hirschfeld confirmed the urban legend that the US Army had used his cartoons to train bomber pilots with the soldiers trying to spot the NINAs much as they would spot their targets. Hirschfeld told the magazine he found the idea repulsive, saying that he felt his cartoons were being used to help kill people. In his 1966 anthology The World of Hirschfeld he included a drawing of Nina which he titled "Nina's Revenge." That drawing contained no Ninas. There were, however, two Als and two Dollys ("The names of her wayward parents").

…In 1991 the United States Postal Service commissioned Hirschfeld to draw a series of postage stamps commemorating famous American comedians. The collection included drawings of Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Edgar Bergen (with Charlie McCarthy), Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. He followed that with a collection of silent film stars including Rudolph Valentino, ZaSu Pitts and Buster Keaton. The Postal Service allowed him to include Nina's name in his drawings, waiving their own rule forbidding hidden messages in United States stamp designs.