 |
| Roy R. Behrens © 2026 |
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 /
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
 |
| an inept attempt at camouflage / WWI |
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
 |
| W. Allen Howells, Raleigh Blowing 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
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
This is one example of an anti-German cartoon, a folding paper puzzle. The top image shows the flat unfolded puzzle picture of what appears to be four pigs. Where is the fifth pig? it asks in French. And when the paper is folded, as shown in the lower half, the pigs have magically become a German officer and his helmet.
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
Charles Le Brun, Resemblances
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
 |
| Chalk talk panel sequence |
 |
| Herb Hake, chalk talk drawings |
•••
John Lewis (who was himself a WWII camoufleur), Heath Robinson: Artist and Comic Genius (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p 36—
When working in the garden he [British illustrator W. Heath Robinson] was in the habit of wearing the most dreadful old clothes and because of this was more than once mistaken for the gardener. On one occasion an artist dressed in a pale violet-grey suit, with a black velvet collar, called on the Robinsons. He saw Will digging in the garden and shouted across to him: “Is your master in, my man?” “I’Il go and see,” muttered Will and disappeared indoors, only to appear a moment later in a tidier jacket and with his hair brushed, to make himself known to the other artist. What the outcome of this was, I do not know. In his autobiography he tells this tale and gives the unnamed visitor the soubriquet of Renée de Boudoir.
•••
Max Eastman, Great Companions (New York: Farrar Straus and Cudahy, 1942)—
[In his later life, American philosopher John Dewey] moved out on Long Island, and preserved his contact with reality by raising eggs and vegetables and selling them to the neighbors… [He received an urgent order one day] from a wealthy neighbor for a dozen eggs, and the children being in school, he himself took the eggs over in a basket. Going by force of habit to the front door, he was told brusquely that deliveries were made in the rear. He trotted obediently around to the back door, feeling both amused and happy. Some time later, he was giving a talk to the women's club of the neighborhood, and his wealthy customer, when he got up to speak, exclaimed in a loud whisper: "Why, he looks exactly like our egg man!"
•••
John Walker Harrington, HART, THE RELENTLESS SCRUTINIZER OF AMERICAN PORTRAITS. He Destroyed Some Illusions, but He Helped to Increase The Fame of Our Early Artists, in the New York Sun, 8 August 1918—
…As one who knew him [Charles Henry Hart], I am venturing to write these lines about him because nobody misunderstood him, and therefore, taken all in all, he was a most unpopular man. There is danger, owing to his decided personality, and also because in these days art has given way to dazzle and camouflage, that the great service which this man did for American art will be forgotten for a time.…
 |
| Ballets Russes performers |
Coincident to some extent with the Ballets Russes was the rise of Russian Constructivism, a branch of Modernist abstract art, of which the leading practioners were El Lizzitsky, Alexandr Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, and others, both men and women.
They saw themselves not as “artists” but as something more akin to architect-designers, or what might be called “constructors.” It was not their intention to imitate or “make images of” existing phenomena, but to invent or “construct” new configurations, that tended to resemble abstract diagrams. When one compares iconic examples of Russian Constructivism—such as El Lizzitsky’s famous self-portrait with a compass, or his photograph of a hand with a compass (shown here)—with the all but abstract poses of performers in the Ballets Russes, their resemblance is undeniable.
 |
| El Lizzitsky, self-portrait photomontage |
At the time, others saw a connection between the stylized movements of dancers in the Ballets Russes and the colorful, geometric designs that were applied to merchant ships as camouflage during World War I (called “dazzle camouflage”). In a 1918 news story about ship camouflage, it was said that some of the camouflaged ships in the war zone were “made up like [the] Russian ballet.” Another journalist described dazzle painting as “a Russian toy shop gone mad.”
There is available online a two-hour film documentary on the Ballets Russes. Of late, I have been building a series of digital montage artworks that commemorate the Ballets Russes, as in the example below. But I also talk about Russian Constructivism (and El Lizzitsky) in my own video on the Bauhaus and problem-solving.
 |
| Ballet Russes digital montage © Roy R. Behrens 2023 |
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
•••
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.
 |
| Online Camouflage Cartoons Archive |
Above A page of camouflage-related comic drawings by World War I French illustrator and toy designer André Hellé, as published in La Baïonnette, c1916. 
La Baïonnette
•••
Jerrold A. Morris, 100 Years of Canadian Drawings. New York: Methuen, 1980, p. 10—
The lover of drawings has the advantage of being in close contact with the artist’s original concept conveyed in a relatively uncomplicated medium. Drawing, in the widest sense of the term, is the linear element in art least susceptible to manipulation by what [William] Blake called “Blotting” and the Pre-Raphaelites called “Slosh”—we might call it “fudging.” Among painters are many masters of camouflage, what [J.A.D.] Ingres meant when he said that drawing is “the probity of art.”
•••
Robertson Davies in New York Times Book Review, May 12, 1991—
About sixty years ago, I said to my father, “Old Mr. Senex is showing his age; he sometimes talks quite stupidly.” My father replied, “That isn’t age. He’s always been stupid. He’s just losing his ability to conceal it.”
Related Links
Embedded Figures, Art and Camouflage
Revisiting Gottschaldt: Embedded Figures in Art, Architecture and Design
