Picasso, Gestalt, Dazzle Camouflage / Missing Links

Above World War I photograph of German dazzle-painted railway car. Unidentified. Restored, color may not be historically accurate.

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Pablo Picasso has been credited with nearly everything, thanks in part to the efforts of his greatest publicist, Gertrude Stein. In her promotional efforts, he was second only to herself. She popularized the resemblance between Cubism and World War I camouflage, which others then embellished, among them French poet André Salmon. Below is a bit from an essay that Salmon wrote in 1929, in which he asserted that Picasso was an "influence" on the dazzle camouflage on ships, as well as disruptive patterning on field service uniforms.

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André Salmon, “Letter from Paris” in Apollo: A Journal of the Arts. November 1929. Vol 10 No 59, p. 281—

The torpedo boat? It was Picasso who influenced the torpedo boat. To him is due the naval camouflage used during the war, and I remember a letter that my friend Picasso wrote to me at the front after a massacre of “red trousers,” in which he expressed the desire of seeing us all dressed like harlequins if there were any chance of finding us alive after the victory. It was not his fault that khaki won the day.…

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Fritz Heider, a prominent German-American psychologist, wrote about the possible link between Picasso's Cubist paintings and the vision research of Max Wertheimer, a co-founder of Gestalt psychology. Picasso and Wertheimer were contemporaries, born one year apart, and there are lookalike factors in their perception-based experiments. But it does not mean that Picasso invented Gestalt theory or that Wertheimer was a Cubist. I wrote an article on this many years ago (online here) and discussed it in a video talk about Art, Design and Gestalt Theory, also free to watch online.

online here

preparing models for testing WWI dazzle camouflage

This is such an interesting photograph. The caption reads "Making models for testing World War I ship camouflage." The original is dated on the back as February 10, 1919, but that's absurd. It must have been made in 1918 (or even late 1917). Nor is the location a certainty. None of these people appear in other photographs of the staff members of the US Navy's Washington DC camouflage lab, nor is this the same room as in those photographs. It's also puzzling that one of them is a woman, most likely a civilian (all three appear to be in civilian clothing). 

They are making ship models out of wood, using woodworking tools, such as the jigsaw on the left. In the center in the very back is a shelving unit on which finished, painted models are stored, and on the far right there is a suspended chart that shows various ship designs. Clearly evident also are the water sprinkler system pipes, which reminds us of a newspaper item from early 1918, reporting that the ship camouflage workshop had been damaged by fire. Based on a public domain government photograph at the Naval History and Heritage Command NH 41721 / digital coloring.

A grayscale print of this photograph was featured in an exhibition at the Hearst Center for the Arts (Cedar Falls IA) in 2018, for which the caption read—

During World War I, the process of designing ship camouflage began with the construction of unpainted wooden ship models, built to scale. These were then given to artist/designers, who devised different camouflage schemes for each of the two sides of the models, in preparation for testing them in a periscope-equipped observation theatre.

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