Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marriage. Show all posts

Sunday, June 22, 2025

women are expert camoufleurs / it is their middle name

Cartoon, Fay King 1918
CAMOUFLAGE IS MIDDLE NAME OF WOMAN: EXPERIENCED IN KEEPING WILLIE ‘HALF-FARE’: IF SHE CAN PAINT RED CRAWFISH ON PLATTERS, CLOUDS WOULD COME EASY


by Fay King, San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1918

In my humble opinion, if there is one branch of the service that we women oughta excell in it’s CAMOUFLAGE.

If I had my way I’d give every woman a job in the camouflage department, and is she’s over forty she’s a master of the art.

Figure it out for yourself. A perfect forty-eight has been looking like a perfect thirty-six for centuries.

Give any woman three days’ notice and a good dressmaker and she can be hippy or hippless, according to fashion’s decree. She can look like Mrs. Vernon Castle or Maxine Elliott or whoever happens to be the most copied at the time, even if she has a face as hilly as San Francisco.

The wife of a small salaried man has long camouflaged as the wife of a steel magnate.

She can make a table full of dishes look like a square meal. Can you imagine what a cinch she’d have making a battleship look like a bucket?

Camouflage is woman’s middle name—why not make it her “bit”?

SURELY her experience at keeping Willie looking like a half-fare is proof enough of her success.

A lip stick and a powder puff have won many a husband for a clever woman. She could certainly win a war with a barrel of paint and a ton of powder.

She’s been painting red crawfish so long on platters and buttercups on butter dishes, she’d not have the slightest difficulty in designing storm clouds on ship masts, waves on battle-boats and daisies on the nose of a cannon.

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

Sale-priced books on camouflage / free shipping

 


Friday, June 20, 2025

failed camouflage / wife's hat must not be so employed

Above This cartoon was published in the Boston Sunday Post on September 23, 1932. The title reads ABRAHAMSON'S CAMOUFLAGE FAILETH with the subtitle of WIFE'S HAT MUST NOT BE SO USED. Where one might expect the artist's name, it simply reads "(Silent Comic.)"

So—who might that "silent comic" be? There is an unreadable signature of sorts at the bottom right. It might possibly be MEB or Michael Edward Brady (1896-1941). But I doubt it. 

One of Brady’s other cartoons was published beside it on the same newspaper page, and the layout makes it confusing to know if this one is his also. Regardless, there is a helpful article about Brady’s life, written by Alex Jay, which can be accessed here online.

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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

SALE book bundle / free shipping

Friday, February 3, 2023

Chagall as a camoufleur in Russia during World War I

Above Marc Chagall, The Birthday (1915). Museum of Modern Art. Public domain.

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Raymond Nacenta, School of Paris: the painters and the artistic climate of Paris since 1910. Greenwich CT: New York Graphic Society, 1960, page 284—

[Marc] Chagall returned to Russia in 1914, where he was married to Bella, whose love is celebrated in so many of his paintings. He served in a camouflage unit during the war and, after the Revolution, was for a time Commissar for the Fine Arts in Vitebsk.  

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