construction of a WWI dummy tank by british in france

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

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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

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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

John Wolcott Adams and World War I ship camouflage

Most likely, we have unearthed more information and have written more about the life of American artist William Andrew Mackay (1870-1939) than anyone else [in most online sources, his birth year is mistakenly cited as 1876] . It has been a long extended search, beginning in the 1970s—and it seems as if it never ends. Mackay was a muralist who, at least in that regard, is especially famous for his murals about the life of Theodore Roosevelt, installed beneath the rotunda in the Roosevelt Memorial Hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. But he also painted numerous other murals in prominent public buildings.

Our initial interest in him began with the contributions he made to the development of ship camouflage before and during World War I. We have talked about his efforts in various earlier blog posts, but we’ve also written a major, detailed essay about his discoveries (acessible free online), and have often featured his work in published books and articles.

Until recently, we were unaware of his connection to John Wolcott Adams (1874-1925), an American illustrator who was a descendant of the famous Adams family of New England, which had produced two US presidents. We learned recently, in an essay by Christine I. Oklander in an exhibition catalog titled John Wolcott Adams: American Life and History (Chadds Ford PA: Brandywine River Museum, 1998) that William Andrew Mackay was “one of [Adams’] closest friends” and that Adams had been “assigned to paint the American liner Philadelphia.” At least one photograph of that camouflaged ship has survived (reproduced above), taken on June 27, 1917.   

In Mackay’s approach to ship camouflage, the goal is low visibility, not confusion or surface disruption (as is the function of dazzle). As shown in the photograph of the ship, Mackay used an optical mixture of red, violet and green, applied in splotch-like patterns (not unlike Pointilism) on the surface of the ship.

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.

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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.”

Caligari, distorted film sets and WWI ship camouflage

Above USS Nantahala in dazzle camouflage scheme (1918).

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Herman George Scheffauer, “The Vivifying of Space” in The New Vision in German Arts. London: Ernest Benn, 1924—

[his description of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] Trees are resolved into conventionalized, constructed forms; foliage becomes a mass of light, dark and shaded crescents, rounds and silhouettes—brilliantly colored in the original scene. Floors and pavements are streaked, splashed and spotted, divided and decorated in bars, crosses, diagonals, serpentines and arrows. The walls become as banners or as transparencies, space fissued by age, or as slates upon which the lightning blazes strange hieroglyphs; or they become veils and vanish in a mosaic of scrambled forms and surfaces, like a liner in camouflage.

Gaunt chimneys rear and slant like masts in this city storm. Cunning lines of composition and the adroit use of diagonals drive the perspective into an invisible “vanishing point.”

For more on the Caligari film sets, forced perspective, and other early avant-garde cinema, see Part Three of my recently posted video trilogy on the Ames Demonstrations here.

Part 03 has been posted / Ames and Anamorphosis

Unbelievable! At last I have completed it. Earlier this afternoon, I finished and posted on YouTube at <https://youtu.be/mxOEx2JLQBA> the third and final segment of a documentary trilogy on the life and work of Adelbert Ames II (known as Del Ames) (1880-1955), an American artist, lawyer, optical physiologist, and psychologist, best-known for having devised the Ames Demonstrations in Perception.

This part primarily focuses on Ames' influence on others, among them scientists, filmmakers, and artists, especially by his targeted use of anamorphosis (aka "forced perspective") in his well-known laboratory set-ups. It reveals the little-known links between Ames' experiments, Vorticism, and avant-garde filmmaking (Ballet Mécanique), as well as in popular culture, such as cinematic special effects and roadside tourist attractions.

In conclusion, it also provides a close-up look at the recent works of three contemporary visual artists, who, in one way or another, make astonishing use of perspective. They are Jan Beutener (Amsterdam), Richard Koenig (Kalamazoo MI), and Patrick Hughes (London).

All three parts of the trilogy (about 90 minutes in combined length) can be accessed online free at my YouTube channel at <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzYrUfsAvkZur5cBv6xlhSg>.  Of course, I am eager for others to see this. Do not hesitate to share it with anyone and everyone who might find it of value or interest.

illusionistic room interiors / windows that do not rotate

Above The video title panels for Parts One and Two of my three-part series on the life and work of Adelbert Ames II (called Del Ames), American artist, lawyer, psychologist, and optical physiologist are free to watch on YouTube at <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzYrUfsAvkZur5cBv6xlhSg>. Each is about 30 minutes in length. Today, I began to write the narration for Part Three.

Ames Demonstrations / replications of some of those

Fifty years ago, as a means of learning about the role of vision in art and design, I replicated a small number of the so-called Ames Demonstrations in Perception (as well as Dürer's drawing machines, Van Gogh's grid-based drawing frame, Alberti's perspective veil, stereo viewers and cameras, et al.). As shown above, I am looking into the back window of a small-sized Ames Distorted Room. Below is a much earlier newspaper article on this and other experiments by its originator, artist and psychologist Adelbert Ames II. Having published a number of articles on Ames and aspects of his life, I am now producing a three-part series of video talks, the first of which can now be viewed on YouTube.

optical camouflage based on Maxwell's spinning disks

One of the earliest, most important contributors to World War I ship camouflage was an American muralist named William Andrew Mackay (1876-1939). He is best known for having created a series of murals about the achievements of Theodore Roosevelt, which are housed in the rotunda of the Roosevelt Memorial Hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In advance of WWI, he began to experiment with optical color mixtures in the camouflage of submarines, which he demonstrated with spinning colored disks that had been developed earlier by James Clerk Maxwell. A detailed, richly illustrated account of Mackay's camouflage-related research is accessible online here, and is also downloadable online here.

• Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk) at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLX5YQF-H3k> 

• Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiSWNYCNRcM> 

• Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3asynn24nD4> 

• Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS2ZwYyxy1Y>