american camouflage expert, both artist and scientist

Charles Bittinger (1946)

Above This is a news photograph of American artist Charles Bittinger (1879-1970). We have blogged about him in the past because he was instrumental in US naval camouflage during both World Wars. 

While trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was not a typical artist, because, as a graduate of MIT, he was equally interested in science, especially physics and optics. Among his achievements were projects in which he made use of both his artistic and scientific training, of which camouflage was one. 

Incidently, he was also the half-brother of the Modernist painter John Marin. He was also a friend and colleague of American Impressionist and ship camoufleur Everett Longley Warner, and was probably responsible for Warner’s wartime assignment to ship camouflage.

This photograph was published in a front page news article (End of War Camouflage Seen By A-Bomb Artist) in the Honolulu Advertiser on May 19, 1946. Bittinger (who was in his late 60s at the time) was passing through Hawaii on government assignment. He was on his way to a test site on the Bikini Atoll, to paint on site the explosion of an atomic bomb. In an interview, he explained that “he would make a few sketch notes just after the missile falls but that most of his painting would be from memory.”

Earlier, Bittinger had taken on other related assignments. In 1937, while working with the National Georgraphic Society, he had painted on site a total eclipse of the sun, which lasted only four minutes. He had also experimented with painted murals that were made with fluorescent paint. When viewed under daylight illumination, they appear to one kind of picture, but look like a totally different scene when viewed in ultraviolet light.

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

ship from which Hart Crane committed suicide / 1932

USS Orizaba

The American Modernist poet, Hart Crane, took his own life at age 32, by jumping from a ship into the Gulf of Mexico while en route to New York in 1932. 

Shown here are two views of the ship that he was traveling on, the USS Orizaba. At the time, however, it would not have been camouflaged. These are photographs from World War I (c1918), at which time it had been painted in a multi-colored “dazzle camouflage” scheme. As is evident, the camouflage patterns on the ship’s two sides are substantially different, as was standard wartime practice. The top image shows the port side, while the other shows the starboard.

USS Orizaba

As noted by art historian Henry Adams in The Golden Age of Cleveland Art: 1900 to 1945 (Cleveland OH: Cleveland History Center, 2022), Crane grew up in northeastern Ohio, where his father was a restaurant owner and candy manufacturer. In view of Crane’s suicide, it is a darkly comic irony that his father was the inventor of the candy known as the Life Saver.

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

Burnell Poole's paintings of WWI camouflaged ships

Portrait of Burnell Poole (unknown photographer)

In an issue dated March 28, 1920, an illustrated article appeared in the New York Tribune, titled "Burnell Poole—Painter of Ships." The subject of the article was an accomplished naval artist (sometimes known as Bert Poole), who had been born in Boston in 1884. The full text of the article is as follows—

From the time he was knee high to a grasshopper, Burnell Poole has made ships his hobby with a special passion for the gray sea fighters of Uncle Sam’s navy. To be a painter of ships has been his ambition to have his canvases technically correct, his ideal. Every now and then during the past several years he has managed through friends in Washington to arrange a trip with the Atlantic fleet. And these privileged occasions have been the joy of his life. Armed with speed camera, sketch pad and paint box he has put to sea as the navy's guest. And hundreds of wonderful photos, detailed sketches and unusual canvases were the result.

When we finally went to war, Poole foresaw the wonderful opportunity of studying the great steel seagoing monsters under actual fire. The rules of the navy were unbelievably strict against admitting anyone with a camera or a sketching pencil. It was only through his personal acquaintance with Secretary Daniels and the Navy Department's knowledge of his peculiar fitness for the work that the red tape was broken. He was permitted to go to sea not as an artist, but as a writer. Once the way was opened to him there was no form of martial maritime craft that escaped his attentive and technical eye. With notebook and pencil in hand he went through naval engagements on the high seas. The submarine, submarine chaser, a British mine-sweeping trawler, all these he saw in actual service. Even the air stations were not passed by.

Burnell Poole, RMS Mauritania (starboard view) 1919

 

The result of this unusual experience is a notebook as unique as it is interesting and valuable. For as far as is known, Burnell Poole was the only American artist who served in this capacity during the war. Especially prized is his precise and detailed record of all the various forms of the fascinating art of naval camouflage.

Burnell Poole, USS Leviathan (in background) escorted

His adventure over, Poole has settled down to the important task of transforming long columns of memoranda into colorful canvases. A task for a very conjurer! The deep blue green of the sea, the dark gray lines of the sky fantastically relieved by the brilliantly camouflaged dreadnaughts. But, however strongly tempted for the sake of an artistic effect, Poole never wavers from the mathematical accuracy with which each porthole, gun turret, smokestack and wireless apparatus is pictured. In this lies the historical value of his paintings. Mr. Poole's wide circle of admirers is looking forward to the little exhibition he's planning to have as soon as enough of his war canvases are ready for display.

Burnell Poole, RMS Mauretania (port side view) 1919

 

In April that year, a small exhibition of Poole’s watercolor paintings was featured in Boston in the print room at Goodspeed's Bookshop. As noted in an article called "Wayside Sketches" in the Boston Transcript (April 10, 1920), it is said that “perhaps nothing in the collection will interest the viewer more than three or four small drawings of camouflaged vessels.” These prints and drawings came about, the article notes, as a result of “his recent engagement with the United States Shipping Board as a marine camoufleur…”

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

extraordinary dazzle-related artworks / Michael Miller

Michael Miller, Counterintelligence

Beginning with World War I and the adoption of abstract disruptive patterns for ship camouflage (called dazzle camouflage), it has been commonly assumed that these may have been influenced by Modernists, such as Cubists, Futurists and Vorticists. While there is some measure of truth in that, such patterns were nearly always designed by artists whose pre-war studio work was academic, pictorial, or, at best, impressionistic. It might make more sense to suppose that dazzle patterns were a great post-war influence on abstract art, instead of the inverse direction. By now, more than a century after WWI, that continues to be true, perhaps even more so.

Patterns that may remind us of close-up detailed segments of dazzle ship camouflage are everywhere, so it's a challenge to allude to those, without seeming to be cliché. Only recently have I run across the work of a contemporary Scottish artist whose paintings pays genuine homage to WWI ship camouflage, while also maintaining a freshness. His name is Michael Miller and his artwork can be viewed online at his website. Two of them are posted here. He is undoubtedly well aware of the indebtedness of his work to ship camouflage, and indeed, in 2014, he was a visiting artist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. 

It is of additional interest that he was born in Glasgow, because it was a prominent Scottish zoologist, Sir John Graham Kerr, who was most likely the first to propose the use of disruptive patterns (if not dazzle, technically) for ship camouflage, as I have talked about elsewhere.

As a person who has extensively studied and written about disruptive patterns, in wartime as well as in natural forms, and as one who tried (for 46 years) to teach students "to see" while producing paintings or graphic design, I find much to admire in Miller's work. In viewing the two paintings of his that are reproduced here, I am reminded of a passage by a British zoologist, Sir Alister Hardy (who was also an artist, and served as an army camoufleur during WWI). Here is an astonishing excerpt from The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and its Relationship to the Spirit of Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1965—

I think it likely that there are no finer galleries of abstract art than the cabinet drawers of the tropical butterfly collector. Each “work” is a symbol, if I must not say of emotion, then of vivid life…It is often, I believe, the fascination of this abstract color and design, as much as an interest in biology or a love of nature, that allures the ardent lepidopterist, although all these may be combined; he has his favorite genera and dotes upon his different species of Vanessa and Parnassius, as the modernist does upon his examples of Matisse or Ben Nicholson. The one-time schoolboy collector will in later life be transfixed with emotion for a moment at the sight of a Camberwell Beauty or a swallowtail—I speak from experience.

Michael Miller, Hippocampus

 

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

a scenery painter and shipbuilder turns to camouflage

Above This photograph was taken during a 1918 Fourth of July parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City. It shows wartime shipbuilders walking beside a float on which has been mounted a scale model of a dazzle-camouflaged ship. The Scottish-born camoufleur in the news story below may have worked for a comparable shipbuilding plant. Digital coloring.

•••

SEEKS REVENGE IN ARMY: Scot Glad to Fight Germans Who Killed Sister and Brothers, in New York Times, October 16, 1917, p 9—

Drilling with Company B of the 302nd Engineers, not with the light-hearted enthusiasm of the rest of the recruits but with the determInation of a man who sees his day for vengeance approaching, is James Kelly, whose sister and two brothers were killed by the Germans.

Kelly was born In Glasgow, Scotland. He came to this country eight years ago, and found employment in New York as a scenery painter. He made yearly trips to visit his family in Glasgow. He tried to enlist, but was rejected because of tobacco heart [ailment related to smoking]. He returned to this country and entered a shipbuilding plant as a camouflage painter for patrol boats for the British navy.

A year and a half ago Kelly heard that his brother Kenneth had been wounded and captured by the Germans. When questioned by a Prussian intelligence officer, Kenneth Kelly refused to divulge important military information he possessed, and was put in prison. Later he was shot.

On receipt of this news James Kelly sailed for Scotland. He tried again to enlist, and again he was rejected because of his heart. Kelly then returned to camouflage British patrol boats being built in this country.

Ten months ago Kelly again visited Glasgow. This time news came that his brother John had been killed by a German shell. James Kelly for the third time tried to enter the service, but his tobacco heart was against him.

The United States had entered the war when Kelly returned to New York. He tried to enlist in the regular army without success, and then went back to his camouflage work. When he registered for the draft he refused to claim an exemption as an alien, and declared that he had two reasons for wanting to fight. His happiest day came when he was called by his local draft board to Camp Upton. Because of his expert knowledge of camouflage, he was assigned to the 302nd Engineers.

A letter from Glasgow this morning brought the news that three weeks ago his sister Angelina, a Red Cross nurse, was killed in France. Tonight Private James Kelly has three reasons why his wartime service should not be the cunning of camouflage but the steel of trench knife and bayonet.

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