ship camoufleurs George Musaphia / B.R. Campbell

George Musaphia illustrations

I know almost nothing about an American illustrator named George Musaphia. The little that I do know I found in a brief news article in the Spokane Chronicle (October 7, 1918), which reads as follows—

RECORD CLAIMED BY CAMOFLEURS Two Seattle "camofleurs"—the men who paint the zig-zag stripes on ships returned recently from Portland OR, where they spent six days supervising the camouflaging of six vessels being built for the Emergency Fleet Corporation. The total of six ships in six days is believed a camouflaging record.

The two are George Misaphia [sic], formerly a New York portrait painter, and B.R. Campbell, who, in peace times, is a Boston theatrical scenery decorator.

That's it. I've searched for both artists, Musaphia (not Misaphia, unless I'm mistaken) and Campbell, the latter of whom is possibly a New England artist named Brooks R. Campbell (1898-1977), who worked as a sign painter in Manhattan. It seems likely that the other man was George (or Georges) Musaphia (1894-1979), but I could be wrong.

One thing about Musaphia that seems certain is that he was affiliated with the theatre, and that he worked in Boston (in advance of World War I) as an illustrator for theatre reviews. Maybe that's how he met Campbell, who is described as a "Boston theatrical scenery decorator."

The six Musaphia illustrations that I have found so far were all published in 1913. I've scanned and reproduced them here. They are stylistically consistent, but the attribution is also clear because he signed his name in an unusual way, part symbol and part letters. They were published in the Boston American on the following dates (from top to bottom) September 7, October 12 and 19, and November 2, 9 and 30. He probably was a portrait painter because his theatre illustrations are, without fail, essentially portraits of the actors as they appear in costume.

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 / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

painting camouflage on trucks—then washing it off

WWI camouflaged ammunition truck (colorized)

Eugene Wokal, quoted in Ronald Naversen, The Scenographer as Camoufleur. Dissertation. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University, 1989, p. 47—

I became friends with Major Peter Rodyenko [who taught camouflage at Pratt Institute]…I traveled down there [to Fort Belvoir] to look around and decided I wanted to work on camouflage. We trained by painting trucks and washed off the paint at night so we could do it again tomorrow.

See also

Rodyenko, Peter (1936) “On Camouflage Training” in The Reserve Officer Vol 13 No 9 (September), pp. 5-7.
___(1941) “Camouflage: Modern aerial photography outmodes paint, results in introduction of new techniques” in Life magazine (January 13), pp. 39-42.

sale priced, free domestic shipping

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 /  

a cubist romance / 'mong the cubes i'd love to ramble

Above Cubism predated WWI French Army camouflage, more or less. This still image is from Rigadin painter cubist [Rigadin the Cubist Painter] a film by Georges Monca (1912), Pathé. See online detail. 

•••

All Aboard, a musical comedy that opened June 5, 1913 at Lew Fields' 44th Street Roof Garden in New York, as reviewed in The Sun, July 27, 1913, p. 12—

It is Ralph Riggs and his wife Katherine Witchie, who do the Cubist dance. The scene is in a studio of a Cubist and a Futurist painter and the lyrics of the song are as follows:

Said the Futurist boy to the Cubist girl

As they met on a poster blue:

"I don't know who the dickens I am—

and who in the deuce are you?"

Said the Cubist girl to the Futurist boy:

"We both were born, I think,

On a dark and dismal night last week

When the cat tipped over the ink."

Said the girl, "You must agree

We're awful sights to see."

Said the boy, "You seem to be

The girl that's made for me."

CHORUS

Oh, you Cubist girl, in cubes that curl

You little, wiggy-waggy, riggy-raggy,

ziggy-zaggy maid—

Picture puzzle queen,

From what I've seen

I think my style will suit you.

In the future when I'm painted

in every shade, like a crazy quilt,

although you're built,

to find you in the scramble

'Mong the cubes I'd love to ramble

A while some future day you'll be

My jumble ju-ju bee

My riggy-raggy,

Ziggy-zaggy,

Cubist girl.

dieting is on the way out and camouflage is coming in

Above The inverse of weight reduction by camouflage: A progression of photographs showing the stage make-up applied to an actor by British artist Cavendish Morton for the portrayal of Falstaff. Below are comparable make-up progressions for King Lear and Don Quixote.

•••

Anon, DIET IS GOING OUT, CAMOUFLAGE COMING IN, SAYS MODERN SYSTEM in Omaha Daily Bee (Omaha NE) November 27, 1917, p. 9—

The value of camouflage is spreading like wildfire in all directions, and there is almost nothing you won’t be able to do with it, when it has been throughly applied.

At the style review in Chicago, Mme Le Mar is instructing women how to disguise themselves so that they may have double chins that won’t show. And if you don’t look as if you had a double chin, you might as well have as many as are comfortable. A little science in the way you dress and hold your head will give the optical illusion of a perfect outline at the throat.

Diet is going out. The really modern system is camouflage.

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

camoufleur Bérard made Chantecler farm yard scene

costume from Chantecler

Back in 2014, we blogged about the French stage designer Louis Bérard, perhaps best known as "le decorateur de Chantecler," a wonderfully zany satirical play by Edmund Rostand, in which all the actors were dressed in animal costumes (as shown above). But he was also a camoufleur for the French during World War I. More recently, we've found a different news article on his life and work, reprinted below.

•••

SCENERY FOR WAR: M. [Louis] Bérard of "Chantecler" Fame a Camouflage Artist in The Spokesman-Review (Spokane WA) May 28, 1918—

Camouflage is an art which attracts the best artists who have been engaged for some time in painting scenery for war.

In Paris there are many studios, employing thousands of men and women. In Montmartre there is a studio where young American artists of the Latin Quarter are busy camouflaging for the American front. Not only guns, but motor trucks, buildings—whole villages even—have to be made to appear what they are not, which, indeed, is the essence of camouflage.

A French scene painter, M. [Louis] Bérard, was one of the inventors of war camouflage. For the last 35 years he has been the leading French scene painter, to whose genius was due the scenic triumphs of the Sardou and Rostand plays. It was he who created the marvelous farm yard scene in Chantecler, and it was the trees which he built for this play which gave him the idea for the observation posts which look like trees.

When war broke out M. Bérard had turned 60 years of age, but he at once offered his services to the French government, and asked to be allowed to go to the front to develop his ideas of camouflage.

With the assistance of his expert pupils he created "lakes" where there was no water, "forests" where no trees grow, and thousands of guns, huts and artillery emplacements changed their hue as the seasons advanced. When M. Bérard put the finishing touches to a particular important piece of work he would go up in an airplane to obtain the same view as that afforded to the Boche.

•••

Note In Cécile Coutin's Tromper l'ennemi (2012) Louis Bérard (1865-1920) is described as an accessoiriste de théatre (property man) who served in the Section de Camouflage (1914-15) as a camouflage instructor at the studio at Amiens. She includes a three-page section on "Louis Bérard and His Contribution to the Invention of Camouflage" (pp. 48-51). It will require translation, since the text is in French.

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

Greenwich Village artists object to phony residents

Greenwich Village Follies / program cover 1921

ARTISTS WANT GREENWICH VILLAGE PURGED OF ALL BOOTLEGGING CAMOUFLAGE in Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg MA, September 19, 1922, p. 7—

New York. Sept 19—The high cost of studio apartments In New York City Is partly explained, at least in the declaration of the rent committee of the League of American Artists, that such quarters are much sought for by bootleggers. The artists In complaining to the district attorney's office asked police Investigation with the view to raising the moral average of Greenwich Village and the Columbus Circle art neighborhood.

"The studio is well adapted to camouflage," Stewart Browne, president of the United Real Estate Owners' association, said "but it is too late for New Yorkers to get excited over that. Real estate owners cannot control it entirely. "

Artists have demanded that the police rid their colonies of painters who can’t paint, sculptors who can't sculpt, and models who can't pose.

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 Hanford applies stagecraft in WWI camouflage

The American promoter and showman Phineas T. Barnum was born in 1810. He was immensely successful and widely known by 1859, the birth year of Charles B. Hanford, who would in time himself become a leading actor in Shakespearean plays. 

Hanford’s middle name was Barnum, not in homage to Phineas T. (although they may have been related) but because Barnum was his mother’s family’s name.

Hanford died in 1926. Near the end of his life (as reported in obituaries), while World War I was ongoing, he collaborated with Thomas A. Edison “in planning methods of camouflage for ships and land operations of the army, his stagecraft lending itself readily to this work.” In earlier blog posts, we've talked about various aspects of Edison's involvement in WWI camouflage.

•••

Anon, CAMOUFLAGE IN CLOTHES PASSES in The Cleveland Press, March 18, 1918—

There’s camouflage in warfare,
But for men whose forms are lean,
In spring styles stores are showing
No camouflage is seen.

“Conserve” is the the edict
Throughout the USA
And that applies to clothing
In quite a funny way.

For tailors have elected,
In making suits this spring,
To make lines they call “skeleton”
The fashionable thing.

Th shoulders have no padding,
The waistline’s pulled in tight,
No bit of cloth unneeded
Is anywhere in sight.

So if you’re thin, flat chested,
Or your shoulder blades are round,
Conceal the fact, you cannot,
To show, it’s surely bound.

But there, don’t look so gloomy,
Just think what you would do
If tailors had decided
To conserve in trousers too.

They might have made it rompers
Like children wear in play.
Or maybe trunks and long hose
Like they wore in Shakespeare’s day.

But we’re not the ones to grumble
When all is said and done,
For we’ll go in Injun blankets
If ’twill help to lick the Hun. 

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

endless dalliance / no need to encourage his talking

Dali Visits Iowa (1952)

Martin Birnbaum, The Last Romantic: The story of more than a half-century in the world of art. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960—

After his exhibition and just when I began to pride myself on having introduced a salient figure into our art world, Herbert Crowley suddenly disappeared. Only after I retired did I discover that he had enlisted in the camouflage division of the British Army. In 1926 [other sources say 1924] he married Miss Alice Lewisohn who, with her sister Irene, had founded the remarkable Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street, New York, an admirable account of which was written by Mrs. Crowley [titled The Neighborhood Playhouse: Leaves from a Theatre Scrapbook].

[Herbert and Alice Lewisohn Crowley lived in Zurich after World War I, where they were closely associated with psychologist Carl Jung.]

•••

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols. New York: Doubleday, Anchor Press, 1964—

Freud made the simple but penetrating observation that if a dreamer is encouraged to go on talking about his dream images and the thoughts that these prompt in his mind, he will give himself away and reveal the unconscious background of his ailments, in both what he says and what he deliberately omits saying. His ideas may seem irrational and irrelevant, but after a time it becomes relatively easy to see what it is that he is trying to avoid, what unpleasant thought or experience he is suppressing. No matter how he tries to camouflage it, everything he says points to the core of his predicament. A doctor sees so many things from the seamy side of life that he is seldom far from the truth when he interprets the hints that his patient produces as signs of an uneasy conscience. What he eventually discovers, unfortunately, confirms his expectations. Thus far, nobody can say anything against Freud's theory of repression and wish fulfillment as apparent causes of dream symbolism.

Courtney Allen / Illustrator, Performer and Camoufleur

Courtney Allen

There was an American illustrator and performer named Courtney (Charles) Allen (1896-1969), who was also a camouflage artist.  He was an interesting character, and he surely deserves recognition. Below is information I found some time ago, which I subsequently shared with askART.

When the US entered World War I in 1917, he was working as an artist for the Wilmington Star and the Washington Times. He joined the US Army and served in France as a camouflage artist. A front page article in the Washington Times in 1919 states that 37 officers and 445 camouflage artists have returned to Washington barracks after ten months of overseas service.

Among the returning camoufleurs, the article states, was Sergeant Courtney C. Allen, “former artist for The Times,” as well as five other artists from Washington DC, including Captain E.R. Keane, Private David Rubin, Private James Allen, Private George Park, and Private James O’Shea. Four of the five were pictured in a group photograph in the same issue, titled “Four Washington ‘Camoufleurs,’ Just Back.” The news photograph (including the headshot of Allen below) has not stood the test of time.

Courtney Allen (1919)

“Sergeant Allen,” the article continues, “was in the fighting at Chateau-Thierry, Soissons, Saint-Mihiel, and at other points along the American line. ‘At Chateau-Thierry we did our best work,’ he said to a Times reporter.”

It may also be surprising to learn that Courtney Allen was also a wildly popular stage musician and comic performer. While studying at Charles Hawthorne’s Cape Cod school, he and five other artists (“all veterans of the World War”) established a popular Provincetown MA coffee house, on Lewis Wharf, called the “Sixes and Sevens,” in which they functioned as the cooks, waiters and entertainers. An article and photograph of the “Big Six” players were published in the Boston Globe in 1920.

In that news feature, Courtney Allen is singled out as especially popular with the crowd. He is, states the article, “variously known among the crowd as ‘Cootie’ Allen and ‘Cuskoo.’” He “is a clever performer with the ukulele and the steel guitar and is kept very busy when the coffee house is crowded—as it has been every evening since it opened.” The raucous new business was seen as a successor to the famous Provincetown Players, who had moved to McDougal Street in Greenwich Village by then.

In August 1921, Allen is mentioned in a Boston Post article as having been a great success at the annual Provincetown Costume Ball. Dressed as “a Japanese coolie,” he received an honorable mention in the costume judging. The Second Prize was awarded to artist Lawrence W. Grant (dressed as a “snake charmer”), who had also served as an Army camouflage artist in France.

For most of his life, he appears to have made his living as a magazine and newspaper illustrator, as in the example shown at the top of this blog post.

Sources

“Camouflage Men Come to Capital” in Washington Times. January 31, 1919, p. 1.

“Costume Ball Like Fairyland” in Boston Post. August 6, 1921.

“Courtney Allen” in Who Was Who in American Art.

Paul Stanwood, “Provincetown Finds Fun at the ‘Sixes and Sevens’ Coffee House” in Boston Globe. July 18, 1920.

the scintillations of your wit, lambent but innoucous

Above This strikingly-costumed figure (pre-camouflage, but visually “dazzling” nevertheless) is extracted from a theatrical poster from 1897. It was an advertisement for Wang, a comic operetta first performed in New York City. 

The title role, as shown here, was played by Broadway actor William DeWolf Hopper (1858-1935), an outsized personality and—at 6 foot 5 inches and 230 pounds—an outsized physical presence as well. He had a powerful booming voice, and a boundless sense of humor. 

His celebrity was due in part to the popularity of his on-stage recitations of the widely known baseball poem by Ernest Thayer, titled “Casey at the Bat.” Having married and divorced with unusual frequency (not to mention reputed affairs), he was sometimes said to have been the “husband of his country.” 

His fifth wife was the famous gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, and their son was the actor William Hopper (William DeWolf Hopper, Jr.), who played a detective named Paul Drake in the Perry Mason televison series.

•••

Guiseppe Garibaldi—

Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune.

•••

A.D. Godley—

What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

•••

Edward Meyrick Goulburn—

Let the scintillations of your wit be like the coruscations of summer lightning, lambent but innoucuous.

Gertrude Hoffman's perturbing lack of camouflage

Gertrude Hoffman as Salomé

LACK OF CAMOUFLAGE BY DANCER SHOCKS: Gertrude Hoffman Asks Church People If They Expect Portrayal of Greek Nymph in Overcoat and Galoshes in Oregon Daily Journal (Portland OR), November 8, 1917—

Chicago, Nov. 8—“Now really, good people, do you expect me to appear in an overcoat and galoshes when I am representing a Greek nymph?”

Thus did the delectable Gertrude Hoffman, pioneer of the cuticule school of dancing, reply today to allegations of the Women’s Church Federation that she is not sufficiently camouflaged during her appearances at a local theatre.

To the charge that she appears “nude below the thighs,” Gertrude replies that hundreds of our best people are appearing daily similarly sans culottes at the Florida and California beaches.

The limitations of Gertrude’s wardrobe are the subject of anxious conferences today between Chief of Police Schuettler and his censor of amusements.

Cover / Gertrude Hoffmann biography

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

Gertrude Hoffman