Cubist Camouflage / she had heard of Jacob Epstein

Jacob Epstein portrait by George Charles Beresford / 1916

Edith Nesbit, CUBIST CAMOUFLAGE, in the Melbourne Leader (Melbourne AU), July 27, 1918, p. 50—

Miss Morbydde was throughly up to date…[she] was abreast of her times; she had heard of the [Jacob] Epstein Venus, all right, and knew that there was an eccentricity called Cubism. That a pupil should desire instruction in this eccentric art seemed to be only one more of the surprises which modern life inexhaustibly supplied to Miss Morbydde. By the greatest good fortune a Cubist Artist was found not too far from the school, an elderly foreigner of obscure nationality and doubtful cleanliness, warranted, to Miss Morbydde’s experience, as wholly safe.

“Of course, I understand Cubist art,” she assured Sir Moses. “Another pupil is to have lessons this term. It happens that a Cubic Artist is available. An elderly foreigner. He occupies a lodge on my estate. He cuts wood; he admires the shape of the logs. All angles, you know. No, he is not mad. But he is wholly unattractive.”

Portrait of Jacob Epstein / photographer unknown

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

Picasso, camouflage, and the moth known as Picasso

Above This is, believe it or not, an insect called the Picasso Moth, known scientifically as Baorisa hieroglyphica. It was discovered by the British entomologist Frederic Moore in 1882, when artist Pablo Picasso was one year old. Surely, it was given his name (probably after World War I) because people came to believe (thanks to Gertrude Stein in part) that he had invented wartime camouflage. Not so, but the error continues. That assumption was emboldened by rumors (as in quotes below) during WWII that Picasso had somehow served as a camouflage advisor for the French government.

That there are resemblances between certain aspects of Cubism and WWI camouflage is undeniable. And yes, Picasso (and untold others) saw those resemblances. But he did not originate the practice during WWI. See my earlier online essay on this.

•••

Anon, from Le Devoir (Montreal), May 30, 1940—

The godfather of camouflage
Camouflage, which has truly become an official weapon of war since there are now regular sections to which specialists are attached, is a French invention of the other war. It began with the substitution of conspicuous uniforms, from red, to blue and gold, to horizon blue, to the colors of the earth and the sky, then to khaki, less messy, and especially less lamentable as it becomes increasingly worn.

What few people know is that the official godfather of camouflage is none other than the inventor of cubism, Pablo Picasso. An official asked that artist, with tongue in cheek, for his advice on how to make men invisible to the enemy. Picasso, in all seriousness, replied, "Dress them as harlequins..!" It was a joke which others took seriously and was soon adopted, for it is indeed in harlequin patterns, in effect, that the factories, the cannons, the vehicles, and even the ships, are now disguised.

•••

Anthony Marino, in “He’d Like to Hear What Artists Think,” a letter to the editor in The Pittsburgh Press, November 26, 1944—

I was not surprised when [Pablo] Picasso was placed at the head of the camouflage department in France; nor when [Homer] St. Gaudens was placed at the head of the same department in this country. Both were given the job of making “something” look like “nothing.” Both had already demonstrated their aptitude at the much more difficult task of making “nothing” look like “something!”

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

that cubist painter has progressed as a camoufleur

Above APPLIED CUBISM in Judge, New York, August 2, 1919 (artist’s signature uncertain, previously published in Le Monde Illustré, Paris)—

“This chap has made progress during the war.”

“What’s he been doing?”

“Camouflage!”

•••

RELATED LINKS 

On Max Wertheimer and Pablo Picasso: Gestalt Theory, Cubism and Camouflage

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

Juan Gris / World War One has been kind to the cubist

Above I have long believed that the truly great practitioner of Cubism was neither Pablo Picasso nor Georges Braque, but rather the all-but-neglected Juan Gris (1887-1927). Above is his remarkable Portrait of Pablo Picasso (oil on canvas, 1912, Art Institute of Chicago). In this painting, the liquidity of the background pretends to threaten the figure, but it always backs off without doing serious damage. Gris must have been prolific because he seems to have produced so much artwork of such heightened quality, and yet he died at forty.

•••

THE CUBISTS’ CHANCE in Ardmore Daily Ardmoreite (Ardmore OK). August 31, 1918, p. 4—

The war has been kind to the cubist artist. He has his day at last. Timid souls who dared neither to scorn nor praise the sylvan views and staircase scenes of the cubist can now burst forth in unstinted praise of these same designs when painted upon gun timbers, freight car doors and ships, to hide them from the enemy.

Camouflage would seem by divine right to be the cubist’s field. As he once successfully disguised the scenes he claimed to depict, he may now conceal the very surface on which he lays his paint. And the entrancing thing is that the layman can appreciate and enjoy the work quite as much as the artist, which he could not do in the glorious days of cubism recently passed.

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

don't paint your Chevy Blazer in high visibility orange

Above Full-page feature article on WWII camouflage, titled Dazzle Painting Amazingly Effective in Modern Warfare, as published in the Boston Sunday Post in the Color Feature Section, December 17, 1939, p. 4. Large size, readable online text can be found by searching vintage newspaper sites.

•••

The following interview was conducted through email exchanges in the early months of 2013. It was a conversation between Rich Dana, now Special Collections and Archives' Sackner Archive Project coordinator librarian at the University of Iowa, and Roy R. Behrens, now Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. The resulting text was published in Issue Number 8 of Obsolete! Magazine: The Journal of DIY Analog Anarchy (Iowa City IA), which Dana was founding editor of, an experimental magazine that is now apparently obsolete (aha!). In its published form, the interview was a bit longer, and slight adjustments in wording have also been made. Copyright for the text belongs to the interview participants.

•••

Obsolete Magazine [Rich Dana]: I discovered your work while doing some research on dazzle camouflage. You’ve written quite a bit about dazzle patterns as well as the role of artists in the history of camouflage. Can you give us some background on how you became interested in that?

Roy Behrens: I started writing about it in the late 1960s. I got into camouflage because I was a graphic designer. The big “trade secret” in design is knowing how people are likely to see. At some point I realized that I could learn about that by hiding or disguising things. In other words, camouflage uses the exact same principles as design. It’s just reverse engineering.

OM: Was this like subliminal advertising?

RB: It’s certainly not unrelated to that, but they’re not the same. In subliminal advertising, it was claimed that images were concealed in magazine ads and film trailers, to function as “hidden persuaders.” The principles that we apply in design and camouflage are more straightforward, such as pointing, rhyming and lining things up. They are subliminal to some extent, because they influence us, regardless of whether we are aware of it.

OM: Obviously, the idea of camouflage is an ancient one. When did it become a field of scientific research?

RB: We can thank Charles Darwin for that. Scientists and naturalists became interested in animal camouflage in the late 19th century, because they thought it offered proof of natural selection, the survival of the fittest. But a big breakthrough came in the 1890s when an American artist named Abbott Handerson Thayer realized that camouflage is based on the same “tricks of the trade” that he had learned while studying art at the French Academy.

OM: I'm fascinated by the idea that camo is a type of art that is used to defeat technology. It seems that it’s almost akin to magic to me. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Is camouflage art, technology or both?

RB: I think it’s pertinent to both art and technology, but to lots of other stuff as well. The key thing to remember is that camouflage depends on a relationship. It’s a perpetually shifting relation between an observer (these days it could be a drone or whatever) and the object or person that’s being observed. A deer can’t see high visibility orange, but that same color is blaringly obvious to humans. To camouflage something, you have to know what kind of visual system you are trying to conceal it from. In other words, camouflage has to keep up with surveillance, and vice versa—it takes two to tango.

OM: Camo is typically associated with the military. Are there civilian uses for camo, other than hunting?

RB: Actually, there’s a long rich tradition of using camouflage for non-military purposes. For example, you just mentioned magic, which famously works by “fooling the eye.” And there are lots of other uses in stage productions, fashion design, cosmetics, architecture and so on. And of course, some of the most successful camouflage practitioners are in marketing and politics. Camouflage is also used in other forms such as language. Maybe I should mention that recently I’ve been exchanging emails with a university student in the UK who’s working on proposals for benign, non-military uses of camouflage. There’s a lot that could be done in that area. Mostly he’s developing ways to make certain things around us (windmills or cell towers, for example) less like eyesores, and, at same time, to make critical landmarks more conspicuous. But this is a shifting relation as well: Since it’s common now for everyone to walk around in camouflage or high visibility orange clothing, it’s not as easy to be sure who’s really an emergency worker and who isn’t.

OM: Let's talk about dazzle camouflage. To me, dazzle represents very much the spirit of the Modern era. Does that make sense? It seems to be consistent with what was going on at the start of the 20th century, technologically and artistically, and, in some ways, even in psychology, in the use of abstract patterns, and so on.

RB: Over the years, a lot people have said exactly that about the resemblance between camouflage and certain branches of Modernism. During World War I, one of the British Vorticists [Edward Wadsworth] was a dock supervisor for ship camouflage. And there’s the famous story about Picasso seeing French military camouflage for the first time, and saying to Gertrude Stein, “Aha, we invented that. That’s Cubism.” There’s a ton of other examples of this, and my books are attempts to identify those. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of artists, designers and architects served as military camouflage consultants (they ecame known as “camoufleurs”) during both World Wars. But oddly enough,those who were responsible for the most bizarre dazzle patterns had been mostly traditional artists before. And after the war ended, their art careers completely collapsed—because, ironically, their artwork wasn’t Modern enough.

OM: Can you talk a little about how dazzle was conceived and developed, and what made dazzle patterns effective?

RB: The term as it’s now commonly used is more or less synonymous with any pattern that is made up of a hodgepodge of high contrast, distinctively-colored shapes. I call it “high difference” camouflage (because the figure breaks apart), and I distinguish it from “high similarity” camouflage (in which a figure blends in with its background or surrounding). Historically, however, the meaning and purpose of “dazzle painting” was much more specific. It was a kind of ship camouflage that was developed by British artists during World War I. Its primary function was not to hide a ship on the ocean (that wasn’t possible back then), but rather to make it confusing to view through the periscope of a German U-boat. It’s a complex subject, but the idea was mostly to “spoil the aim” (to throw off the calculations) of submarine torpedo gunners. It’s popular now for people to say that dazzle painting was ineffective, but the more you learn about the circumstances, the more apparent it becomes that it did indeed work.

OM: I’ve noticed that dazzle patterns are increasingly used in fashion. Asymmetrical haircuts and face-paint are being used successfully to subvert facial recognition software and surveillance cameras. Any thoughts on this? It's a very 80's cyberpunk dystopian sci-fi look. I love it! But do you think it will be effective? It seems to have a deus ex machina quality to it, in the sense that it undermines digital technology, not with more advanced technology, but with age-old simple tools like abstraction and facepainting.

RB: That’s a curious turnabout, isn’t it. I’ve been following the research on how to prevent digital face recognition, and apparently it works for now. But that too is indebted to Modernism, since it’s related to research that began with the Gestalt psychologists in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, the Gestaltists also wrote about camouflage, and about graphic design principles.

OM: That's really interesting. So essentially it’s about how the brain processes data that it receives from the eyes. Facial recognition computers programs look for geometric specifics of the structure of the face, rather than hair color, skin color, etc, which are really culturally programmed ways that humans see.

RB: Much of what we’re talking about is being confirmed by current brain research. There seem to be aspects of vision that are learned and culture-laden. On the other hand (and this especially interests me), there are also inherent, hard-wired defaults of vision that “come in the box” with everyone’s brain. If we go to war with another country, we can be sure that they will be hoodwinked (to some extent) by the same camouflage patterns that throw us off: figure-ground blending, figure disruption (or dazzle), mimicry, and the combined use of blending and dazzle.

OM: Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think historically there are a lot of examples of technologically “inferior” forces defeating vastly "superior" forces by using the environment to their advantage. Doesn't it seem like the growing surveillance state will always be running to catch up with the low-tech workarounds of the indigenous population?

RB: Well, you could put it that way. Again, the two sides have to correlate, and conditions are constantly changing. But in a way, everything’s a workaround, whether low tech or high. So you could say that, yes, high tech will always be struggling to keep one step ahead of Rube Goldbergian workarounds. But in the same way, low tech will always be struggling to jerry-rig new workarounds. One thing is certain: their dance is unlikely to ever conclude, short of a massive, finite end.

OM: I’m changing direction here: I started thinking about this when I bought an old Chevy Blazer from the National Guard. It is painted "forest" camo, I guess you would call it, mostly olive drab with black and brown. It's a spray can job, so it’s wearing out fast and I need to repaint it. So I began researching other patterns, and thinking about the Iowa landscape. Ideally, what sort of patterns and colors would be most effective in our environment?

RB: It depends on why you’re doing this. If you effectively decrease the vehicle’s visibility by matching it with the Iowa landscape, you might increase your chances of getting hit by another driver. And even then, what is the “Iowa landscape”? Urban, woodland, cornfield, grass? And in what season of the year? Now and then I’ve thought about putting a camouflage pattern on my car, but I’ve always opted out. In relation to choosing a season, if I painted it white for the winter, I wouldn’t want to drive it home during one of those Iowa snowstorm white-outs.

OM: I also considered putting a WWI naval dazzle pattern on it, just as an art project. It would be sort of ironic because it would be the most noticeable vehicle in the parking lot.

RB: I thought about this too, when I was considering my own car. Like you, I have a great fondness for dazzle patterns, so I thought I wouldn’t want my car to blend with the surroundings. I would prefer that it stand out dramatically (like those WWI dazzle-painted ships), and be painted in a clever way that uses confusing brightly-colored shapes to distort the physical shape of the car. But then I thought, that’s really asking for trouble: First, it would stand out in the parking lot and probably get vandalized. Second, when I’m on the road, it might be so confusing to see that I could end up getting hit. Or third, if it’s too distracting to other drivers, they might collide with other cars. Well, whatever you decide, don’t paint your Chevy Blazer in high visibility orange—or you’ll get run into by a deer.

OM: Ha! That would be ironic to say the least! Here's a thought; from what you have said about relationships, landscape and how people see, perhaps a car painted with primer would be the best all purpose camouflage. Culturally, I think people might look past it because primer paint represents lower social status. Just the way people look past a homeless person on the street. Parked in a lot it might be less likely to be broken into. In a field, it might be seen as abandoned. On the flipside of course, driving home late at night, it might be more likely to draw the attention of law enforcement, who are programmed to see something else.

RB: If we continue with this train of thought, we may end up putting antlers on your car, covering it with flocked wallpaper—or better yet, with chia sprouts—and transforming it into an automated jackalope. That might cut down on traffic too, since no one else would want to be seen driving beside 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

cubist style condemned as too germanic or boche

Monument by WWI camoufleurs Mare, Süe and Jaulmes

Mary Sperling McAuliffe, When Paris sizzled: the 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and their friends. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, page 52—

Given the [Paris WWI Victory] parade’s many admirable qualities, it was unfortunate that the work of art meant to commemorate the war’s fallen soldiers at the Fétes de la Victoire came to a bad end. The privilege of creating a memorial for the war dead had gone to three men: the painter André Mare, along with his associates, architect Louis Süe and designer Gustave Jaulmes, all three former members of wartime camouflage units at the front. Their creation [shown above, on July 14, 1919, to the right of the Arc de Triomphe], a huge gilded cénotaph, or tomblike monument, thrust upward in the form of a gigantic bier, its sides decorated with Winged Victories, each backed by a pair of real wings from French warplanes. It had been a mammoth undertaking and was unquestionably meant to be patriotic, but critics fiercely derided it as Germanic or “Boche” art. Mare was known for his Cubist style—indeed, he had been painting French artillery with Cubist designs when he was badly wounded at the front—and “l’affaire du cénotaphe” was immediately perceived by Mare’s supporters as an attack by traditionalists on Cubism. 

RELATED LINKS

Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk)

Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk)

Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)

Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk)

to camouflage the inside—so I don't know where I am

Roland Davies

Above Roland Davies, WWII British Short Sunderland Flying Boat.

•••

James Thrall Soby, “Genesis of a Collection” in Art In America, Vol 49 No 1, 1961, p. 79—

[Abstract Expressionist artist] Matta [Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren] was born in Chile and therefore presumably exempt from American military service. Nevertheless, he worried about being drafted, and came to me in the Museum [of Modern Art]  to ask whether he could be assigned to camouflaging tanks if he were called up. I explained that this sort of camouflage was less commonly used in the Second World War than in the First because of improvements in aerial reconnaissance. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t want to camouflage the outside of a tank so the enemy can’t find it. I want to camouflage the inside, so I won’t know where I am.”

RELATED LINKS

 Cubism and Camouflage

Cook: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive

Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version

cubism and camouflage / oscillation of appearances

Above Simay Imre, Subscribe to the Liberty Loan (World War I French poster), 1918. University of Illinois Archives, Public Domain.

•••

Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature. New York: Vintage Books, 1960—

To prove that art and life intersect, that thought enters things, that appearance and reality collide, or coincide, at the points we call objects, the cubist relied on certain technical devices: a breaking of contours, the passage, so that a form merges with the space about it or with other forms; planes or tones that bleed into other planes and tones; outlines that coincide with other outlines, then suddenly reappear in new relations; surfaces that simultaneously recede and advance in relation to other surfaces; parts of objects shifted away, displaced, or changed in tone until forms disappear behind themselves. This deliberate “oscillation of appearances” gives cubist art its high “iridescence” [p. 270].

It has been said that the great cubist achievement was camouflage [p. 299].

RELATED LINKS

 Cubism and Camouflage

Cook: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive

Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version

Picasso on camouflage / we originated it with cubism

Cook: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive

Above  Roy R. Behrens, Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Northern Iowa and Independence (Iowa) native has released a new 60-minute online documentary film about Iowa expatriate artist William Edwards Cook, and his close long-term friendship with American writer Gertrude Stein.

 •••

Gertrude Stein (speaking in the pretended voice of Alice B. Toklas), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933—

[In 1907, Pablo Picasso went back to Spain for the summer] and he came back with some spanish landscapes and one may say that these landscapes…were the beginning of cubism.…

…In these pictures he first emphasized the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of the camouflage the guns and the ships in the war. The first year of the war, Picasso and Eve, with whom he was living then, Gertrude Stein and myself, were walking down the boulevard Raspail a cold winter evening.…All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C’est nous qui avons fait ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified.

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

New Film / Cook taught Gertrude Stein to drive / 2022

Duplicated from an identical posting on my alternative blog, CAMOUPEDIA , but important enough to deserve it—

I am pleased (albeit exhausted) to say that, as of yesterday, I completed what may be my most ambitious undertaking in recent years. It is a sixty-minute documentary voice-over film biography of the life of William Edwards Cook (1881-1959), an American expatriate artist, who grew up in Iowa, but spent his adult life in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, and Mallorca.

Titled COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive, the film is freely available to everyone here online. More specifically, it is a detailed account of the life-long friendship of Cook with the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is based on her frequent adulation of him in her writings, as well as on the contents of 250 pages of their unpublished correspondence.

Cook was never a well-known artist, but he did acquire some renown for two other reasons: In 1907, he was the first American artist to be allowed to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Later, in 1926, he used his inheritance to commission the then-unknown Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design an early Modernist home (the "first true cubist house") in Boulogne-sur-Seine, which is still intact, and widely known as Maison Cook or Villa Cook.

The friendship of Gertrude Stein and William Edwards Cook (including the roles of their partners, Alice B. Toklas and Jeanne Moallic Cook) was first documented in (my earlier book)  COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier (Bobolink Books, 2005). This new documentary film corrects, updates, and adds to the information in that book.

This film project (as well as the earlier book) was made possible by the earlier work of such Stein scholars as Ulla Dydo, Bruce Kellner, and Rosalind Moad, as well as the Stein / Cook correspondence in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

In 2005, when COOK BOOK was released, Ulla Dydo (the pre-eminent expert on Stein, and author of The Language that Rises) praised it in the following way: "This book jumps out at my eyes, my ears. It comes from everywhere, never drags those even blocks of print that dull the mind. Look at it, read it, let it tease you: It's researched with all the care that keeps its sense of humor and its visual and voice delights. Travel with it, leave home, go and explore the many ways for a book to be a house for living."

The distinguished critic Guy Davenport wrote: "This is as good as topnotch Behrens gets!"

This film is not without humor, and at times it shares surprises. It may prove of particular value to viewers (both scholars and the rest of us) who are particularly interested in American literature, Modernism, Gertrude Stein, art, architecture, horse racing, Harvard, William James, art collectors, expatriates, Paris, Mallorca, the American Midwest, Iowa, art history, the training of artists, Cézanne, Cubism, Picasso, Le Corbusier, LGBT, and gender identity issues. 

 

measles, camouflage and asymmetrical shoes in 1918

SHOES DIFFER IN COLOR in the Davenport Democrat and Leader (Davenport IA), March 1, 1925, p. 3—

Futurism, cubism or some other art complex has descended upon French custom bootmakers, who insist that they set the styles in women’s shoes for the world. These bootmakers all are of one mind in turning out symmetrical footwear. The first models of this year styles were shown a few weeks ago. They seemed freakish, but the bootmakers have carried their original ideas further until now one side of a shoe is quite different, not only in design, but in color, from the other side. Humorists are speculating whether the makers will not soon decree that right and left shoes be entirely dissimilar.

Designer John Vassos / WWII Camouflage Consultant

John Vassos, c1932

Above Art Deco-era turnstyle, designed by John Vassos, c1932. We blogged about Greek-American designer John Vassos a few years go in reference to his service as a camouflage consultant during World War II.

•••

CUBISM DOMINATES NEW PARIS SALON ARTISTS, in Bluefield Daily Telegraph (Bluefield WV), September 19, 1926, Section 2, Page 4—

Paris, Sept 18—Cubism completely dominates the new Paris Salon of decorative artists. The curve must only be used in case of grave necessity. Straight lines, angles and zigzags dominate tables, chairs, lighting, jewelry, clocks, and, above all, architecture. Even carpets and curtains have to fit octogonal rooms, and are cut up themselves into tee-squares and triangles.

Chairs look as though they were cut out of solid cubes of wood and then camouflaged with a medley of colors. Curtains are often painted by hand in vivid thunder and lightning effects. The edges are made of strips of different color, each of which is a littler shorter than the last, like the ABC of a diary. Clocks are made entirely of glass, but have square faces, and are supported by glass stands cut like a Chinese puzzle. Heading lamps are equally geometrical problems. Colors are almost as angular, consisting of vivid greens, purples, magnates, raw siennas, sometimes all mixed together. The new Decorative Salon is nothing if it is not revolutionary.

Gestalt Psychology, Cubism, Art and Camouflage

In 1973, Fritz Heider, a Viennese-born American psychologist, published a memoir on "Gestalt Theory: Early History and Reminiscences." Near the end of the article, Heider talks briefly about Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer's research of "unit-forming factors" (or perceptual grouping tendencies) and the explicit use of comparable strategies, during roughly the same time period, in the Cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso…more>>>

SEE ALSO

Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk)

Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk)

Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)

Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk)

Art | an illusion of reality that tells the truth by fibbing

Leon Dabo (1909)

Above Portrait photograph of Leon Dabo by Emil O. Hoppé (1909). Public domain.

•••

Rollin Lynde Hartt, CAMOUFLAGE in Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1918—

As their train nears Chicago, passengers note a low, murmurous hum. It is the Chicagoans saying “Camouflage.” Those of us who once confined our remarks to “Skiddoo! Twenty-three!” and more recently to “I should worry!” and “What do you know about that?” peg along at present on “Camouflage,” though a bit wearisome it grows. Declares a neighbor of mine, “The next time I hear ‘Camouflage’ I shall make my will, kiss my friends and relatives good-bye, and jump in the wastebasket!”…

[Camouflage] borrows its technique from a humble enough source. It is the Chamber of Horrors over again…Some steal their technique from the impressionists. Some repeat the antics of cubism. Others depend for their success upon certain very curious principles of optics. It takes an artist to invent them and an artist to explain them, and Mr. Leon Dabo* is never more entertaining than when holding forth on their theory and practice.

In order to understand the enormously important part impressionism plays in camouflage one must first define impressionism. Aesthetically, it is a simple matter, merely an attempt to reproduce, not nature itself, but the side of nature that appeals strongly to the artist. Technically, however, it involves profundities. Instead of counterfeiting reality, it creates an illusion of reality. It tells the truth by fibbing…

It was to cubism that the camouflageurs had recourse when they wanted to hide ships from view. Painting them gray was a poor device, they found. From habit, the eye would still recognize the silhouette of a ship even at a great distance. But it turns out that the eye had come to depend almost wholly on habit. Break up the familiar silhouette by dappling it with inharmonious colors in huge, shapeless masses, or—better yet—by covering it with immense cubist triangles and with cubist rectangles as immense—and the eye of the seasoned mariner would report no ship at all. The eye sees what it is accustomed to seeing and balks at learning new tricks.…

And why resent that low, murmurous hum of the Chicagoans saying “Camouflage”? Let the hum continue. It is just now a foolish hum, to be sure; it reflects a quaintly naive sense of novelty, as if camouflage were a new thing under the sun instead of being a modern recourse to trickery as old as “Quaker” cannon and the painted portholes on merchantmen, and, for that matter, the celebrated wooden horse at Troy. But it popularizes an idea. It gives it prominence. It backs up the army’s determination to put camouflage where it belongs. France has thousands of camouflageurs. So should we.…

•••

* Note The following entry was featured in a column titled Fifty Years Ago 1918, in the August 25, 1968 issue of the Asbury Park Press (Asbury NJ)—

Aug. 27—Leon Dabo, American painter who has been serving on General Pershing’s staff designing camouflage, was the principal speaker at a war rally in Ocean Grove Auditorium. He described enemy atrocities.

To see or not? The compleat disguise of the nightjar

Nightjar

Above Scissor-tailed Nightjar (referred to in the article as the "goatsucker"). Public domain.

•••

Below is most (not all) of the text from a magazine article that was published during World War I. An opening section, which is a disturbing and not-funny joke about the “West Indian negro” (but referred to by a slanderous name), has been omitted. Encountering such offensive content is standard fare when searching vintage published texts.

The author, Stephen Haweis (1878-1969), was a British artist and photographer whose family (described as “socially prominent”) lived in Cheyne Walk in London, in a house that had been previously owned by Dante Gabrielle Rossetti. While living in Paris, he was a student of Alphonse Mucha, and, as a photographer, documented the sculptural work of Auguste Rodin. He was also the sometime husband of British poet Mina Loy. After losing much of his family’s wealth in the 1929 stock market crash, he moved to the West Indies, where (according to a biographical note in the finding aid for his papers at Columbia University) “he studied and painted tropical fish [and] wrote for local newspapers…”

Stephen Haweis, "To See or Not To See? A Question that Camouflage, Color and Cubism Are Solving in the War" in Vanity Fair, April 1918, pp. 42ff—

… It was recently announced in the newspapers that ingenious camouflage men were required by the Chief of Engineers at Washington. Property men, photographers, sheet metal workers, scene and sign painters, were specified among a host of others, but there was no notice or mention of color experts, or men whose lives are devoted to the observation of Nature.

A really ingenious camouflage man ought to be able to do quite well without the simple wiles of the stage decorator, but it seems odd that the color men should be overlooked by such an important branch of the Army service as the camouflage department. Perhaps, at this moment, the most useless professions would seem to be those of the picture painter and the naturalist, but in these two branches of study are the real master camouflagers. The painter, because he devotes his life to the science of color, and the collecting naturalist because he could not possibly find the objects of his search were he not trained to notice the slightest variations of color and form, in forest and plain.

The naturalist can see the screech owl on the stump of an old tree, and can find the praying mantis upon a bush, which the rest of humanity will pass unnoticed; indeed a tyro may stare vacantly at a land-crab in a mangrove swamp for several minutes after its exact position has been indicated to him. I have seen a man kneel down upon the sand with his nose less than three feet from the young of the goatsucker, yet he could not see it, because to him sand and fluff were exactly alike.

We are not trained to accurate observation unless our life interest depends upon it. But who should be able to detect a hidden gun emplacement, or a sniper, so well as a painter or a naturalist? They know when a boulder has been recently moved by the direction of the lichen growths on it. They suspect an unusual shape of a branch in a mass of foliage. They are not easily deceived by cut trees that are supposed to be growing.

Biography of Mina Loy

The army authorities should take into consideration that there are several breeds of artists. The popular portrait painter might be dead weight in the camouflage department, and the old fashioned landscape man might be well supplanted by the scene-painter; but the impressionist, perhaps even the post-impressionist or the cubist, should be of the utmost value to them because they look at nature scientifically and analytically. They have no preconceived ideas of what a picture should be, they are concerned with what nature really is, however unlikely it may seem to the eye. They do not attempt to paint details, but effects of light upon scenes or objects which in themselves have no particular interest for them.

They are aware that the color of the thing at any given moment is incompletely interpreted by that color detached from its encircling environment of light, air, and movement. To attain this, the impressionist analyzes what he sees and devises a means of expressing the result of his analysis.

He does it as a rule by juxtaposing brilliant colors in spots and blotches so that the result expresses the colors, and suggests the details of his subjects properly in their relative values,—the keynote of successful camouflage.

Most people think that an object painted blue would be inconspicuous against a blue sky. Blue sky, however, is not blue paint, a paint which appears to darken with distance more rapidly than any other color,—so that a blue airplane would show up almost like a black spot in the sky.

Orange, on the other hand, (the complementary of blue), will disappear remarkably quickly, a pale vivid yellow would probably be found to be the best airplane color for a blue sky. Pink will disappear rapidly against white skies, while anyone who has seen a spot of vermilion on gray drawing paper, should realize that a vermilion airplane against a thunder cloud if visible at all, would be an impossible target, as the two colors produce a vibration in the eye that is almost intolerable. I do not doubt that artists could devise a far better color for uniforms than the favorite grays and browns dear to the military heart today.

Applied to battleships, the result of the prevalent gray color scheme is well nigh pathetic, for, upon the horizon, they appear perfectly well defined to the enemy marksman. He would have considerably more trouble if the color were a bright mauve. If there were enough red in the mauve, these ships, theoretically, should not be visible on the greens and grays of the ocean.

Already there are some who regret the old white battleships, which at least reflected the water. But white is now said to be a bad color. But there are different kinds of white; blue-white, green-white, yellow-white—each of which has its own characteristics and uses. Probably all white holds or refracts too much light to be very inconspicuous, except in a blaze of light.

The chief essential in camouflage is that the same color should not be employed all over anything. Spots have been used by the painters to simulate movement in picture painting. They will be found—on a large scale—to be right in principle for harmonizing an object with the continual movement of its surroundings.

But, whatever colors are employed the impressionist has long known that stars and stripes are the right principle—and I think we shall see that they will be placed, in Europe, where they will do a lot of good.

Canine Stealth | Can you find the cubidachshund?

Can you find the cubist dog?

Above This is one of a series of cubist-themed puzzles that were published in the San Francisco Sunday Call during 1913. This network of lines was published on the entertainment page on May 26, with a challenge to the readers to "find the cubidog" and, more specifically, to "find a cubidachshund" by filling in a certain number of shapes. The solution (posted below) was revealed the following Sunday. This is an embedded figure puzzle, of course, a variant of camouflage. But this example predates World War I, and "camouflage" was not yet an English word. Instead, this is a spin-off from the famous Armory Show which opened in New York in early 1913. It was the American public's first introduction to Cubism. More>>>

Stinemetz Knew Stieglitz | WWI Ship Camouflage

Alfred Stieglitz, Hands of Helen Freeman (c1920)

Everyland, an American monthly periodical published by Christian missionaries, was self-described as "a magazine of world friendship for boys and girls." Among its various activities, it sponsored drawing contests. In its June 1920 issue (Vol 11 No 6), it included the following paragraph—

Morgan Stinemetz…is our Art Editor. During the war, he was in the camouflage service of the navy. It is he who will judge the results of the drawing contests, so look out for him!

So who was Morgan Stinemetz? In addition to that page in Everyland, I've found two other sources. One is a multi-page article by Louise Davis, titled ARTIST'S RETREAT: Morgan Stinemetz, who dropped an illustrator's career to become Methodist Publishing House art editor, is a man who finds joy in country life. Published in The Nashville Tennessean Magazine on September 7, 1952 (pp. 6-7, 18-19), it was illustrated by eight photographs of the artist and his artwork, interwoven with interview excerpts. I also found a newspaper obituary that was featured in the Nashville Tennessean on August 20, 1969 (p. 23). He had died at a nursing home in Nashville two days earlier.

Stinemetz was born in Washington DC in 1886. His grandfather, Major Thomas P. Morgan, was one of the first DC police commissioners. His father-in-law was an important DC publisher. As a child, Stinemetz had been interested in animals, as well as in painting and drawing. He studied at the Corcoran School of Art in DC, the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia with Thomas P. Anshutz, a student and later a colleague of Thomas Eakins.

From Philadelphia, Stinemetz returned to New York, where (these are Louise Davis' words) "cubism and other various other 'isms' that startled the new century were taking a firm hold. He experimented with all of them and had his paintings in numerous shows, including the first International Art Show at the Armory in New York in 1913, when Matisse and Picasso were first shown in this country."

He became interested in the literary excursions of Gertrude Stein, and developed a friendship with Alfred Stieglitz, photographer, gallery owner, and the publisher of Camera Work. In 1916, Stieglitz met the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and soon after they became a pair. It is interesting to note that in the years just prior to this, O'Keeffe had studied with an art educator (and an advocate of the theories of Arthur Wesley Dow) named Alon Bement, who had been her greatest influence. During World War I, Bement was a major contributor to American ship camouflage.

As for Stinemetz, he soon became disillusioned with Modernism. Quoting Davis, he became "fed up with the artificiality of the whole movement." At gallery openings, when he mingled with those in attendance, "he overheard them 'interpreting' things into his work that he had never thought of. …They analyzed every brush stroke, he said, and he was sick of it. He gave up painting on the spot," and turned instead to a new career as a book and magazine illustrator. In subsequent years, he became a well-known illustrator for a variety of popular magazines, among them Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Outdoor Life, and others. He especially enjoyed animal illustrations, and eventually became well-known for his drawings and prints of Scottie dogs. Over the years, he moved from the East Coast to Cincinnati, then settled in Nashville TN as the art director for the Methodist Publishing House.

The US entered WWI in 1917, and soon after artists, designers and architects were encouraged to use their expertise in the development of wartime camouflage. Stinemetz was one of those who contributed to naval camouflage. The article by Davis states that "he served in the navy, capitalizing on the tricks of cubism to camouflage our ships so that enemy submarines would miscalculate their aim."  The obituary simply notes that "he designed camouflage for ships of the US Navy." But he may have remained a civilian, since the Navy and the US Shipping Board worked with both military and civilian artists in designing, testing and painting "dazzle" camouflage patterns on ships, both military and commercial (called merchant ships).

Until these references were found, I had never heard of Morgan Stinemetz, much less about his service as a ship camoufleur, so it may be wise to be skeptical of the claim (stated first in the Davis article, then repeated verbatim in the obituary) that "so effective were his distortions of perspective that a record of his camouflage patterns was filed in various museums." Obviously, if such documents still exist, it would surely be helpful to find them.

Postscript (added May 10, 2019): I was mistaken. I had heard of Morgan Stinemetz. A couple of years ago, I gained access to a list (dated September 26, 1918) of sixty-four artists who had studied ship camouflage in New York with William Andrew Mackay. Stinemetz's name is on that list of American Shipping Board camoufleurs from the Second District. This suggests that Stinemetz was a civilian, and most likely not in the Navy.

Gestalt Theory | Cubism, Camouflage and Design

Gestalt Theory: Cubism, Camouflage and Design

Lunacy, Delirum Tremens, Jazz—and Camouflage

Cubist cartoon (1913), by Frank King

Styles of so-called "modern" art pre-date dazzle ship camouflage, since disruptive camouflage (as we know it) was not adopted until 1914, the first year of World War I. Modern styles of art were shown to the American public by way of the Armory Show in early 1913. 

Thereafter, cartoonists had an absolute field day with avant-garde art, as shown above in a wonderful cartoon by Frank King, titled "After the Cubist Food Exhibit," that appeared in The Chicago Tribune on April 24, 1913. As soon as disruptive camouflage was introduced, there was no stopping the rumors that it had been inspired by lunacy, the delirium tremens, jazz—and cubism. The fight is still on-going.

•••

P.I. O'Leary, THE LITERARY PAGE. The Informalists. The Advocate (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), June 24, 1920, p. 3— 

Mr. [W.L.] George sees in the work of [Irish writer James] Joyce a resemblance to the impressionist painter's method, who, instead of painting a green spot, painted side by side a blue spot and a yellow spot, and then invited you to stand back. If this attempted literature of Joyce resembles anything at all in pigments, it is the chaotic and seemingly meaningless lines and drab splashes painted on camouflaged ocean-going vessels during the late war. Unlike those markings, however, which served to obliterate the vessels they made usefully hideous, these serve only to hide something which is not there to be hidden.…

•••

Dazzle Mania in The Register (Adelaide, South Australia), October 8, 1923, p. 11—

Post-impressionists have been at work in London again. Wandering down one of the streets where the feminine population does its shopping, I was struck—literally—by a most amazing pair of silk stockings. "Jazz," murmured the fair lady: "aren't they a dream?" They were—a rather bad one. The post-impressionist had apparently endeavored to portray his impressions of a landscape after a thunderstorm. Verdan green as to foot, the stockings first took on a threatening reddish-yellow glow, deepening into vivid crimson, and back again to sullen gray, all the colorings looking as though they had been thrown on from a distance of at least five feet. I suppose they would be all right on some people, but they looked to me like the camouflage they put on boats in war time.