Camouflage Artist | Jean-Louis Forain

Camouflage artist Jean-Louis Forain (left), c1914-15

Above At the beginning of World War I, Jean-Louis Forain was a well-known and immensely popular French artist, who in his youth had been close friends with Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Edgar Dégas, and Édouard Monet. Known chiefly as a caricaturist, he had been strongly influenced by Honoré Daumier.

When the war began, Forain was already in his sixties. Nevertheless, he volunteered for the French Army’s camouflage section. In the photograph shown here, he is on the left, applying disruptive camouflage shapes to a field cannon, c1914-15.

A comparable image is reproduced in Cécile Coutin, Tromper ‘ennemi (p. 27), where it is credited to the Musée de l’Armée, Paris. As a side dish, below is a passage we recently found in which a prominent British nurse recalls her wartime meeting with Forain.

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Kathleen Burke, The White Road to Verdun. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916—

We lunched with General [Philippe] Pétain and his État Major. A charming and most interesting addition to the party was M. [Jean-Louis] Forain, the famous French caricaturist, and now one of the Chief Instructors of the French Army in the art of camouflage—the art of making a thing look like anything in the world except what it is! He has established a series of schools all along the French Front, where the Poilus [French infantry] learn to bedeck their guns and thoroughly disguise them under delicate shades of green and yellow, with odd pink spots, in order to relieve the monotony. Certainly the appearance of the guns of the present time would rejoice the heart and soul of the "Futurists." It was most interesting to hear him describe the work in detail and the rapidity with which his pupils learned the new art. For one real battery there are probably three or four false ones, beautiful wooden guns, etc., etc., and he told us of the Poilus' new version of the song Rien n'est plus beau que notre Patrie ("Nothing is more beautiful than our country"). They now sing Rien n'est plus faux que notre batterie ("Nothing is more false than our battery").

Kathleen Burke

More Horse Carcasses & Phony Observation Trees

Steel-Lined Dead Tree Observation Post

Above During the trench warfare of World War I, both sides of the conflict "test drove" the idea of clandestinely replacing familiar large dead tree trunks with steel-lined replicas of the same trees. Equipped inside with a ladder and a telephone, these were used as observation posts. Given the skill and effort required to construct one of these, not to mention the challenge of putting it in place (at night, in total darkness), there can only have been a few of these.

As noted in an earlier post, British painter Solomon J. Solomon (initially in charge of the Camouflage Section of the Royal Engineers) is thought to have been responsible for erecting the first British observation tree in March 1916, a task that he later depicted in a well-known painting.

In this wartime photograph, we see a British soldier apparently inspecting a faux tree made by German camoufleurs. There are a few eyewitness accounts of how these were constructed, and at least one British observation tree has survived and is in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.

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E. Alexander Powell, Italy at War and the Allies in the West. [The War on All Fronts series. Vol IV] New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919.

At a certain very important point on the French front there long stood, in an exposed and commanding position, a large and solitary tree, or rather the trunk of a tree, for it had been shorn of its branches by shell fire. A landmark in that flat and devastated region, every detail of this gaunt sentinel had long since become familiar to the keen eyed observers in the German trenches, a few hundred yards away. Were a man to climb to its top—and live—he would be able to command a comprehensive view of the surrounding terrain. The German sharpshooters saw to it, however, that no one climbed it. But one day the resourceful French took the measurements of that tree and photographed it. These measurements and photographs were sent to Paris. A few weeks later there arrived at the French front by railway an imitation tree, made of steel, which was an exact duplicate in every respect, even to the splintered branches and the bark, of the original. Under cover of darkness the real tree was cut down and the fake tree erected in its place, so that, when daylight came, there was no change in the landscape to arouse the Germans' suspicions. The lone tree-trunk to which they had grown so accustomed still reared itself skyward. But the "tree" at which the Germans were now looking was of hollow steel, and concealed in its interior in a sort of conning tower, forty feet above the ground, a French observing officer, field glasses at his eyes and a telephone at his lips, was peering through a cleverly concealed peep-hole, spotting the bursts of the French shells and regulating the fire of the French batteries.

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Of course there were other kinds of battlefield observation posts as well, such as the supposed use of imitation horse carcasses as hiding places, as was featured earlier. My own suspicion is that few of these colorful camouflage ploys were actually used on the battlefield. But they proved immensely valuable as amusing illustrations for exaggerated news reports, which boosted recruiting and Liberty Loans. Below for example are photographs of the two sides of a roughed-out dead horse carcass trick, mocked-up in clay by camoufleurs at Camp Taylor KY (c1918).

Phony Horse Carcass Used as Observation Post

Camouflaged Ships as Deep-Sea Barbershops

USS Siboney (c1918) in dazzle camouflage

Arthur Capper, Nature, Art and Camouflage in The Topeka Capital (Topeka KS). October 21, 1917, p. 4B—

The new art of camouflage is not limited to land, by any means. One of our boys transported to Europe has described a fine example of this art, in the case of the American destroyers, hunters of U-boats, who came out to meet the transport fleet as it neared the French coast.

The smudge of the destroyers could be seen twenty minutes before they themselves were visible, and when their hulls finally appeared they bore the appearance of a two-stack freighter heavily loaded and low in the water. As a matter of fact the destroyer has four funnels instead of two, but the two not seen at a distance are cleverly camouflaged to give the appearance of a freighter instead of a war vessel. As the boats came nearer the boys thought they were French, owing to their gay and bizarre coloring, or decoration. Their sides were painted in zigzag lines of white and blue, while the rigging and "concealed" smoke stacks were trickily and cockily camouflaged in wavy lines or "snaky ribbons," of green, white and blue. The general effect of the American destroyers on the sea, when transacting business, as soon as they can be closely observed, is suggested by the nickname the American soldiers immediately gave them of "deep-sea barbershops." The U-boat is the "canned Hun."

…The notion that protective coloration of warships must necessarily be a dull sea-gray disappeared long ago… New principles are employed, as in the case of the spiral green, white and blue lines on the stacks of torpedo boats, the zigzag lines of blue and white on the hull, and the same scheme of wavy zigzag, or spiral painted lines and splashes of color in varicolored combinations on cannon behind the front.

Yet the truth is that the new camouflage follows the principles first adopted by the artists of the Barbizon school and soon carried to extremes by radical painters, the principles that later, about thirty-five years ago, developed into the new landscape method of impressionism. Camouflage and impressionism are twin sisters. Nature is in fact colored not on simple, dull principles, but its coloration is greatly mixed, weirdly so, and with no regard to conventional ideas of consistency or harmony. Once in a while, as in this exceptionally brilliant month in Kansas, the true principle of mixed coloration appears to the plain, common eye in viewing the stunning prairie landscape. But to the now initiated artist these colors are present, even when hidden.

Arthur Capper, campaign card for Kansas governor's race

Inept Trompe l'Oeil Camouflage in WWI

Camp Sherman, Chillicothe OH, building camouflage (1919)

Distant view of same building (1919)

Surely, some of the least persuasive camouflage of World War I was illusionistic building camouflage, devised by Allied infantry camoufleurs. Sometimes it was designed by artists who were assumed to be experts because, as civilians, they had worked or studied as artists. Too often, apparently, they may not have been sufficiently skilled as painters, nor did they genuinely understand the conditions that contribute to effective camouflage. There is ample indication of that in wartime vintage photographs of the use of quaint pictorial scenes (inept trompe l'oeil realism) on the sides of buildings, which can't have fooled anyone. Show here (above and below) are various examples of that from government photographs from WWI.

As was featured in an earlier post, it was common to use perspective illusions in setting up phony pictorial scenes.

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Henry Berry [American artist, writer and WWI camoufleur], Make the Kaiser Dance. NY: Doubleday, 1978, p. 206—

None of us, including the captain, knew a goddamn thing about camouflage, but it got us out of all the drilling and what have you.

309th Engineers, Camp Taylor KY (1918)

European building camouflage (c1918)

Ambulances painted on building, Camp Taylor KY (1918)

Camouflaged Naval Air Station in FL (c1919)

Protective Coloration for White Horses

Protective coloration

Above (apologies for posting this drawing again, but it is so good it deserves to be repeated) World War I-era cartoon by George Morrow, published in Punch magazine, April 7, 1915, p. 280. The caption reads: REMARKABLE CASE OF PROTECTIVE COLORING. Owing, it is believed, to the fears of a German invasion, a zebra at the zoo assumes a neutral aspect.•

• Protectively colored in "stars and stripes" from a British point of view, presumably because the US was still neutral in the war.

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In earlier posts, we have talked about the practice during World War I (apparently not uncommon) of reducing the conspicuousness of white horses by painting them with darkened pigments. We've found yet another reference to that in the memoirs of the granddaughter of President U.S. Grant: Princess Cantacuzeine, Countess Spéransky, née Grant, Revolutionary Days: Recollections of Romanoffs and Bolsheviki 1914-1917. Small, Maynard and Company 1919, p. 23. In this passage, she recalls the resulting commotion when newly-painted horses (formerly white) were loaded onto railroad cars—

A most curious sight was the horses belonging to the regimental band. It was a tradition that though the other soldiers were all mounted on bay horses, the band should ride pure white steeds. With the news ideas of warfare, these animals became a danger to their unit, and they had been dyed for safety with olive-brown. This was their first appearance in their disguise; and their comrades of the four squadrons did not recognize them. There was a dreadful fuss, and such desire to avoid the poor, painted creatures that the latter felt insulted; and regarding themselves as victims of a ridiculous mistake, they lost no opportunity of protesting. Their humiliation turned them timid and fractious, and it took time and persuasion to get them into their cars. Everyone rushed to help; and officers as well as soldiers were amused at the result of this first essay at "camouflage," which came as a diversion to our strained feelings.

Concealing the Land: Camouflage from Above

Above Cover of Sonja Dümpelmann, Flights of Imagination: Aviation | Landscape | Design. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Camouflage, landmark alteration, and aerial disorientation in both World Wars are examined throughout, but also featured is an extensive 50-page section on "Concealing the Land: Creating Invisible Landscapes of War and Peace" with subsections on "Camouflage as Art-Science," "Camouflage as Regional Planning," "Camouflage as Urban Design," "Camouflage as Landscape Architecture," "Living Camouflage," and "Camouflage for Peacetime."

Cruise Boat Camouflage | Katy Mutton

Above Australian artist Katy Mutton has undertaken a public art project (concurrent with the World War I Centenary), called In Plain Sight, in which she has designed a glaring dazzle camouflage scheme for a small cruise boat.

Beginning in October 2016 and continuing for a year, the vessel will provide tours on Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra (Australia's famous capital), as part of the Contour 556 Arts Festival. In the artist's words, the project will play up various aspects of stealth and surveillance: "Using bright, bold mixed patterns the transformed vessel will invite attention while simultaneously interfering with the viewer's perception of its form and detail." More>>>

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 15

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the styles" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Anon, THE BAFFLE SYSTEM OF CAMOUFLAGING SHIPS in Monroe Journal (Monroe NC), September 17, 1918, p. 2—

…The district camoufleur at one great [US] port was called to the telephone late one Saturday afternoon—when most folks were ending their week's work. The agents of a big steamship company requested that one of their vessels, an 8000-ton freighter, due to sail the following Monday morning, should be camouflaged.

"All right!" was the matter-of-course reply to the most unusual request. And an expert camoufleur was immediately assigned to the task. A paint concern was instructed to deliver the necessary supplies to the dock, arrangements were made for a crew of painters, the design for the vessel was speedily selected and by midnight the marking out of the design on the ship was accomplished. The paint supplies arrived some time during the middle of the night, a crew of 62 painters showed up promptly next morning and at 5:30 on that Sunday afternoon the ship was completed, and she sailed with her precious cargo for our forces overseas exactly on schedule time….

Answers (top to bottom) Marc Chagall, Romare Bearden, Amedeo Modigliani, and Max Weber.

La Baionnette Camouflage Cover | Jacques Nam

Cover illustration (1917), by French camoufleur Jacques Nam

Above La Baionnette was a weekly French satirical magazine that was published during World War I, from 1914 to 1918. Each issue focused on a theme, and this is the cover illustration for the 23 August 1917 edition. As is evident from the signature at the bottom left, the artist was Jacques Nam (aka Jacques Lehmann or Jacques Lehmann Nam) (1881-1974), who served as a French Army camoufleur. In civilian life, he was primarily known for political caricature and for stylized animal portraits (ad nauseum), especially cats—ca-choo!

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George W. McCree, "Recruiting Engineers for the World War in Minnesota" in Minnesota History Bulletin. Vol 3 (May 1, 1920, p. 350)—

One day a man came into the office very excited. He was an artist, a scene painter in one of our theatres, and he was very anxious to get into Company C of the Twenty-Fifth Engineers. This was a company made up of camouflage artists. This fellow was a dandy man for that organization but he was an inveterate cigarette smoker and had one hundred percent of artistic temperament. Before he went up for his preliminary physical examination, I spoke to him quietly because I knew his heart was beating about a thousand times a minute and that he would never pass in that condition. When I thought he was all right I let him go and then telephoned the noncommissioned officer in charge at the recruiting station, telling him what kind of a man was coming to see him and that if there was nothing organically wrong to let him pass because he was a very desirable man for the camouflage unit. About three minutes after the man left he came back and said, "Oh! Mr. McCree pray that I may be passed." He was passed and he was so elated that it was about four days before he could get his feet back to earth so that he could go to [Fort] Snelling for his final examination. After his elation he became tremendously depressed; every little while he would come in to ask me if I thought he would pass and each time I was requested to pray for him. At last I got him off to Snelling and sent him on his way assuring him that I would pray for him. Believing that in this case work was more efficacious than faith, I telephoned Snelling and told the authorities how anxious I was to have this man accepted. Soon thereafter he left for American University [the camp in Washington DC, where WWI US Army camoufleurs were being trained] to join his regiment.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 14

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Isabel Anderson, Zigzagging. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918—

I was not disappointed on seeing the British camouflaged boats! They exceeded even my wildest dreams. The British idea is not to make the ship invisible, but to deceive as to its direction and length—the bow, for instance, often being painted to represent the stern. They were even sometimes made to look like two boats—unbelievably queer! One had a destroyer under full steam painted on her side. The prominent colors seemed to be green, blue, white, and black; sometimes done in figures, or resembling a Scottish plaid, or squares and triangles, or strange cubist designs. There were curling, crazy lines—often carried on to the lifeboats, which were painted half and half. These designs are quite incomprehensible to the lay mind. One wonders if some cubist artist has gone entirely mad—and perhaps the whole world, too.

Answers (top to bottom) John James Audubon, William Harnett, László Moholy-Nagy, and Édouard Manet.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 13

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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George Fitch, "Cubist Art" in the Washington Herald, April 21, 1913—

To paint cubist pictures requires great genius and self restraint. The painter must abandon all previous ideas of art, nature and religion, and paint as nearly as possible in straight lines. This can best be done in the ordinary strait jacket, so popular in our leading institutions for the regulation of advanced and explosive thought.

Answers (top to bottom) Max Ernst, Irene Rice Pereira, Frank Stella and John Singer Sargent.

Camouflage Hoodies | Sinister French Artillery Robes

early WWI French camouflage (c1914)

In earlier blog entries (such as one on camouflaged robes, and a second on French camouflage and criminals), we've posted information about the hooded outfits that were devised by French artists who were serving in artillery teams at the beginning of World War I. As I've described elsewhere—

…what we call camouflage was first promoted by artists serving in the French Army in the early years of WWI. While there is some confusion about which individual initiated the ideas, the reasons are not in contention. Soldiers assigned to artillery teams were dismayed by the ease with which airborne enemy spotters could find and report the positions of their field artillery. In response, they initiated two countermeasures: the application of disruptive ("broken color") patterns on the surface of their cannons, and the donning by those in artillery teams of sinister-looking hooded robes, called cagoules (they closely resembled the outfit worn by a French crime novel character called Fantomas (c. 1911) or darkened paint-stained versions of Ku Klux Klan ceremonial robes).•

A surprising number of photographs of these hoodie-like camouflage outfits have survived, including a handful of full-color images in the collection of the Bibliothéque Nationale de France, and can be accessed online (posted here are restored, cropped and cleaned-up renditions of those). Other images of these outfits, whether black and white photographs and drawings, or painted illustrations by artists, were also commonly reproduced in contemporaneous magazines, such as on the cover of Scientific American (September 29, 1917). Even a few of the robes have survived.

• From Roy R. Behrens, "Khaki to khaki (dust to dust): the ubiquity of camouflage in human experience" in Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas, eds., Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the Art of Disappearance. Sydney AU: Sydney University Press, 2015, pp. 1-15.

 

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 12

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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J.M. Daiger, "Makes Warship Look Like Tub" in The Breckenridge News (Cloverport KY), January 16, 1918, p. 6—

The older naval officers include to the opinion that the regulation navy gray by itself is better than any camouflage that the artists have invented, and they are frankly skeptical about these riots of color and freak designs that the scientific application of one of the fine arts is smearing over their ships.…

…These vessels close up look like scrambled rainbows or like the palette of an artist in his cups. 

Answers (top to bottom) Arthur Lismer, Joan Miró, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 11

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Henry Charles Witwer, From Baseball to Boches. Boston: Small, Maynard and Co, 1918, p. 31—

The whole boat was painted by a set of maniac painters opposed to prohibition, and the foreman must have seen that nobody died of thirst while they was on the job. There's a swab of pink here and a swab of blue there, and in between they got samples of chocolate, strawberry, orange, vanilla, and allied flavors. This is called camouflage and is supposed to keep the submarines from seein' the ship, and, in the event they do see it, to scare 'em away.

Answers (top to bottom) Francis Picabia, John Graham, Edgar Dégas, and El Lissitzky.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 10

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Katharine Kuh, Break-Up: The Core of Modern Art. Greenwich CT: Graphic Arts Society, 1969, p. 11—

The art of our century has been characterized by shattered surfaces, broken color, segmented compositions, dissolving forms and shredded images. Curiously insistent is this consistent emphasis on break-up.

Answers (top to bottom) Thomas Eakins, Jacques-Louis David, William Holman Hunt, and Mary Cassatt.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 9

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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William Marion Reedy in "Hosiery and Skirts, Etc." in Goodwin's Weekly, c1918—

We want a [Herbert] Hoover to regulate skirts and waists and stockings—yes and the cosmetics of the ladies. The paint one beholds! And the ladies are all past impressionists. Their faces rival the works of Matisse or Nevinson or Picabia. They are as barbaric as Gauguin, as cubist or vorticist as Gaudier-Brzeska. Some of them look like the camouflage ships on the river or in the bay.

Answers (top to bottom) R.B. Kitaj, Charles Meere, Gustave Courbet, and Théodore Géricault.

Watson-Norfolk Camouflage Scheme | F.M. Watson

USS Anniston (aka USS Montgomery)

One of the earliest, most informative publications about modern American ship camouflage was a two-part magazine article in the US Naval Institute Proceedings, in July 1971 and February 1972. Both articles were titled "Ship Camouflage: Deceptive Art," the first one dealing with World War I, the second with World War II. The texts were written by Robert F. Sumrall (the curator then of ship models at the US Naval Academy Museum), and were greatly enriched by photographs, charts and drawings from his collection. more>>>

Surely, anyone who saw Sumrall's initial article was especially taken aback by photographs of two ships, USS Anniston (formerly the USS Montgomery) and the USS Nebraska. Both ships had been painted with a strange experimental design called the Watson-Norfolk scheme. It was called that because it had been proposed by F.M. Watson, who was the chief ship painter at the Norfolk Navy Yard. We blogged about this once before, when we featured a replica of one of the ships, by model-builder Wolfgang Kring.

Shown above are photographs not of the USS Nebraska but of the USS Anniston. Apparently they were the only two ships to which this pattern was applied (c1917). In both cases, as these photographs show, the left or port side of the ship was painted in a geometric zigzag plan, while the right or starboard side had a strikingly different pattern of multi-colored target forms.

There remains the mystery of just who F.M. Watson was. He may have had connections with North Carolina, since the only online works we've found are on the website of the North Carolina Digital Collections, which has 14 wartime posters signed by Watson. If so, it may be relevant that there is a grave for F.M. Watson (no name, only initials again) in the Elmwood Cemetery in Fremont NC. His dates are listed on the tombstone as 1877-1938, a typical time span for a WWI veteran. [We have since determined that the camoufleur and poster designer who was the chief ship painter at the Norfolk Navy Yard was Frank M[orris] Watson, Sr. (1880-1966) from Portsmouth VA, not F.M. Watson from Fremont NC.] more>>>


The Watson posters in the NC collection are in dreadful shape, for the simple reason that they were (apparently) published not on a printing press, but through a blueprint process, which is notoriously impermanent. I have cleaned up one of those (in brown coloration, not blue), in an attempt to strengthen its contrast. The result is below.

Poster by F.M. Watson (c1918)

By artistic standards, Watson's Over the Top: Third Liberty Loan poster is the best of his posters. The others are blueprints and somewhat clearer to read, but the drawn images, hand lettering and page layouts are amateur. Whatever the circumstances that enabled him to design the camouflage for a ship, the naiveté of his posters suggests that he was either untrained or not very capable as a professional designer. This is also reinforced by his amateur method of signing his name (shown below).

Camouflage Theatrical Costumes | Lera Nekhaeva

Costume designs for Gogol's "The Nose" © Lera Nekhaeva

Above About eight years ago, I was fortunate to work with a young, talented design student from Russia, named Lera Nekhaeva. At the time, I was researching camouflage (of course), and preparing a book titled Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (2009). Before studying in the US, Lera had also studied theatrical design, and costume design specifically. When she showed me her sketches (see above) for a suite of striped costumes for a stage interpretation (never actually produced) of Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose," we were both delighted by the resemblance of her costumes to World War I British ship camouflage or dazzle-painting. But, as I recall, a more direct influence for her were the striped sentry stations (see image below) that are used in Russia and other countries. I don't think I had seen one then. Later, I published her costume designs in my book.

WWI striped guard house or sentry station

Applying a Dazzle Camouflage Scheme | Video

Ian Rolls, Elektra (2015), Jersey Evening Post

Above In 2015, a UK artist named Ian Rolls, who lives on the Island of Jersey, designed a dazzle camouflage scheme for a vintage American Army tugboat, Elektra. With the assistance of friends and support from the World War One Centenary program, the project was completed in two months. Wonderfully, the process was recorded by Little River Pictures in a delightful time-lapse video, which can be accessed through Vimeo here. More>>>

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 8

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Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Henry B. Beston, Full Speed Ahead: Tales from the Log of a Correspondent with Our Navy. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page and Co, 1919, pp. 122-123—

I have an indistinct memory of a terrible mess [a WWI dazzle-camouflaged ship] of milky-pink, lemon yellow and rusty black, which earned for the vessel displaying it the odious title of "The Boil." We saw the prize monstrosity in mid-ocean. Every school of camouflage had evidently had a chance at her. She was striped, she was blotched; she was painted in curves; she was slashed with jagged angles; she was bone gray; she was pink; she was purple; she was green; she was blue; she was egg yellow. To see her was to gasp and turn aside. We had quite a time picking a suitable name for her, but finally decided on the Conscientious Objector, though her full title was "The State of Mind of a CO on Being Sent to the Front."

Answers (top to bottom) Charles Willson Peale, Georges Seurat, Gustave Caillebotte, and Grant Wood.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 7

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Anon, "Baffling the Undersea Pirate" in National Marine, March 1919, p. 30—

Each nation seemed to have a characteristic type of [ship] camouflage and after a little practice you could usually spot a ship's nationality by her style of camouflage long before you could make out her ensign.

Answers (top to bottom) Paul Gauguin, Sofonisba Anguissola, Rosa Bonheur, and Marie Müller Landsknecht.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 6

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Paul K. Saint-Amour, "Modernist Reconnaissance" in Modernism/Modernity Vol 10 No 1 (2003)—

By 1918, young British aviators were being trained to see an avant-garde exhibition unfurling beneath their cockpits: a First World War Air Force photo atlas for new pilots used "FUTURIST country" and "CUBIST country" in its taxonomy, alongside more everyday mnemonic headings such as "FRUIT GROWING" and "PATCHWORK QUILTING."

Answers (top to bottom) Fernand Léger, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp and Paolo Ucello.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 5

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Random House, 1933—

Another thing that interested us enormously was how different the camouflage of the french looked from the camouflage of the germans, and then once we came across some very neat camouflage and it was american. The idea was the same but as after all it was different nationalities who did it the difference was inevitable. The color schemes were different, the way of placing them was different, it made plain the whole theory of art and its inevitability.

Answers (top to bottom) John Everett Mallais, Salvador Dali, Edward Wadsworth, and Max Beckmann.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 4

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Anon, Camouflage at Sea in The Sailors’ Magazine and Seamen’s Friend, 1918, p. 154—

All styles of camouflage are on the highways and byways of the sea.… Some go in for color and some for line. Our own ship’s style is suggestive of the old court jester’s suits, with parti-colored diamond patches. Black-and-white effects are very fetching, however, with the lines caught up into unexpected turns and slashes and bows.

Answers (top to bottom) Diego Velasquez, Conrad Marca-Relli, Charles Sheeler, and Corita Kent.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 3

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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"Camouflage" in Time magazine (1939)—

Camouflage in the last war meant whirls, blotches, stripes and curlicues with which "experts" made common objects look like a Futurist's bad dream.

Answers: (top to bottom) Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Klee and Balthus.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 2

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Plenty of Camouflage in New York Harbor in New York Times (January 20, 1918), p. 63—

The wonders of camouflage, as it is practiced by the men of the fighting armies abroad, are much pictured and described for American readers, but any New Yorker who wants to inspect its experiments for himself has only to take a ferry boat trip across the harbor on almost any bright day. There he will see at anchor, or coming in or going out, numerous ships whose painted sides reveal such wild extravagances of form and color as make the landsman open his eyes with amazement and mystification.

Answers: (top to bottom) Caravaggio, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 1

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Sir Alister Hardy, 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.

Answers: (top to bottom) Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Arshile Gorky (who taught a course in camouflage to civilians during World War II), Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud.

Camouflage Artist | British Lieutenant O. Moser

British Navy camoufleur Lieutenant O. Moser (c1918)

Above This is a restoration of an undated photograph from World War I, c1918. The original print can also be found online at the Navy History and Heritage Command (NH 120779), where the caption reads: "Lieutenant O. Moser, Head of British dazzle painting and camouflage for ship." How strange. In all our research of ship camouflage, we've never heard of Lieutenant Moser, much less that he supposedly served as the head of British ship camouflage. The credit for that is nearly always given to Lieutenant Norman Wilkinson. So who was Moser? (Oliver, Oscar, Oswald, Otto?) Please note on the table beside him the dazzle-painted ship model (very British and, most likely, very Wilkinson).

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Update Since the above was originally posted, we've learned a bit more about the fellow in the photograph. He was a British artist and illustrator named [Robert] Oswald Moser (1874-1953). An officer in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve during World War I, while he was surely not in charge of British ship camouflage, he was most likely on the team who served under Norman Wilkinson, along with UK artists Jan Gordon and Cecil King. We've seen that ship model before, because it was reproduced in a 1918 article by Gordon on "The Art Of Dazzle-Painting." It shows the dazzle pattern for the RMS Olympic. 

Otherwise, he was an interesting painter, whose finest artwork may have been a strange painting (somewhat Stanley Spencer-like) titled Wounded Sailors Listening to Musicians Playing on Board a Ship (c1918). But there's also a wonderful self-portrait from 1928 (reproduced below), which is in the collection of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum.

[For a detailed further update on Norman Wilkinson's dazzle camouflage team, see more recent blogpost here.]

Oswald Moser, Self-Portrait (1928)

From MEN FROM EVERY STATION IN LIFE BUILDING SHIPS. Even Doctors, Lawyers and Clerks Have Been Whipped Into Shape as Workmen; Much Friendly Rivalry (reporting on operations at the Moore Shipbuilding and Dock Company in Oakland CA) in the Albuquerque Morning Journal (Albuquerque NM), October 14, 1918, p. 1—

Ship camouflage gives every boat from this plant the appearance of some monster futurist painting that has left its frame for a spin on the ocean. The idea is carried out to such an extent that an aviator or lookout gazing down at her is deceived in her size and direction. Each camouflage scheme is worked out to give its own particular illusion.

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Below is another restored photograph from the same NHHC archives in which two wooden ship models are positioned side by side, the one on the left having been dazzle-painted in the British manner while the one on the right is unpainted.

WWI ship camouflage demonstration

From SHIP CAMOUFLAGE FUTILE, SAYS NIXON; Asserts German Periscope Reveals Outlines, Regardless of Color Plan in the New York Sun, March 7, 1918, p. 4—

Camouflage of ships is a useless art. No longer does the much heralded war method of concealment hide allied transports from the destructive eyes of the Kaiser's U-boat, according to a statement made yesterday by Lewis Nixon, shipbuilder, at the luncheon of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce…

"The Germans are inventive. They are desperate and they are relying on the submarines," said Mr. Nixon. The peculiar coloring of our ships is of no avail, because they have invented a periscope that reveals the ship in outline, regardless of coloring.

Dazzle-Painted Ship Model | SS Hindustan 1917

Model of dazzle-painted SS Hindustan

Above We recommend a visit to a post (from October 2015) on the Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums blog. It features this photograph of a dazzle-painted model of a WWI-era tramp steamer named the SS Hindustan. Below that is an article that repeats the standard British account of the origin and purpose of so-called dazzle camouflage, supplemented by eight additional photographs of camouflaged ships.

Camouflage in Works That Work (2016)

from current issue of Works That Work

Above Just out is the current issue (Number 7) of the magazine (both print and digital) Works That Work, published in The Netherlands. Among its articles is an illustrated essay by Caitlin Hu titled "The Art and Science of Military Camouflage." More>>>

Dazzle Camouflage Designs Applied Willy Nilly

John Goss book illustration (1919)

This is a full-page illustration from a rather curious book that came out the year that World War I ended. Written by Isabel Hornibrook and titled Camp Fire Girls in War and Peace (Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1919), it has an entire chapter about the efforts of a Camp Fire Girl named Sara, who (as shown here) decides to apply a dazzle design to a small boat. Throughout the chapter, there is some wonderful dialog on wartime camouflage and public attitudes toward it. The book's illustrator was John Goss (1887-1963), who headed the graphic arts department of the Rhode Island School of Design, and at one time shared a studio with typographer and book designer W.A. Dwiggins in Boston.

At about the same time, the application of dazzle-like camouflage patterns to rowboats was all but epidemic (see below), as were cartoon comparisons of dazzle with all sorts of commonplace phenomena.