It’s getting cold out and it’s about time to pull out the camo and tims. Have you ever thought, “I wonder who came up with the idea of the camouflage thats printed all over my Wu-Wear hoody?”
Tate ETC has the answer.
In 1896 the American artist Abbott H Thayer (1849-1921) published an article entitled “The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration”, in which he explored how animals protected themselves by the use of graduated colours and tones on their feathers, scales or fur, allowing them to be camouflaged by their surroundings. Using a language that mixed art and optics, he said “the spectator seems to see right through the space really occupied by an opaque animal”. While Thayer was not the first to observe how animals used this defensive colouration, he believed nature was acting as an artist, using colour and light for optical effect, and thought that this study “belongs to the realm of pictorial art and can be only interpreted by painters”.
It was quite a claim and, unsurprisingly, not everyone agreed, including the former President and amateur naturalist Theodore Roosevelt, who attacked the theory in his own writings. Undeterred, Thayer believed that his ideas were not only radical and visionary, but also had practical uses. In the late 1890s, during the Spanish-American war, he tried (and failed) to persuade the US government that its naval forces could benefit from ship camouflage.
While Thayer was considered to be the father of camouflage, it was other artists who independently put such ideas into practice. The first section de camouflage in military history was established in 1915 by the Frenchman Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, an academic painter who was serving as an infantryman. He had admired Picasso’s shard-like, geometric Cubist forms. (Picasso had also been thinking about camouflage when living in Paris during the war, and had recommended a similar strategy as Thayer in suggesting a replacement for the French field service uniform, telling Jean Cocteau, no doubt with the tip of his tongue in his cheek, that the army would better “dazzle” its men if it dressed them in harlequin costumes.)
Comparable units, made up of fine artists, designers and architects, were used by the British and Americans, and, to a lesser extent, by the Germans, Italians and Russians. In fact, hundreds of artists served during both world wars, including Jacques Villon, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Franz Marc, Oskar Schlemmer, Edward Wadsworth, Arshile Gorky, László Moholy-Nagy and Ellsworth Kelly.
Among the earliest and most important British practitioners was Lieutenant Commander Norman Wilkinson, a marine painter who, in April 1917, devised a concept for the camouflage of ships called “dazzle painting”, in response to the number of vessels being torpedoed in the Atlantic. As he explained to the Admiralty, there was no point attempting to blend them in with the sky and the ocean, because both were so visually inconstant. Rather than aiming for invisibility, the idea was to confuse the gunner on a German U-boat as to the target’s course, size, speed or direction, using a dis-rupted pattern painted on to the side of the ship. A team of eighteen artists was soon set up as the Dazzle Section and installed in studios at the Royal Academy of Arts. Designs were applied to models, which were then viewed on a rotating turntable through a periscope. Those deemed worthy were sent off for implementation to various dazzle officers, including the Vorticist painter Edward Wadsworth, who oversaw operations in Bristol and Liverpool. Within a year, 4,000 merchant ships and 400 navy vessels were painted with varying styles of stripes, blocks and disrupted lines. Each had a different design, which was changed on a regular basis.
Explanation continues at Tate Etc.
