![]() 1920.Ĭamouflage’s purpose expanded in WWII from simply hiding things to a full-bore industry of strategic deceit. How to camouflage a truck, from La Guerre Documentée, vol. It can fairly be described as the most democratic visual-literacy course ever. Recruiting the least likely of military types to its cause-long-haired artists, theater set designers, fashionistas and the like-to teach crewcut youths from Japan to Nebraska in basic skills of camouflaging munitions using paint, netting, leaves, shadow-a full gamut of visual subterfuge techniques. So began an improbable, decades-long love affair with military camouflage. You might also want to hide those expensive tanks, munitions factories and other assets from attack too. Aerial combat posed a brand-new threat during WWI, and all combatants woke up to the fact that parading into war in brilliant scarlet or blue trousers was less than smart. Unsurprisingly, camouflage hits its stride when the military seized it. “Dazzle” warship USS Mahomet in port, circa November 1918. Seeing a camouflaged cannon rolling through Paris in WWI, Picasso exclaimed: “C’est nous qui avons fait ça!” “It is we who created that!” Later he cultivated a breezily world-weary stance: “If they only want to make an army invisible at a distance,” he told poet Jean Cocteau, “they have only to dress their men as harlequins.” Whether these artistic experiments authored military camouflage is an open question, but artists liked to think they were first. Pointillists like Seurat broke their images into tiny optical dots, while Cubists and Vorticists showed multiple perspectives on a flat canvas. Visual artists around the turn of the 20 th century fell hard for these perceptual games. Camouflage could be unwittingly undone by closure-the mind’s attempt to “connect the dots” in incomplete forms. ![]() The Gestalt notion of continuity-a moving gaze’s tendency to continue in a given direction-could be harnessed to misdirect enemy attention. Simultaneously, ideas core to camouflage were gaining traction in another area of scientific inquiry, cognitive psychology.įounded in 1910, Gestalt psychology sought to understand “unit-forming factors” in how we perceive forms (or thwart that perception). ![]() The second British zoologist Hugh Cott built on Thayer’s concepts and added his own: contour obliteration, shadow elimination, among others. As his theories gained prominence (and attracted strong critique), Thayer succumbed to panic attacks, while writing with increasingly focused zeal in his own defense. Disruptive coloration refers to irregular patterning on the animal’s hide that disrupts its contours, making it more difficult to perceive at a distance.Ī crotchety painter of pellucid angels, Thayer suffered from bipolar disorder. ![]() This visual effect cancels out shadowing from overhead sun, rendering the animal flat-looking. Countershading explains why so many animals have lighter underbellies shading to dark. Whether masquerading as a twig, a wood ant (when actually a rove beetle), or a poisonous valentine pufferfish (when actually harmless), mimicry is a bluffer’s gift used by predators and prey alike.Ībbott Thayer, the American painter, popularized two concepts inherent to camouflage: countershading and disruptive coloration. An ardent Darwinist, Poulton saw animal mimicry for concealment as proof of natural selection. Zoologist number one, Sir Edward Poulton, wrote the first book on camouflage in 1890. Three early champions-two British zoologists and one slightly deranged American painter-studied camo closely and brought it to the attention of the wider scientific community. Ĭamo starts, of course, as a phenomenon of nature. Chromatophores in their skin enable them to match color, pattern, even physical texture and shape with their environment. This NPR Science Friday video shows the mimic wizardry of cephalopods, from cuttlefish to octopi. Here’s a crash course in what may well be the world’s most fascinating and pervasive pattern. When I plunged deep into research on the history of camouflage for The Believer, I came back sputtering and laden with gold. Nothing will teach you faster if a topic can sustain your attention, and offer true scope for exploration, like writing an in-depth essay about a single instance of your subject. While the jury remains out on sibling-making for our son, I’m at least equipped with an answer for what I’ll tackle for book #2: a popular history of classic graphic patterns like polka dots, stripes, fleur de lis and camouflage. No sooner do you pop out the first one, folks start eagerly chatting you up about #2. It’s uncanny, the similarities between birthing babies and books.
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