Dazzle Camouflage - Art History

Art History

The abstract patterns in dazzle camouflage inspired many artists. Picasso is reported to have taken credit for the modern camouflage experiments which seemed to him a quintessentially Cubist technique. He is reported to have drawn the connection in a conversation with Gertrude Stein shortly after he first saw a painted cannon trundling through the streets of Paris. The Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth who had supervised dazzle camouflage painting in the war, created postwar canvases based on his dazzle work on ships. In Canada, artists from the Group of Seven, notably Arthur Lismer, used dazzle ships in many wartime compositions.

In 2007, the art of concealment was featured as the theme for a show at the Imperial War Museum. The evolution of dazzle was re-examined in this context. In 2008, the Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design announced the rediscovery in its collection of 455 lithographic printed plans for the camouflage of US merchant ships during World War I. These documents were donated to the RISD library in 1919 by one of the school’s alumni, designer Maurice L. Freeman, who had been a camouflage artist for the U.S. Shipping Board in Jacksonville, Florida. Portions of the collection were publicly shown at the RISD library for the first time from January 26 through March 29, 2009, in an exhibition titled "Bedazzled."