It’s Paris, early in the spring of 1915. Pablo Picasso is standing in the Boulevard Raspail, in a state of excitement, watching a parade of military vehicles. Suddenly, some big cannons come rolling past, painted in camouflage colours. It’s the first time anyone has seen such a sight. “We were the ones who created that!” Picasso shouted out, according to the writer Gertrude Stein.

Picasso was talking about Cubism, that strange art of disruptive patterning that he had recently pioneered with Georges Braque. He could see the similarities between that and the guns immediately. And so can we. A new show about to open at the Imperial War Museum explores the history of camouflage in military conflict, art and, later, fashion. What it proves beyond doubt is that Picasso was right: the development of camouflage could never have existed without the input of artists.

The use of camouflage accelerated with the arrival of the aeroplane in war. Artists, as masters of optical illusion, were called in to develop forms of disguise to stop vulnerable targets being bombed to destruction. It was the French who led the way thanks to the Cubists — even though their experiments had nothing to do with warfare. Picasso and Braque were investigating the nature of perception, and whether there might be a way of painting objects that could somehow be more rounded and more comprehensive than traditional Western perspective allowed for.

They began to fracture the picture surface, to break it up into mirror-like segments so that, if we look carefully enough, we seem to see the object, be it a pipe or a violin, not just from one point of view, but from all sides. With this multiple perspective they had shown the object from many sides. But there was another effect: they had also helped to disguise its form cunningly, to destroy its contours by causing it to melt into the background of the picture. Colour plays its part in this. Cubist paintings are often very tonally subtle and muted — browns and greens meld and merge into each other. It sometimes feels as if you’re in a wood — in spite of all the urban bric-a-brac.

So objects in Cubist paintings often tend to look a bit like cunning animals in nature. When we peer into them, it’s almost a matter of hide-and-seek. They seem not to want to reveal themselves. And this is why the pioneering methods of Cubism in particular, and the experimentations of avant-garde art in general, came to be of such importance to the military. The naval officer James Chisholm observed: “Perhaps a modern artist like Picasso . . . would be the most helpful of all working on camouflage schemes, for he would have at his command a deep knowledge of abstract design which could find ready scope.”

These painters, almost in spite of themselves, did great favours to the war machine. And some artists got quite excited when they saw objects on the battlefield that reminded them of avant-garde art. Jean Cocteau once wrote to Igor Stravinsky: “In a week I shall return to my post on the Somme, where big guns camouflaged as if by Bakst or the Cubists are shaking all Picardy.”

The man who pioneered the use of camouflage in France was an academic painter called Lucien Victor Guirand de Scévola, who served in the French infantry. It occurred to him one day that you could make a tank seem less visible by painting it with zebra stripes.

In England the portrait painter Solomon J. Solomon, influential in the Royal Academy, made important innovations in camouflage. He suggested that nets be used to cover targets. Raised high on bamboo poles and garnished with scraps of dyed muslin, these made artillery look like gawky, moving trees.

Even more important was Norman Wilkinson, who devised the abstract patterning on the sides of big ships which came to be known as “Dazzle” painting. You don’t know exactly whether you’re looking at the port or the bow, whether the boat’s coming towards you or moving away.

After the Second World War camouflage began to fall out of favour with the military as infra-red and thermal imaging technology developed. But it found a new lease of life among artists and fashion designers. Now camouflage was not about disguise at all. It was all to do with visual display and attention-seeking in the sexual market-place.

In this show you will see how Andy Warhol discovered its potential in 1986, the year before his death — his paintings and prints based on “four-colour US M81 woodland camouflage” are tricked out in the most luscious pinks, yellows and reds.

Perhaps the most striking example is a series of photographs of the model Veruschka taken in 1978 by the photographer Holger Trulzsch. She painted her naked body to resemble parts of the wall of a decrepit industrial unit — you see the swell of her breast against crumbling plaster and rusting pipes. She looks like something either coming into existence or dissolving out of it. The essence, actually, of camouflage.

Camouflage, Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London SE1 (www.iwm.org.uk 020-7416 5439), from Mar 23 to Nov 18; £7, concs £6, children free, groups of six or more £6 each

FIVE YOU MUST SEE

A flotilla of more than 100 “Dazzle Ship” models, displayed beside technical drawings

Beautifully sculpted dummy heads designed to be poked up out of the trenches to deceive the enemy

Eugene Corbin’s coat of 1914 is an early example of disruptive pattern uniform

André Mare’s sketchbooks of the day-to-day comings and goings of a camouflage officer

Percyval Tudor-Hart’s prototype camouflage for a sniper suit of 1916-17, printed in an onslaught of garish colours

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette