Camouflage

Imperial War Museum

How could a study of brown and green blotches possibly be interesting? The art of concealment comes into focus in a new show at the Imperial War Museum called Camouflagethat has an unexpectedly varied and often surprisingly colourful story to tell. This is a tale led by the artists and sculptors, the stage and film-set designers who, commissioned into the Army during the First and Second World Wars, put their creative skills to a practical use. But it’s not a conventional art show in the sense of a room full of paintings.

Rather it explores the ways of seeing that we don’t often think about: the tricks and deceptions of visual subterfuge.

Animals, of course, have long been experts at visual deception. A brief section of this new exhibition examines their tactics, from the sardine’s silvery reflections to the bobcat’s “countershadings”. By the time camouflage was becoming an important military priority, pioneering naturalists had already put in plenty of groundwork.

But modern camouflage came about as a direct consequence of the invention of the aeroplane. The First World War turned into a deadly game of hide and seek as aerial surveillance became increasingly valuable.

The French led the way, experimenting with ever more effective ways to hide their soldiers and weaponry. Contrast and shape, they discovered, mattered more than colour. And their groundbreaking use of camouflage soon caught on. By 1916 uniforms, guns and tanks were all being painted with the randomly disruptive patterns that broke up clear planes into a confusing jumble of light and dark tones.

By the Second World War teams of artists and designers were collaborating with scientists to explore more and more sophisticated methods of optical deception. Camouflage was ubiquitous. Anything from field helmets to entire factories were put under wraps. Cooling towers were painted with street scenes and entire landscapes were faked.

By the Seventies, camouflage was standard issue for most soldiers – available even in the form of maternity pants. It had become a means of identification more than a method of concealment as the development of radar, heat-seeking missiles and thermal-imaging techniques rendered simple physical subterfuge increasingly redundant. And yet camouflage, as this show makes clear, could still change its spots. By then it was popping up everywhere, from haute couture to the high street.

Through a concise but varied selection of costumes and photographs, sketch books and paintings, models and mementos, this show explores the development of camouflage. (If you want to know more – and there is plenty more to find out – invest in the new Thames & Hudson book Camouflage, published this week.) It moves from the experimentally splattered uniform of the Frenchman Eugène Corbin, the first surviving example of a now ubiquitous disruption pattern, to a chiffon ball gown confected in khaki tufts some 85 years later by his compatriot Jean Paul Gaultier.

And there are lots of historically evocative and imaginatively intriguing items in between. Here is a pair of RAF escape boots, for instance, a knife tucked into the shin so that, stranded in enemy territory, a pilot might cut away the top part and be left with what looked like a pair of civilian shoes. There is a pair of special strap-on soles so that, parachuted on to a beach, a Special Operations Executive soldier could leave barefoot prints like some innocent paddler. (It isn’t explained why they couldn’t just take their boots off.) Here are the D-Day decoys, little rag-doll dummies dropped from an aeroplane to trick the Germans into believing that a mass invasion was taking place at the Pas de Calais, and there is the faked cap of a Colditz guard, made as part of a sadly failed escape attempt.

This show is certainly not as drab as it sounds. You only have to look at the British soldiers on the Western Front disguising a field gun with kaleidoscopic patterns to see how colourful camouflage could be. And among the most impressive displays are the “Razzle-Dazzle” ships of the First World War, when entire fleets were painted with eye-dizzying Modernist patterns.

But it worked. Apparently, these broken masses of contrasting colour bewildered the eye so that, at first sighting, it was all but impossible for a submarine to determine the ship’s course and so launch an attack.

It was a marine painter, Norman Wilkinson, who first came up with this ploy. And the role of the artist was important in the creation of camouflage. In Germany, for instance, the Expressionist Franz Marc applied the styles of the great Modernists to his work as a camouflage artist. “I am curious what effect the ‘Kandinskys’ will have at 2,000 metres,” he wrote in 1916.

Picasso was certainly impressed. Camouflage seemed to him a quintessentially Cubist technique. “It is we who created that,” he apparently cried when he first saw a painted cannon trundling through the Paris streets. “If they want to make an army invisible at a distance,” he later confided to his friend Jean Cocteau, “they have only to dress the men as harlequins.”

The eye of the artist gives a sharp focus to a show that includes everything from works by such famous war painters as Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash to the slick camouflage patterns of Andy Warhol. A set of little fake heads, designed to pop up over trench parapets and confuse enemy snipers, are created with an attention to detail that was surely not necessary but must have seemed an outlet for sculptural skills.

And certainly the surrealist Roland Penrose played an important part. The producer of a manual that offered a complete analysis of the nature and application of camouflage, he enlivened the lectures that he gave to the Home Guard with a photograph of his lover, Lee Miller, dressed in nothing but a piece of netting and few strategically applied tufts.

If you thought that camouflage was just a bit of boring background stuff, then this is a show to ambush you. It takes you by surprise.

Camouflage is at the Imperial War Museum, London SE1 (020-7416 5439; www.iwm.org.uk ), from Friday. Camouflage, by Tim Newark, is published by Thames & Hudson, £24.95

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