Pablo Picasso is said to have recognized the style immediately, according to the biography Gertrude Stein wrote about her friend. On the Allied side of Europe, British illustrator Norman Wilkinson developed a scheme he called dazzle camouflage for ships, which was quickly adopted for ground vehicles and aircraft. Pointillism, used by artist Georges Seurat, inspired camouflage for World War I aircraft. Writing in his diary during the war about his personal work, which he continued to produce, he seemed affected by the camouflage nature of his creations: “Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Many of these aircraft looked like Klee’s fine art pieces. Klee and his crew traveled around the region by train to collect crashed and otherwise broken aircraft and paint lozenge patterns on them. In 1916, when a German infantryman named Paul Klee turned out to be a highly skilled artist, his sergeant shipped him off to Oberschleissheim air field, near Munich, to paint repaired aircraft. The effect would make a patrolling Albatross recede into the surrounding sky, says Behrens. This camouflage was inspired by pointillism, an Impressionist technique in which neighboring bits of color appear to blend with one another as the viewer moves away from the image. Seen up close, the wings of an Albatross D.Va appear garish, covered in a pattern of large, multicolored, misshapen dots called lozenges. The result: World War I aircraft sporting some unusual livery. In addition to shrouding gun emplacements and concealing battleships, the men of the regiment began to apply their artistic styles to making aircraft more difficult to spot. “That unit comprised soldiers who in their civilian lives had worked in art-related professions, such as painting, illustration, graphic design, architecture, theatrical set design, and so on.” Other countries followed suit, with the United States creating the 40th Regiment of the Corps of Engineers (Camouflage) in 1917-though only after a private society of civilian artists, including Lincoln Memorial architect Daniel Chester French, published an article insisting the War Department accept their services. Behrens, a professor of graphic design at the University of Northern Iowa who has written several books on the history of camouflage. “Early in World War I, it was the French army that established history’s first dedicated camouflage unit,” says Roy R.

This story is a selection from the August issue of Air & Space magazine Buy

Dazzle camo