These were then tested on wooden models, viewed through a periscope in a studio to assess how they would work at sea. Each British pattern was unique, and many of the designs were invented by women from the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The close relationship of ‘dazzle’ technology to British art extended right through its manufacture. Artist Edward Wadsworth, who supervised the application of ‘dazzle’ patterning to over 2,000 ships, later made a series of paintings on the subject. He employed techniques that resembled those of avant-garde British painters such as Wyndham Lewis and David Bomberg. ‘Dazzle’ was developed by the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson to counter the threat posed by German U-Boats. Of ‘dazzle’ camouflage, Picasso said that ‘Yes, it is we who made it, that is cubism.’ de Scévola said that ‘in order to deform totally the aspect of the object, I had to employ the means that cubists use to represent it’, namely fracturing it into splinters of shape and colour. Many early camoufleurs were artists, and the styles that they invented drew upon the art of their time as well as studies of animal camouflage undertaken by the American naturalist and painter Abbott H. He helped to pioneer the style of camouflage familiar to us today, replacing a single colour that roughly corresponded to the prevailing landscape (dun green in fields, for example, or khaki in the desert) with overlapping shapes that slip the eye’s grasp.
The first army camouflage unit was led by a French painter named Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola. Military camouflage was little-used before the First World War, into which the French had marched in blue coat and red trousers, but the introduction of modern weaponry soon forced a change. Widely used in the First World War and into the Second, ‘dazzle’ does not strive to make a ship invisible to its enemies, but rather to confuse their attempts to sink it by making it difficult to accurately gauge the distance, direction and speed at which it is travelling. ‘Dazzle’ is a style of ship camouflage characterised by brilliant, glaring geometric patterns.
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