this is a continuation of the OMD, Dazzle Ships album
(link below)
SS West Mahomet in dazzle camouflage - 1918
Dazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle (in the U.S.) or dazzle painting, was a family of ship camouflage used extensively in World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II and afterwards. Credited to the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson, it consisted of complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other.
The 1919 painting, Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, by Edward Wadsworth was the inspriation for the album, Dazzle Ships, by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), released in 1983 (link below).
In 1914, an embryologist named John Graham Kerr approached Winston Churchill and proposed a new way to camouflage Britain’s ships. Taking his inspiration from animals like the zebra and giraffe, he suggested that instead of trying to conceal their ships, they make them so glaringly conspicuous that it would be nearly impossible to target them.
HMS Nairana (1917)
Unlike other forms of camouflage, the intention of dazzle is not to conceal but to make it difficult to estimate a target's range, speed, and heading. Wilkinson explained in 1919 that he had intended dazzle primarily to mislead the enemy about a ship's course and so to take up a poor firing position.
Front view of Siboney - May 1918
The trick was in the paint, which formed optical illusions along the hulls of the ships. The goal was to make it so disjointed, so visually confusing, that rangefinders wouldn’t be able to get a fix on the ship’s location, size, and speed. The rangefinders used to pinpoint enemy ships at the time worked by creating two half-images of a target; when the operator maneuvered the half-images into a single, unbroken image, he could calculate the ship’s distance, allowing them to calibrate the guns for an accurate shot.
painting by Norman Wilkinson of a moonlit convoy
wearing Dazzle camouflage, 1918
But if you looked at a ship with dazzle camouflage, the two half-images still ended up looking like a mismatch, even when they were perfectly aligned. With their patterns of zigzags, spirals, and complex geometric shapes, the ships didn’t look like ships anymore; all the distinguishing features normally used to identify a ship’s orientation—mainly the stern and the bow—were lost in the illusion.
HMS Argus displaying a coat of dazzle camouflage - 1918
The Admiralty made it a point to use a different paint scheme on every single ship so the enemy couldn’t learn to use the patterns to identify specific classes of ship. As a result, it was hard to tell what worked and what didn’t. There was no standard; one ship could be painted bright blue with red spirals, and another might be painted with intersecting black and white bars. If one of those went down, it could have been because of the colors, or the pattern, or just because the enemy got lucky. There were too many factors involved to fairly evaluate it.
Every ship was given a different pattern. The Admiralty called in a
creative army of artists, sculptors, and designers to create each
design. While some were just crazy jumbles of lines and shapes, others
were full-on optical illusions, creating such effects as making the
center of the ship appear higher than either side.
Dazzle has been compared to the contemporary Vorticist art that was partly inspired by Cubism. Though the style grew out of Cubism, it is more closely related to
Futurism in its embrace of dynamism, the machine age and all things
modern (cf. Cubo-Futurism).
However, Vorticism diverged from Futurism in the way it tried to
capture movement in an image. In a Vorticist painting modern life is
shown as an array of bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer's
eye into the centre of the canvas.
The name Vorticism was given to the movement by Ezra Pound in 1913, although Wyndham Lewis, usually seen as the central figure in the movement, had been producing paintings in the same style for a year or so previously.
The movement was announced in 1914 in the first issue of BLAST, which contained its manifesto and the movement's rejection of landscape and nudes in favour of a geometric style tending towards abstraction. It became the literary magazine of that art movement in Britain but only two editions were published: the first on July 2, 1914 (dated 20 June 1914). The first edition contained many illustrations in the Vorticist style by Jacob Epstein, Lewis and others.
Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti gave a series of lectures at the Lyceum Club, in London in 1910, aimed at galvanizing support across Europe for the new Italian avant-garde. In his presentation he addressed his audience as "victims of .... traditionalism and its medieval trappings," which electrified the assembled avant-garde. Within two years, an exhibition of futurist art at the Sackville Gallery, in London, brought futurism squarely into the popular imagination, and the press began to use the term to refer to any forward-looking trends in modern art.
The second (and last) edition of BLAST, by Wyndham Lewis and friends, included an article by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; it was written and submitted from the trenches of WWI.
The Mud Bath, 1914
Oil on canvas by David Bomberg.
The name Vorticism was given to the movement by Ezra Pound in 1913, although Wyndham Lewis, usually seen as the central figure in the movement, had been producing paintings in the same style for a year or so previously.
Workshop painting by Wyndham Lewis, c.1914
The movement was announced in 1914 in the first issue of BLAST, which contained its manifesto and the movement's rejection of landscape and nudes in favour of a geometric style tending towards abstraction. It became the literary magazine of that art movement in Britain but only two editions were published: the first on July 2, 1914 (dated 20 June 1914). The first edition contained many illustrations in the Vorticist style by Jacob Epstein, Lewis and others.
Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti gave a series of lectures at the Lyceum Club, in London in 1910, aimed at galvanizing support across Europe for the new Italian avant-garde. In his presentation he addressed his audience as "victims of .... traditionalism and its medieval trappings," which electrified the assembled avant-garde. Within two years, an exhibition of futurist art at the Sackville Gallery, in London, brought futurism squarely into the popular imagination, and the press began to use the term to refer to any forward-looking trends in modern art.
The second (and last) edition of BLAST, by Wyndham Lewis and friends, included an article by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; it was written and submitted from the trenches of WWI.
BLAST second edtision - July 1915
Dazzle camouflage ships
Depiction of how Norman Wilkinson intended dazzle camouflage to cause the enemy to take up poor firing positions.
Eyepiece image of a warship
in a naval rangefinder, image halves not yet adjusted for range. The
target's masts are especially useful for rangefinding, so Kerr proposed
disrupting these with white bands.
Claimed effectiveness: Artist's conception of a U-boat commander's periscope view of a merchant ship in dazzle camouflage (left) and the same ship uncamouflaged (right), Encyclopædia Britannica, 1922. The conspicuous markings obscure the ship's heading.
dazzle camouflage (left), uncamouflaged (right)
December 31, 1921
Polish destroyer ORP Wicher (sunk September 3, 1939)
HMT Olympic, sister ship of RMS Titanic, in dazzle camouflage while in service as a World War I troopship, from September 1915.
RMS Olympic in dazzle camouflage during WWI
Diagram of the camouflage pattern of the S.S. Alban produced for the U.S. Navy by Thomas Hart Benton, 1918.
by Thomas Hart Benton - 1918
painting by Burnell Poole - 1918
HMS President, painted by Tobias Rehberger in 2014 to commemorate the use of dazzle in World War I. 13 February 2015.
Viewfinder link:
Net links:
KnowledgeNuts ~ The Ludicrous Dazzle Camouflage Of Britain
Merseyside Maritime Museum ~ Dazzle ship
Public Domain Review ~ Dazzle Ships
Huckberry ~ Razzle Dazzle Camouflage
YouTube links:
Dazzle Painting
James May's 20th Century (BBC) ~ Dazzle Camouflage
Naval Camouflage of WW1 and WW2 (Razzle Dazzle)
Dazzle Camouflage: Hiding in Plain Sight Exhibition
My thanks to Lon for inspiring this blog.
Styrous® ~ Tuesday, February 27, 2018
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