Art: Camouflage School

Last week Kansas City’s Art Institute opened the first class in industrial camouflage in the U. S. The free course attracted some 40 students: artists, sculptors, interior decorators, advertising designers, photographers, students of architecture and engineering. Lecturer: the Institute’s director, husky, 30-year-old Keith Martin, onetime Harvard crewman and portrait painter. Purpose of the course: to explore ways & means of protecting vital industries, plants, stores from attack by air.

Beginning with a study of aerial photographs, Director Martin and his students will make scale models of buildings, take reconnaissance flights in TWA and Naval Reserve planes. From the No. 1 U. S. camoufleur, Director Homer Schiff Saint-Gaudens of the Carnegie Institute’s department of fine arts, Director Martin got a general line on the problem. Says Saint-Gaudens, a lieutenant colonel in the Engineers Reserve Corps: “Camouflage is just plain Injun fighting.”

The popular conception of camouflage dating from World War I, when multicolored blotches were used to break up outlines of ships, tanks, buildings, is old stuff. Chief reason: parti-colored camouflage alone gives little concealment from airplane observers, whose sharp eyes are likely to pick up shadows, breaks in the pattern of the landscape. Today the idea is to use plain, dull colors, eradicate shadows, break up telltale outlines. England has had considerable success in disguising airplane factories and flying fields as farms by distorting shadows, building dummy roads. Germany disguised many a new flying field by planting it in crops, laying dummy railroad tracks across the middle to fool high-flying enemy pilots. Another dodge of the 1940 camoufleur is to set up fake flying fields, factories, military posts for enemy bombers to shoot at. France, short on planes and morale, went to the foot of the class in this kind of camouflage. Long on bottle corks, Frenchmen floated millions of them on rivers and canals, figured the Germans would think the cork masses were fields.