Camoufleurs
A camoufleur or camouflage officer is a person who designed and implemented military camouflage in one of the world wars of the twentieth century. The term originally meant a person serving in a First World War French military camouflage unit. In the Second World War, the British camouflage officers of the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate, led by Geoffrey Barkas in the Western Desert, called themselves ''camoufleurs'', and edited a humorous newsletter called ''The Fortnightly Fluer''. Such men were often professional artists. The term is used by extension for all First and Second World War camouflage specialists. Some of these pioneered camouflage techniques. This list is restricted to such notable pioneers of military camouflage. Surrealist artist Roland Penrose wrote that he and Julian Trevelyan were both "wondering how either of us could be of any use in an occupation so completely foreign to us both as fighting a war, we decided that perhaps our knowledge of painti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lucien-Victor Guirand De Scévola
Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola (14 November 1871 in Sète, France – 29 March 1950 in Paris) was a French painter. He is known for his pioneering leadership of the ''Camoufleurs'' (the French Camouflage Department) in World War I. Early life De Scévola was a student of Fernand Cormon and Pierre Dupuis at the École des beaux-arts de Paris The Beaux-Arts de Paris is a French ''grande école A ''grande école'' () is a specialised university that is separate from, but parallel and often connected to, the main framework of the French public university system. The grandes écoles .... Pastellist De Scévola was a pastellist, remarkable for his silky, velvety and smooth style. "Making his only aesthetic concern accuracy of the most naked kind" (E. Benézit), he left an extensive body of work including scenes of alcoves, landscapes, flowers and society portraits. However his Symbolism (art), Symbolist-inspired works are particularly esteemed. He exhibited at the Salon ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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John Graham Kerr
Sir John Graham Kerr (18 September 1869 – 21 April 1957), known to his friends as Graham Kerr, was a British embryologist and Unionist Member of Parliament (MP). He is best known for his studies of the embryology of lungfishes. He was involved in ship camouflage in the First World War, and through his pupil Hugh B. Cott influenced military camouflage thinking in the Second World War also. Early life He was born at Rowley Lodge, in Arkley in Hertfordshire, to Scottish parents: James Kerr, former Principal of Hooghly College in Calcutta, and his wife, Sybella Graham. Kerr was educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, and then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Zoology Kerr interrupted his medical studies to join an Argentinian expedition to study the natural history of the Pilcomayo River. On his return, he studied natural sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating with first class honours in 1896. The Argentinian expedition had ended with the los ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jean-Louis Forain
Jean-Louis Forain (23 October 1852 – 11 July 1931) was a French Impressionist painter and printmaker, working in media including oils, watercolour, pastel, etching and lithograph. Compared to many of his Impressionist colleagues, he was more successful during his lifetime, but his reputation is now much less exalted. Life and work Forain was born in Reims, Marne but at age eight, his family moved to Paris. He began his career working as a caricaturist for several Paris journals including ''Le Monde Parisien'' and ''Le rire satirique''. Wanting to expand his horizons, he enrolled at the École des Beaux Arts, studying under Jean-Léon Gérôme as well as another sculptor/painter, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Forain's quick and often biting wit allowed him to befriend poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine as well as many writers, most notably Joris-Karl Huysmans. He was one of only "seven known recipients" to receive a first edition of ''A Season in Hell'' directly from Rimbaud. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Franz Marc
Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc (8 February 1880 – 4 March 1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of ''Der Blaue Reiter'' (The Blue Rider), a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it. His mature works mostly depict animals, and are known for bright colouration. He was drafted to serve in the German Army at the beginning of World War I, and died two years later at the Battle of Verdun. In the 1930s, the Nazis named him a degenerate artist as part of their suppression of modern art. However, most of his work survived World War II, securing his legacy. His work is now exhibited in many eminent galleries and museums. When up for auction, his major paintings attract large sums, with a record of £42,654,500 for ''Die Füchse'' (''The Foxes''). Early life Franz Marc was born in 1880 in Munich, the then capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria. His father, Wilhelm Ma ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Roland Penrose
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose (14 October 1900 – 23 April 1984) was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage. Penrose married the poet Valentine Boué and then the photographer Lee Miller. Biography Early life Penrose was the son of James Doyle Penrose (1862–1932), a successful portrait painter, and Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, the daughter of Baron Peckover, a wealthy Quaker banker. He was the third of four brothers; his older brother was the medical geneticist Lionel Penrose. Roland grew up in a strict Quaker family in Watford and attended the Downs School, Colwall, Herefordshire, and then Leighton Park School, Reading, Berkshire. In August 1918, as a conscientious objector, he joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, serving from September 1918 with the British Red ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Julian Trevelyan
Julian Otto Trevelyan (20 February 1910 – 12 July 1988) was an English artist and poet. Early life Trevelyan was the only child to survive to adulthood of Robert Calverley Trevelyan and his wife Elizabeth van der Hoeven. His grandfather was the liberal politician Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and his uncle the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan; he is the great-uncle of his namesake, Julian Trevelyan the pianist. Julian Trevelyan was educated at Bedales School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature. Artistic career He moved to Paris to become an artist, enrolling at Atelier Dix-Sept, Stanley William Hayter's engraving school, where he learned etching. He worked alongside artists including Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. In 1935, Trevelyan bought Durham Wharf, beside the river Thames in Hammersmith, London. This became his home and studio for the rest of his life and was a source of artistic inspiration to him. H ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Military Camouflage
Military camouflage is the use of camouflage by an armed force to protect personnel and equipment from observation by enemy forces. In practice, this means applying colour and materials to military equipment of all kinds, including vehicles, ships, aircraft, gun positions and battledress, either to conceal it from observation ( crypsis), or to make it appear as something else (mimicry). The French slang word ''camouflage'' came into common English usage during World War I when the concept of visual deception developed into an essential part of modern military tactics. In that war, long-range artillery and observation from the air combined to expand the field of fire, and camouflage was widely used to decrease the danger of being targeted or to enable surprise. As such, military camouflage is a form of military deception. Camouflage was first practiced in simple form in the mid 18th century by rifle units. Their tasks required them to be inconspicuous, and they were issued gree ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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André Mare
Charles André Mare (1885–1932), or André-Charles Mare, was a French painter and textile designer, and co-founder of the Company of French Art (''la Compagnie des Arts Français'') in 1919. He was a designer of colorful textiles, and was one of the founders of the Art Deco movement. As a soldier in the French Army in World War I, Mare led the development of military camouflage, painting artillery using Cubism techniques to deceive the eye. His ink and watercolour painting ''Le canon de 280 camouflé'' (The Camouflaged 280 Gun) shows the close interplay of abstract art and military application at that time. He authored the book ''Cubisme et Camouflage'', 1914–1918. Mare sketched and painted scenes based on his experiences in World War I. His works include: ''American Troops Marching Through the Arch of Triumph'', 1930, and ''The Funeral of Marshal Foch'', 1931. After the war Mare combined his talents with the skills of architect Louis Sue and became a leader in the Art Deco ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hugh Cott
Hugh Bamford Cott (6 July 1900 – 18 April 1987) was a British zoologist, an authority on both natural and military camouflage, and a scientific illustrator and photographer. Many of his field studies took place in Africa, where he was especially interested in the Nile crocodile, the evolution of pattern and colour in animals. During the World War II, Second World War, Cott worked as a camouflage expert for the British Army and helped to influence War Office policy on camouflage. His book ''Adaptive Coloration in Animals'' (1940), popular among serving soldiers, was the major textbook on camouflage in zoology of the twentieth century. After the war, he became a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. As a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, he undertook expeditions to Africa and the Amazon to collect specimens, mainly reptiles and amphibians. Life and career Cott was born in Ashby Magna, Leicestershire, England, on 6 July 1900; his father was the Rector (ecclesiastical), ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate
The British Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate (also known as the Camouflage Unit or Camouflage Branch) organised major deception operations for Middle East Command in the Western Desert Campaign of the Second World War. It provided camouflage during the siege of Tobruk; a dummy railhead at Misheifa, and the largest of all, Operation Bertram, the army-scale deception for the decisive battle of El Alamein in October 1942. The successful deception was praised publicly by Winston Churchill. These operations contributed to victory by diverting enemy attention from real targets to dummy ones, wasting enemy ammunition, preserving vital resources such as the single water desalination plant at Tobruk, and deceiving the enemy as to allied strength and intentions. Operation Bertram may have been the last army-scale physical deception ever to take place, since subsequent major deceptions, including those for the D-Day landings in Normandy, have included or consisted of electronic me ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Camouflage
Camouflage is the use of any combination of materials, coloration, or illumination for concealment, either by making animals or objects hard to see, or by disguising them as something else. Examples include the leopard's spotted coat, the battledress of a modern soldier, and the leaf-mimic katydid's wings. A third approach, motion dazzle, confuses the observer with a conspicuous pattern, making the object visible but momentarily harder to locate, as well as making general aiming easier. The majority of camouflage methods aim for crypsis, often through a general resemblance to the background, high contrast disruptive coloration, eliminating shadow, and countershading. In the open ocean, where there is no background, the principal methods of camouflage are transparency, silvering, and countershading, while the ability to produce light is among other things used for counter-illumination on the undersides of cephalopods such as squid. Some animals, such as chameleons and o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Paul Klee
Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures ''Writings on Form and Design Theory'' (''Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre''), published in English as the ''Paul Klee Notebooks'', are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's ''A Treatise on Painting'' was for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality. Early life and training Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, as the second child of German music teacher Hans Wilhelm Kle ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |