As an art teacher, you may wonder how to bring history into your lesson plans. Why not teach about Picasso’s Cubism period (1909-1912) and how it influenced the art of camouflage during World War I (1914-1918)?
“It was us who created that.”
Pablo Picasso on seeing a camouflage cannon in Paris
Learning Objectives
Lesson 1 –
- DEFINE what ABSTRACTION is and DESCRIBE how this visual language works
- IDENTIFY why abstraction was chosen as a form of camouflage
- DEMONSTRATE abstracting from nature to create their own camouflage
- DEMONSTRATE drafting out their final ship silhouette with crisp clean lines
Lesson 2 –
- IDENTIFY a Tetradic color scheme for their camouflage
- DEMONSTRATE mixing their gouache to create their tetradic palette
- DEMONSTRATE painting their final ship silhouette with crisp clean lines
Lesson 3 –
- REFLECT and DESCRIBE why they chose the natural object for their camouflage
Materials Needed
- WWI Ship Camo Powerpoint
- ship template
- natural objects like leaves, flowers, sticks, shells, rocks etc.
- pencils
- erasers
- gouache paints
- color wheel
- tracing paper (optional)
- paintbrushes
- palettes
- Practice Worksheet
Download Lesson Plan
“You should see our fleet, it’s camouflaged to look like a flock of Easter eggs going out to sea.”
Journalist from the New York Times
Background Context
Camouflage has always been used in wartime, but with the onset of World War I, the practice became widespread. Concealment, the most common form of camouflage, seeks to alter the physical characteristics of an object to the viewer. The goal being to disappear the object into its surroundings. During WWI, British naval officer Norman Wilkinson pioneered dazzle camouflage in hopes of making it harder to successfully torpedo ships.
Dazzle was based on the theory that, just like stripes on a zebra and spots on a cheetah, stripes and odd patterns on a vessel would break up its outline, making it harder to target. To torpedo a ship, the enemy would need to find the location of the ship and plot its course. Then, the speed of the ship would be determined. Once that information was gathered, the enemy would fire the torpedo, not directly at the ship, but to the location calculated where the ship would be when the torpedo hit. In its essence, dazzle paint sought to confuse rather than to totally obscure. By painting ships in abstract patterns with bright colors, German U-boats would find it harder to determine the speed and precise location of the ship.
This type of camouflage was inspired by the Cubist movement in art at the time. Analytical Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic cubists “analyzed” natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color, and line to create a composition, which may exist with varying degrees of independence from visual realism in the world. Western Art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the nineteenth century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the nineteenth century, many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place at the turn of the century. The sources from which individual artists drew their inspirations ranged from nature to the human form or even a bustling metropolis.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (October 25, 1881 – April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the twentieth century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, both men and women stepped up to help in the war effort. We often think of women taking factory jobs, but some would help camouflage ships. In New York City, a group of female art students joined the National League for Women’s Service and trained to serve in the Camouflage Department of the United States Navy. On December 3, 1917, newspapers picked up a wire service report about a camouflage school set up by the U.S. government in Marshfield Hills, Massachusetts. Women artists participated in a month-long training camp to learn how to camouflage cars, locomotives, and battleships for the war effort. In 1918, the Army formed the American Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps. Beginning in March of 1918, the United States Navy painted a total of 1250 vessels in dazzle camouflage. After that date, the Germans sunk ninety-six ships but only eighteen were camouflaged.
This interdisciplinary lesson plan teaches students about art history and Picasso, war, camouflage, and women’s contribution to the war effort. If used in an art class, students will go on to learn about the Tetradic complementary scheme, a combination of four colors that are made up of two complementary color pairs. (Remember, two colors are complementary if they are opposite each other on the color wheel.) To make it even easier, this kind of color combination is also known as rectangular tetrad because when the four colors are connected on the color wheel they form a rectangle. Students will learn to abstract from nature and create their own camouflage by using the Tetradic color scheme on a ship silhouette.
Additional Resources
Hidden Women: The Art of WWI Camouflage by Richard Green for the Unwritten Record, National Archives.
Education Standards
Foundations Course Media Arts Standards – Massachusetts
Creating
- Generate and conceptualize artistic ideas and work. Create media arts ideas that are characteristic of different media genres. (F.MA.Cr.01)
- Refine and complete artistic work. Refine concepts and content by focusing on a specific element such as interactivity, temporality, or heterogeneity. (F.MA.Cr.03)
Connecting
- Relate artistic ideas and works to societal, cultural and historical contexts to deepen understanding. Identify the connections between historical and cultural context and defining stylistic elements of multiple media artworks (e.g., shifting styles due to the birth of computer animation). (F.MA.Co.11)