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
- WWII 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. The French were the first to create a dedicated camouflage unit in 1915. Concealment, the most common form of camouflage, alters the physical characteristics of an object to the viewer. The goal being to disappear the object into its surroundings.
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 directed at the ship, but to the location calculated where the ship would be when the torpedo hit. During WWI, dazzle camouflage was pioneered by British naval officer Norman Wilkinson to make it harder for ships to be torpedoed. Dazzle was based on the theory that, just like stripes on a zebra and spots on a cheetah, stripes and odd patterns on a battleship would make it harder to target by breaking up its outline.
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.
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 monthlong 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.
Additional Resources
Hidden Women: The Art of WWI Camouflage by Richard Green for the Unwritten Record, National Archives.
See British Dazzle Camouflage – over 300 hand-colored drawings in this series, each of them unique in color scheme and pattern layout.
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)