The man who disappeared | 22 March 2018

On a night in Paris in 1914, Gertrude Stein was walking with Picasso when the first camouflaged trucks passed by. ‘We had heard of camouflage,’ Stein recalled, ‘but we had not seen it, and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism.’

The art of blending into the background was indeed discovered by painters, but the roots of camouflage, Mary Horlock argues, lay in Impressionism. French camouflage manuals cited Corot rather than Picasso: ‘It is by variations of light and shadow, often very delicate, that one recognises how an object is solid and detached from its background.’

For Solomon J. Solomon, the Royal Academician who built observation posts disguised as trees in the first world war, camouflage was a form of realism. In a letter to the Times in 1915, he argued that only an artist skilled at modelling could understand the workings of camouflage, and similarly only a writer skilled at looking can understand why a man might also make himself disappear.