- My kind of show: Military and Art, both in the same venue. Must see this summer, if I summon courage to visit anything in London...
A major London exhibition on the history of military camouflage looks at how it took to the field and ended up on the catwalk.
Dress the French army as harlequins, Picasso reportedly quipped during World War I, and the diamonds will make them harder for the enemy to see.
France, perhaps wisely, declined to kit out its soldiers as Italian clowns but was otherwise happy to apply Cubism to the war effort, on the principle that a broken-up form is harder for a spotter-plane to sight. The Section de Camouflage, staffed with minor Cubist painters and set designers, was born in 1915 and no major piece of military hardware would ever be safe again from the paint-brush.
Back in Napoleonic times, high-visibility uniforms were the battle order of the day, as French blues and Russian greens, British reds and Austrian whites marched forth. "It was basically a way of identifying soldiers but it was also about the camaraderie that comes from wearing the same kit," Tim Newark, author of new book Camouflage, told the BBC News website. --- Camouflage runs at the Imperial war Museum from 23 March to18 November 2007.
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