Staff and students are invited to Dazzle: Disguise and Disruption in War and Art, a new study day at Avenue Campus on Saturday 30 June. Book your place here.
The event is part of the Faculty of Humanities’ Great War: Unknown War centennial programme and accompanies a stunning exhibition of the same name at St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery in Lymington.
Dazzle painting was invented by the artist Norman Wilkinson in 1917 to help protect British and Allied shipping from U-boat attacks. Bold irregular patterns of colour were painted on to the sides of merchant and Royal Navy ships in order to confuse German submarine commanders observing them through a periscope. 2500 British ships were painted in Dazzle camouflage across the final eighteen months of World War I, with the US Navy copying Wilkinson’s initiative.
The study day is organised by the Lymington exhibition’s curator, Dr James Taylor and Adrian Smith, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University. It explores how Dazzle camouflage was adopted and its close connection with modernist art in early twentieth-century Britain, notably Vorticism.
Full details of the event can be found here.
