Frances Wilson

The man who disappeared | 22 March 2018

Mary Horlock goes in search of the ingenious camoufleur, whose war work and private affairs were equally skilfully concealed

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.

Horlock is a novelist and former curator at Tate Britain, and her moving and unusual book weaves together the story of camouflage with the story of the search for her great grandfather, Joseph Gray, one of the band of camoufleurs who studied the techniques of Solomon and thus changed the landscape of the second world war. ‘How do I get close to a man who was so good at hiding,’ Horlock asks; ‘a man who had made camouflage the fabric of his life?’

Born in South Shields in 1890, Gray wasn’t always invisible. While Solomon was experimenting with camouflage in his garden at St Albans by dyeing butter muslin and hanging it on tennis nets, Gray was in the trenches with the 4th Black Watch Regiment, where he fought in the battles of Neuve Chapelle, Festubert and Loos.

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