by Gavin Neaves
As the museum works on its Fokker D. VIII, a famous German plane used during the First World War, a puzzle has arisen: why is it historically accurate to cover the plane’s fuselage in a bizarre, brightly coloured fabric?The answer might lie in those modernist painters who were part of the German army!
This wild looking pattern, called “lozenge,” was a characteristic camouflage of German aircraft during the First World War. Between 1916 and 1917, “there was report after report by British pilots, drawing attention to German aircraft bearing mixed camouflage schemes or flaunting gay, even bizarre, colour schemes.”[1] There were a multitude of different versions of the design, with both four and five coloured patterns that covered different parts of the plane with a variety of colour options.[2]
The design’s roots can be found in modernist paintings, with their experiments in colour and creating illusions out of different colours placed next to each other. In fact, camouflage’s general development in the First World War was more tied to the artistic movements of the time, with many of Pablo Picasso’s colleagues, known as the “Salon Cubists” making up the first camouflage unit created by the French.[3] After the French began experimenting with painting airplanes, the Germans took it a step further with their pointillist inspired designs. This trend of experimentation and the close relationship to the artists of the day can be seen in the biography of the famous Swiss artist, Paul Klee, who, after completing basic training with the German Army, was moved to the Oberschleissheim airfield to repair and paint aircraft. There, he would camouflage the airplanes in the same style as many of his paintings.[4] For instance, Klee used as much colour as was available, experimenting with the designs and lamenting at times in his diary that “I again work more in black and white than in color. Color seems to be a little exhausted just now; new reserves have to accumulate.”[5] His view on art theory and its application to airplane camouflage can be readily found in his journals: “Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient. The real truth, to begin with, remains invisible beneath the surface. The colors that captivate us are not lighting, but light.”[6] With colour viewed as a proposal, it is possible to see the way Klee and other artists thought it could be used to disguise airplanes.
The theory behind the lozenge pattern was similar to Klee’s theory of colour and to that of pointillism. Pointillism was an artistic movement in the late 19th century in which different points or dots of colour were placed next to each other, relying on the viewer’s eyes to blend the colours together into different tones. When viewed from a distance, the different colours seem to blend together, in the hopes of creating an optical illusion and making it more difficult for the enemy to spot the aircraft. Whether it was successful or not (unlikely, due to the fact that the design was not used long after the First World War), the theory of colour developed by artists like Klee seems to be the background for the odd German camouflage.
Yet, partly due to the time it took to paint the airplanes and the extra weight the paint added, a printed fabric was introduced in 1916.[7] The records of when this was officially introduced are patchy, but “the first mention of this fabric appears in a German order of October 27th, 1916, which called for a return of existing stocks of fabric, pending issue of new fabric.”[8] The fabric, manufactured at Halberstädter Flugzeug Werke’s textile mills, allowed for the lozenge pattern to be applied to the airplane much faster, and without the extra weight. Additionally, different variations could be applied to the same airplane, further confusing the enemy. A lighter coloured pattern could be sewn on the bottom of the airplane, fooling those searching for it from below, while a darker pattern could be applied to the top, making it blend better with the landscape below. Furthermore, on top of the lozenge pattern, there were similar fabrics with hexagons or other irregular shapes. Colours ranged from yellow, green, pink, brown, blue, black, sage green, reddish mauve, and grey.[9]
The brightly coloured Lozenge pattern that covered German airplanes during the First World War is certainly a fascinating topic with rich ties to those people like Paul Klee who, despite being thrown into circumstances vastly different from what they were experienced in, managed to adapt and still make impactful and beautiful artifacts that still puzzle us today.
Image citations:
Image #1: Enzo Angelucci and Paolo Matricardi, World Aircraft: Origins – World War 1 (Randy McNally & Company, 1975), 291.
Image #2: “File: Lozenge camouflage.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, accessed March 25, 2026, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lozenge_camouflage.jpg.
Image #3: Kenneth Munson, The Pocket Encyclopaedia of World Aircraft in Colour: Fighters, Attack and Training Aircraft 1914-1919 (Blandford Press, 1968), 80.
Image #4: Paul Klee, “Untitled,” The Met, accessed March 25, 2026, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/483180.
Image #5 Paul Klee, “Angelus Novus,” Wikimedia Commons, accessed March 25, 2026, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Angelus_Novus.
Image #6 Peter M. Grosz, “Fokker D.VIII,” Windsock Datafile no. 25 (1991): 10.