Marcia Feuerstein and I have written a chapter in Architectures of Hiding (Routledge, 2024) that examines “Camouflage after the Bauhaus: Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes.” In this chapter, we discuss the influence of their early work at the Bauhaus, notably costume and stage design, on their later work camouflaging buildings and landscapes during WWII. In The Language of Vision (1944), Kepes outlined two theories of spatial organization that could be used to confuse the perception of camouflage: “grouping” and “belonging:”

The organization of optical belonging is more basic than the recognition of the objects themselves. […] A snake camouflaged by nature is no longer a snake. It is an aggregation of small units of color-shape. Because kinship of elementary visual qualities is more fundamental to image building than the relations of empirical experience, the patterns on its body are more easily seen together with corresponding patterns in its background than in its form […]. The snake disappears into its background.