This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

If passersby cannot work out what is going on with a newly transformed first world war ship berthed on the Thames, then that is entirely deliberate – just as German U-boat captains were baffled and confused 100 years ago.

The German artist Tobias Rehberger has covered HMS President, above, in a surreal and striking "dazzle camouflage" print as one of the art commissions marking the centenary of the first world war.

The project sheds light on one of the lesser-known battle strategies of the war: getting artists to paint British ships so that they became floating optical illusions making it difficult for the enemy to target them accurately.

RMS Mauretania, in service as a troop ship, in dazzle camouflage pattern. Photograph: Hirz/Getty Images

Rehberger first came across "dazzle ships" 20 years ago. "I thought it was a funny paradox, to camouflage something with a pattern that is so obvious and so visually strong.

"It makes sense after you know what it is, but when you first see it, of course it is … what? This is how they camouflaged their battleships?

"It fascinated me for quite a while and I always wanted to do something with it."

The dazzle painting theory was first put to Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, by scientist John Graham Kerr in 1914.

HMS Kildangan in dazzle camouflage. Photograph: IWM via Getty Images

The idea was not to hide the ships but to make them appear optically distorted so submariners would find it difficult to calculate their course.

Its development was led by the marine painter Norman Wilkinson who first coined the term dazzle painting, while the Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth supervised the dazzle patterning of more than 2,000 ships – each with its own unique pattern of stripes, distorted lines and garish colours.

Two ships have been given a dazzle makeover this summer: the Edmund Gardner, a pilot ship in Liverpool, and HMS President in London, one of the last three surviving Royal Navy ships built during the war.

A closeup of HMS President in dazzle camouflage. Photograph: Ben A Pruchnie/Getty Images

Now a venue for events, parties and conferences, HMS President, formerly HMS Saxifrage, was the first type of warship built specifically for anti-submarine warfare and would have been dazzle decorated during the war.

Rehberger said the challenge had been to take such a serious subject and make it contemporary and even funny.

The new work "had to reflect on the fact that things have changed in the last 100 years".

• This article was amended on 18 July 2014. An earlier version referred to the Edmund Gardner as a first world war ship, she was actually built in 1953, and a caption identified the Mauretania, in service during the war as a troopship, as the troopship USS Leviathan.