Posters of the Great War- An Exhibition
Archived Online Exhibit
Originally exhibited at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina
Archived October 13, 2013
Curator: Joseph M. Bruccoli
Table of Contents
Archived Online Exhibit 1
Introduction 2
Acknowledgments 4
Artists and the Posters 5
Island 1 7
Island 2 9
Island 3 12
Island 4 15
Introduction
Nobody knows how many posters were generated by The Great War / World War I / “The War to End All Wars”/ "The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.” Thousands. They had a strong effect when issued and retain historical value.
This exhibition evokes the sentiments and beliefs that inspired and sustained the worst slaughter in history. It displays 36 posters selected from the Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection at the University ofSouth Carolina, which holds more than 90 posters documenting responses to the War in the belligerent nations (USA, Great Britain, Canada, South Africa, France, Austria, Italy). Among the major poster-artists represented are Lucien Jonas from France and the Americans Howard Foster Christy, Harrison Fisher, James Montgomery Flagg, and Joseph Pennell. Their subjects include recruiting, war loans, famine relief, patriotism, and straight propaganda (German atrocities in Belgium andSchrecklichkeit). The poster collection preserves contemporary depictions of doughboys, Tommies, andpoilus; Red Cross nurses and Salvation Army lassies; families and industry; trenches, tanks and airplanes.
THE JOSEPH M. BRUCCOLI GREAT WAR COLLECTION
These posters are part of the comprehensive collection of Great War materials founded in 1997 by Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. The collection is named for Professor Bruccoli's father, who was wounded in France. It is an in-progress research archive for the literary, historical, and cultural aspects of World War I. Its fields of specialization are literature of the American Expeditionary Force, British novels and poetry of the war, the air war, and trench warfare. The collection includes sheet music, original art, manuscripts, correspondence, photo albums, scrapbooks, and glass slides.
By 2003, the Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection held more than 3,000 items, including some 500 books and documents acquired in 2002 with the Joseph Cohen Collection of World War I Literature. Great War items from other collections—the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Speiser and Easterling-Hallman Collection of Ernest Hemingway, and the Guinn Collection of Military Aviation—are cross-catalogued.
Individual items in the Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection are described inUSCAN, the University of South Carolina online catalogue, which may be accessed throughwww.sc.edu/library. A parallel exhibit,Songs of the Great War, is also available on the web. For more information contact: The Curator, Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208; telephone 803-777-8183.
Acknowledgments
1 Acknowledgments
The exhibition has been curated by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Patrick Scott, and Elizabeth Sudduth (Thomas Cooper Library) and Jay Williams and Jason Shaiman (McKissick Museum). Administrative support has been provided by Paul Willis (Dean of Libraries) and Lynn Robertson (Director, McKissick Museum). The exhibition has been prepared for the web by Zella Hilton (Thomas Cooper Library). The posters displayed in this exhibit were all donated by Prof. and Mrs. Bruccoli; additional posters have recently been donated by Mr. William Schmidt. Two Maine dealers—Elliott Healy of Wiscassett and Joseph Riley of Lincolnville Beach—provided many of these posters. Preparation and framing of the posters for this exhibition, by Etherington Conservation, has been largely funded by a grant from the Exxon Foundation, in partial match to a major donation by Edward Hallman (in memory of Donald Easterling) through the Easterling-Hallman Foundation.
The public program and lecture relating to this exhibit by leading Great War historian Robert Cowley was funded in part by the Humanities Council of South Carolina, an independent state level agency of the National Endowment for Humanities
Artists and the Posters
The artists of the Great War, like the writers, faced an unprecedented challenge to match aesthetic technique with world events. The war years were a transitional period in the history of Western art, as Modernism displaced academic traditions dominant since the Renaissance. This exhibition shows the variety of artistic modes—advertising, art lithography, the heroic tradition, and emergent modernism—that artists used to confront the world crisis of the war.
The earliest posters on display, from 1914 and 1915, emphasize text over image,and some of the earliest war posters were wholly typographic. Where these early posters have illustrations, these often echo the political caricatures of such 19th-century artists as John Tenniel in Britain or Honore Daumier in France.
As the scope of the war, and the significance of war propaganda, became apparent, French artists looked to the academic tradition for its presentation of war as heroic and mythic. The old European academies of fine art had provided a clear hierarchy of subject matter. Nicolas Poussin, one of the founders of the French Academy under Louis XIV, wrote, “The first thing . . . required is that the subject-matter shall be grand, as are battles, heroic actions, and divine things.” While the war itself reached stalemate, the artists posed small groups of Allied soldiers striving successfully ever upward in "un dernier effort" for "la croisade du droit." Historical battle painting is echoed in D. Chavannaz's poster of cavalry awaiting battle with raised lances. Human figures were juxtaposed with the allegories of national symbolism—eagles, lions, and cockerels. As losses mounted, the academic tradition also provided artists such as Maurice Romberg and Lucien Jonas with a traditional imagery of suffering in the Madonna-like pose of a bereaved mother cradling orphaned children.
The Great War technologized warfare with machine guns, barbed wire, gas, tanks, and airplanes. Poster art also utilized technical innovation through lithography. The artistic possibilities of the medium had been explored by such 19th-century masters as Edward Delacroix and Daumier. By the 1890's, the French artists Jules Cheret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the Czech Alphonse Mucha, and the American Edward Penfield had married lettering and images to advertise both entertainment (caberet and circus) and commercial products. Before radio, lithography was a primary vehicle for advertisers, with designs influenced by the colorful shapes and flattened perspectives from Japanese prints. War posters in the current exhibit show lithographs drawn directly on the stone (as in the four French posters by Jonas) and posters employing offset lithography, first introduced commercially by the American Ira W. Rubel in 1904.
In the United States, the dividing line between the fine and commercial arts was less rigid than in Europe. Poster design, like book illustration, attracted talented artists such as Howard Chandler Christy and James Montgomery Flagg, trained in thebeaux artstradition. As one of their contemporaries observed, their posters were not to be dismissed as "potboilers": "the dignity of the intention ennobles the result." The most effective of the American posters, like Joseph Pennell's haunting image of the Statue of Liberty under German air attack, combine the visual power of the modern poster with a moral or ethical message.
War posters were art with a purpose. They helped counter the shortages of enlistees, war materials, and cash in the central banks. Images of saintly nurses, suffering mothers, and inspiring goddesses motivated masculine patriotism. As the conflict ground on, more realistic images of war-weary infantry-men and even maimed heroes sought to strengthen civilian resolve.
If we approach the posters of the Great War only through nostalgia, they may now appear to be artifacts from a simpler age. Neither the artists nor the war were simple. These posters show the power of lithographic art, making visual the attitudes, ideals and contemporary understanding of World War I and foreshadowing art's role in war propaganda through the war-torn century that followed.
—Jay Williams
McKissick Museum
Island 1
"Why Don't They Come?"
Unsigned.
Canadian, 1914
Leonard Raven-Hill.
British,1914.
"Lord Kitchener Says: Enlist To-Day."
Unsigned.
British, 1915.
"Everyone Should Do His Bit."
David Low.
British, 1915.
"The Empire Needs Men"
Arthur Wardle.
British, 1919.
"Fleurette Grand Roman Inédit par Emile Pouget"
Maximilien Luce, Charles Emile Jacque.
French, 1916.
"Journée de l'Orphelinat des Armées, 20 Juin 1916"
Maurice Romberg.
French, 1916.
"Un Dernier effort et on l'aura."
Unsigned.
French, 1917.
Ellsworth Young
American, 1918.
Island 2
"Keep These Off the U.S.A."
John Norton.
American, [1917?].
"To Make the World a Decent Place to Live In."
Herbert Andrew Paus.
American, 1917.
"...Porta il tuo Salvadanaio Perche 'Papa' Ritorni Presto Vincitore."
Signature undecipherable
Italian, 1917.
"Remember Belgium."
Ellsworth Young
American, 1918.
"Emprunt de la Libération: On les a: Souscrivez á la London County & Westminister Bank."
Unsigned.
French, [1918].
"Hâtez son Retour: En Souscrivant à l'Emprunt de la Victoire."
Unsigned.
French, 1918.
"Emprunt National 1918: Pour achever La
Croisade du Droit."
D. Chavannaz.
French, 1918.
.
"Books Wanted For Our Men in Camp
and "Over There"."
Charles Buckles Falls.
American, 1918.
Island 3
"Pour le suprême Effort."
Marcel Farber.
French, [1918].
"Have You Answered the Red Cross Christmas
Roll Call?"
Harrison Fisher.
American, 1918.
"Boys and Girls! You Can Help Your Uncle Sam
Win the War" Bit."
James Montgomery Flagg.
American, 1918.
"America Owes France the Most Unalterable Gratitude."
Lucien Jonas.
French, 1918.
"Crédit Commercial de France"
Lucien Jonas.
French, 1918.
"Emprunt de la Liberation."
Lucien Jonas.
French, [1918].
"Four Years in the Fight."
Lucien Jonas.
American, [1918].
"K.K. Priv. Allegemeine Verkehrsbank"
W.K.K. Kuhn.
Austrian, 1918.
"For Home and Country."
Alfred Everitt Orr.
American, 1918.
Island 4
"That Liberty Shall Not Perish."
Joseph Pennell
American, [1918?].
"Halt the Hun!"
Henry Raleigh.
American, 1918.
"Must Children Die and Mothers Plead in Vain?"
Henry Raleigh.
American, [1918].
"Oh, Boy! that's the Girl!"
George M. Richards.
American, 1918.
"Civilians When We Go Through This We Need All the Help and Comfort You Can Give."
Sidney H. Riesenberg.
American, 1918.
"Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds"
Frederick Strothmann.
American, 1918.
"Americans All!"
Howard Chandler Christy.
American, 1919.
"Clear-the-Way! Buy Bonds: Fourth Liberty Loan."
Howard Chandler Christy.
American, 1918.
"He Can Win!"
Dan Smith.
American, 1919.