Flags and Faces: David Lubin on the Art of the First World War

David Lubin’s forthcoming book, Flags and Faces: The Visual Culture of America’s First World War, shows how American artists, photographers, and graphic designers helped shape public perceptions about World War I. In commemoration of Veterans Day, David Lubin shares the stories behind ten images in the book:

Fig. 34. Mutilated French soldier with prosthesis from the Portrait Masks studio, 1918. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

In 1917, Anna Coleman Ladd, a Boston sculptor with humanitarian concerns, persuaded the American Red Cross to open a “studio for portrait masks” in Paris. There she and a team of assistants crafted galvanized-copper face masks for soldiers who had been permanently disfigured in trench warfare to enable them to return to the workplace and their families. Here is one such mask. When the war ended, the studio closed and the masked men were left to their own devices, most likely to live the rest of their lives in seclusion. [To hear more from David Lubin on Anna Coleman Ladd, visit http://www.npr.org/2014/09/25/351441401/one-sculptors-answer-to-wwi-wounds-plaster-copper-and-paint]
Fig. 1. Robert Minor, "At Last a Perfect Soldier", 1916. Public Domain.

In 1916, Robert Minor, a cartoonist for the left-wing periodical The Masses, makes fun of right-wing preparedness advocates who want to beef up the size of the United States Army with the expectation that the US will eventually declare war on Germany.
Fig. 2. George Bellows, “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” 1917. Public Domain.

George Bellows, not only a leading artist of the day but also a Daumier-like commentator on the social foibles of his era, makes fun of the sedition laws put into place at the start of America’s involvement in World War I. The Masses, where he published it shortly after the declaration of war, was censored for cartoons such as this one.
Fig. 3. Childe Hassam, Early Morning on the Avenue, 1917. Addison Gallery of Art. ©Addison Gallary of Art.

Childe Hassam, America’s leading Impressionist painter, was thrilled to see the US go to war on behalf of beleaguered France, his spiritual home as an artist; he painted a series of 31 patriotic scenes of New York City proudly flying the flags of America and its allies.
Fig. 8. Ellsworth Young, Remember Belgium, 1918. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Incendiary posters such as this one, plastered on public facades across the nation, used rape imagery and other sexualized content to outrage Americans against the German enemy and induce them to contribute money to the war-bond campaigns that financed the US military effort.
Fig. 9. Howard Chandler Christy, Fight or Buy Bonds – Third Liberty Loan, 1917. Public Domain.

The popular American illustrator Howard Chandler Christy, known for depicting the delectable Christy Girl (a variation of the Gibson Girl), headed up the government office for visual propaganda during the Great War. This, perhaps his most acclaimed poster, borrows from Delacroix’s 1830 masterpiece Liberty Leading the People.
Fig. 13. Paul Strand, Wall Street, 1915. Aperture Foundation. ©Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

Paul Strand’s famous photograph, one of the icons of American art, shows the recently built Morgan Bank headquarters looming ominously over Wall Street workers as they march into the morning sun. Strand and his fellow members of the Lyrical Left were appalled by the role that Morgan and other financial giants played in leading America into the conflict abroad; radicals termed it “Morgan’s War.”
Fig. 14. Wall Street explosion, Sept. 1920 (note Washington statue in background). Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Just past noon on September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn cart loaded with five hundred pounds of dynamite pulled alongside the headquarters of the Morgan Bank, an architectural symbol of American capitalism much as the World Trade Center would become half a century later. An explosion ripped through the building, killing 38 workers and bystanders and injuring hundreds more. Anarchists were thought to be behind the crime, but no one was ever charged.
Fig. 16. Joseph Pennell, That Liberty Shall Not Perish, 1918. Library of Congress.

Joseph Pennell, the creator of this widely viewed poster, was perhaps the most prominent graphic artist of the day; he had been a protégé of Whistler. The poster envisions New York under airborne attack; flames engulf the city and the Statue of Liberty has been decapitated by enemy bombers. The message is clear: support the war over there, or the United States will experience destruction like this over here. It’s perhaps the first “homeland security” image in American history.
Fig. 28. Wounded Agricultural Worker from War Against War! (1924). Public Domain.

In the 1920s, Ernst Friedrich, a German anarchist who was detained in a mental institution during the war because of his pacifism, created an antiwar museum in Berlin. Among the exhibits were banned images such as this one of a German soldier whose face was mangled in combat. The idea was to rub viewers’ faces in the ugliness of war, making it so repulsive to behold that they would never lend support to another. Obviously, the plan did not succeed.