What is one to make of a poster that shows a plump, happy child (naked except for socks and new sandals) perched on air beside Libertys torch and beneath the rubric "Save your Child from Autocracy and Poverty"; or, a lovely young lady in nightdress, a baby in her arms, floating lifeless at the bottom of the sea next to the lone word "Enlist"; or, beautifully rendered fish swimming languidly among underwater growth, with the not-intentionally funny legend "Eat more fish -- they feed themselves"? Like many another poster of World War I, done by the periods best-known illustrators, they are instantly fascinating and obviously praiseworthy for artistic merit, but their full intent (both in word and image) can sometimes baffle a late-twentieth-century viewer.

The purpose of these government-sponsored works of art was to communicate essential information rapidly and efficiently (in an era that preceded radio broadcasting); and from all accounts these posters succeeded admirably in conveying the right message to their intended audience; however, to us, decades later, the entire significance of some of the posters may no longer come through so clearly. To aid our understanding of Americas World War I posters, this volume is designed not simply to collect and illustrate some of the best examples from all aspects of the war effort but to provide guidance into the social, political, and historical context in which these posters commendably performed their patriotic duty.

For many World War I posters to speak to us now requires an effort on our part to be more responsive to the spirit of that period -- which one congressman characterized as a dominant faith in America as Gods "chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world." A noble mission, that, but certainly far remote from current thinking on American foreign policy. It now seems that, in many ways, citizens of the World War I era are about as distant intellectually from post-Vietnam Americans as are the knights of King Arthurs Round Table. Indeed, it was to these very knights that the young men who went off to fly for France (long before America entered the war) often compared themselves -- observing in aerial combat a code of chivalry that Sir Lancelot might not have found wanting.

Initially we will be concerned with examining the great dilemma faced by peace-loving, traditionally xenophobic Americans when the very survival of freedom and democracy in faraway Europe was threatened by sinister forces of autocratic militarism. Subsequently -- once the dilemma was resolved in a declaration of war on Germany -- we will investigate some of this countrys more interesting domestic pursuits related to her rapid national mobilization. Our special focus will be on the posters role in this mobilization, for it was on the main streets of Home Front America that these posters did their job so effectively.

It is necessary to begin this story in prewar Europe -- the Old (and outmoded) World in Americas eyes -- to understand what this country thought it was fighting against "to make the world safe for democracy." Periodically the narrative will travel to the Western Front to examine the exploits of representative Americans in the "war to end all wars": those who ventured to Europe while their country was still a neutral nation -- driving ambulances on the battlefield to save endangered lives, enlisting in the Foreign Legion to preserve French culture, flying in the Lafayette Escadrille to stop the barbarous Hun -- as well as those who later fought "over there" under Black Jack Pershing and Billy Mitchell when their homeland could no longer keep out of the European conflict. Nonetheless, our underlying concern is to survey the American poster as a dramatic and representative icon of its period: to examine the various patriotic and informational chores it undertook in the war effort, to tell how its creation and production were developed into a fine art, who many of the artists were, and also to give some background information on the several masters the poster served -- from enlistment to Liberty Bonds to food conservation to appeals for aid to war -- devastated European communities.

A POSTERS FUNCTION

America printed more than twenty million copies of perhaps twenty-five hundred posters in support of the war effort, more posters than all the other belligerents combined. As artist Joseph Pennell noted in a small book telling how he created a very famous Liberty Loan poster: "When the United States wished to make public its wants, whether of men or money, it found that art -- as the European countries had found -- was the best medium." Indeed, there were European prototypes for several American posters, including the most famous one of all: James Montgomery Flaggs self-portrait as Uncle Sam pointedly saying, "I Want You." Earlier, in 1914, British illustrator Alfred Leete had produced a design for the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee showing Lord Kitchener, secretary of state for war, pointing a finger at the viewer and saying, "Your Country Needs YOU." The concept was simple and direct, the way a poster must be to function effectively, and it was copied by other countries as well. No less an authority than Adolf Hitler, a corporal in the First World War and a sometime artist, admired the simplicity of British and American posters and found them more popularly compelling than the sophisticated variety produced in Germany. Later he wrote in Mein Kampf "All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials, and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas."

These stereotyped formulas -- since posters were intended to sway a mass audience -- were aimed at eliciting, among other emotions, patriotism, sacrifice, outrage, and hatred. To be effective, to be believed, a posters message had to play upon broad ideas and feelings already current. After what the newspapers described as the "Rape of Little Belgium" in 1914, the German soldier was routinely pictured by the Allies as his savage ancestor the Hun, and sometimes as a more remote forbearer, the subhuman ape -- two ravaging creatures (at least in popular mythology) easy to hate. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reminded readers of the London Times, "Hate has its uses in war... It steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do. The bestiality of the German nation has given us driving power... We have to win and we can only win by keeping up the spirit and resolution of our own people."

Harry A. Garfield, head of the wartime United States Fuel Administration, said, "I can get authority to write a column or a page about fuel -- but I cannot make everybody or even anybody read it. But if I can get a striking drawing with or without a legend of a few lines, everyone who runs by must see it." In commenting on this, Joseph Pennell wrote: "That is the whole secret of the appeal of the poster -- and by the poster the governments of the world have appealed to the people, who need not know how to read in order to understand, if the design is effective and explanatory." He went on to say, "Again artists are working with and for the government of their country, again they are at work for the people, at work which the people can understand, for if they cannot it is worthless."

THE DESIGN AND PRINTING OF POSTERS

The posters illustrated in this book all date from a period of less than five years, 1914 to 1919, and the majority of American posters fall within an even shorter time span -- the twenty months that the United States was in the war. Although we would have to call the genre propaganda art (one artist said, "The poster should be to the eye what a command is to the ear"), these works fall more comfortably into the tradition of commercial advertising, which goes back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century in Europe, when attractive printed handbills were posted where they could be seen in passing.

Many of the posters of World War I are authentic lithographs, in the grand tradition of the posters turn-of-the-century golden age. Although the technology existed then, most of these posters were not printed in the more modern four-color process, where combinations of color in the original design are first photographically "separated," using filters, into four primary inking colors. To print lithographs, many colors are applied to the paper one at a time from inked printing "stones," in solids and patterns planned by the artist or lithographer to bring about a desired artistic effect through overlay and blending. In lithography the ink adheres only to marks on a wet stone made by a greasy crayon, a printing technique discovered in the late eighteenth century. Through most of the nineteenth century, lithography had been used as a way of reproducing works of art -- or menus, labels, and letterheads -- rather than as an artists medium for original creations. There were exceptions, of course: notably in the monochromatic prints of such artists as Goya and Daumier earlier in the century, and in the book illustrations of Grandville and Gavarni.

In the first decades of lithography, when color was desired, it was applied by hand (or stencil) to the black-ink print pulled directly from the lithography stone. Gradually the lithographer determined that by adding colored ink to just certain parts of the same stone he could fill in broad areas of the print with a second color -- for example, a blue sky, in which cloud effects could be achieved by leaving areas of the stone free of the litho grease. Eventually, additional stones were prepared for all the other hues needed for a full-color effect. This process became known as chromolithography, and in some cases as many as twenty or so different stones were used to create one print. Again, this was a process essentially devoted to reproducing works of art. The result, even when it was used as an advertisement, was generally no larger than a print.

To be sure, there already were -- from the middle of the nineteenth century on -- large, colorful advertisements and posters. One has only to look to the American circus tradition for these -- and, in terms of techniques for catching the publics eye, that is probably where the modem advertising poster had its beginnings. But the early circus posters were primarily woodblock prints, pieced together from smaller sections, or sheets, to create huge, colorful displays often overloaded (by todays standards) with images and words.

For a more direct antecedent of the World War I poster (at least in terms of concept), one has to look to France, to the beginnings of the so-called art poster -- and particularly to the work of one man: Jules Cheret. Cheret was a commercial lithographer and also a trained artist, so when he had a poster to make he was able to draw directly onto the printing stone, as other artists were doing for book illustrations or original prints. Unlike other printers, who translated someone elses work onto the stone, Cheret used lithography as a creative medium. During the time he served his apprenticeship as a lithographer, he also studied painting at the Paris Ecole des BeauxArts. influenced both by book illustration and mural painting, Cheret introduced to commercial advertising the colors and designs of the fine arts -- but on a fresh, new scale for lithographed posters, that of the mural. In the 1860s he had gone to London to study advancements in color lithography and had first encountered the spectacular woodblock posters of touring American circuses. He also traveled to Venice where he discovered the ceilings and murals of his "god," Tiepolo. Upon his return to Paris, Cheret secured his first poster commissions from owners of theaters and cabarets. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century he created more than a thousand exuberant and colorful posters, which revolutionized the very look of weathered Paris boulevards (Manet called Cheret "the Watteau of the streets").

In 1889 Cheret was awarded the Legion of Honor for "creating a new branch of art"; by then his dramatic influence on postermaking already had spread through Europes ateliers and printshops. This burst of vitality in the commercial arts did not go unnoticed by other artists or the general public. Posters were mounted side by side with oils at exhibitions, and the first great boom in poster collecting was well under way. In the streets, the most spectacular posters were so quickly stolen that printers were obliged to issue special editions for these eager collectors -- to reassure advertisers that posters paid for would definitely be seen by the public.

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, two French painters entering the poster scene were to epitomize the major directions in Europe of this commercial "branch of art" right up to the beginnings of World War I. Eugene Grasset was the first artist to introduce to advertising the languorous female beauty with free-flowing hair provocatively posed with a product amidst stylized and intertwined flora. His beautifully drawn work launched an Art Nouveau trend in poster art that reached a climax in the complex and convoluted renderings of Alphonse Mucha, perhaps best known for advertising the appearances of actress Sarah Bernhardt. Another direction was suggested by the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who, inspired by Pierre Bonnards poster for France Champagne, offered to draw one for the Moulin Rouge, a popular cabaret he frequented on boulevard de Clichy. Although this was perhaps the first oversize lithograph Lautrec worked on, it pointed a new way for the poster -- that of simplified large forms bereft of detail and presented in the flat colors of the Japanese print, then in high fashion among European artists.

Americans saw these two styles directly (Grasset and Lautrec created covers and posters for Harpers and The Century) and indirectly through the work of others, including British artist Aubrey Beardsley, who combined elements of both in a highly individualized fashion. His illustrations for books, such as Oscar Wildes Salome, and for literary quarterlies, such as The Yellow Book and The Savoy, quickly caught the eye of some Americans and influenced (among others) Will Bradley and Edward Penfield, two of the countrys most promising poster artists. This influence showed itself less in subject matter than in its call for simplification, where narrative content was subsumed in bold forms shown without distractions or nonessentials, and where shapes were created as flat colors (with or without outlines) or by patterns unaffected by hints of a third dimension. The ideal came to be a single dominant image that took on the resonance of a symbol, something intended to be quickly perceived rather than pondered. (Wilde himself had pointed out that "art is at once surface and symbol.") This idea, best seen in the work of Ludwig Hohlwein and Lucian Bernhard in Germany and that of the Beggarstaffs in England, was without precedent in American advertising posters (which long had essayed verisimilitude) and did not by any means sway all advertisers or artists.

THE ARTIST AND ILLUSTRATOR IN AMERICA

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the finest in American art and literature was popularly thought to be found in the many illustrated magazines that had blossomed in step with advances in printing technology (more than fifty magazines had a circulation in excess of one hundred thousand). And posters of a new kind in America, by Bradley, Penfield, and Maxfield Parrish, began to appear at newsstands and in bookshop windows in support of such hightone literary periodicals as Scribners, Harpers, Lippincotts, The Century, and The Chap-Book. These posters did not fail to attract the literate public, or others taken with their graphics, and one critic quipped that "editions of posters surpass in number and in demand editions of the reviews themselves." However, the larger-circulation magazines depended less on posters. Colliers, for instance, was featuring the more traditional work of illustrators Frederic Remington, Charles Dana Gibson, and John Sloan (as well as Penfield and Parrish); and J. C. Leyendecker had begun his long series of distinctive covers for Saturday Evening Post, which by 1913 was boasting 11 more than two million a week --a world record circulation. This was also a great period for the illustrated book. Remington had done detailed western scenes for the works of Owen Wister, Francis Parkman, and Theodore Roosevelt, among others; and Howard Pyle, Edwin Austin Abbey, Arthur Burdett Frost, N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, and Jessie Willcox Smith were creating wonderfully evocative images for childrens classics that would forever capture in youthful minds the look of many an imaginary hero and villain.

While for many critics the first decades of this century may not have been quite a golden age for the poster in America, the period was certainly the golden age of the illustrator. Gibson, Flagg, the Leyendecker brothers, and Howard Chandler Christy were not only among the best paid of all Americans but among the best known and most admired. Their work was instantly recognizable from regular association in books and magazines with the countrys most popular writers (Flagg, for instance, illustrated the stories of P. G. Wodehouse, Sinclair Lewis, and Booth Tarkington for Cosmopolitan, and the Gibson Girl and Leyendeckers Arrow Collar Man were such icons of popular culture that they attracted love letters by the hundreds.

In the work of the majority of American artists who contributed posters to the war effort, there is little evidence of direct inspiration from European precedents; Americans were more responsive to a home-grown tradition. However, Adolph Treidler can be seen to echo the German master Hohlwein in his Colliers covers, where flat-patterned coat fabrics shape the outlines of figures without reflecting the forms they cover; and Coles Phillips seems to have been aware of the work of the Beggarstaffs in his development of the "Fadeaway Girl," where the background so exactly matches the color or texture of the girls costume that only certain of her attractive features stand out. In his poster "Light Consumes Coal," Phillips sets a flat bulb shape against a stylized pattern of vines within a circle, a treatment similar to one conceived by Peter Behrens in 1907 for A.E.G., the German General Electric Company. For J. C. Leyendecker, European posters were definitely firsthand encounters when he studied in Paris at Academie Julian. In August, 1896, a cover he did for The Century ("First Prize, Century Poster Contest") was almost pure Art Nouveau: a voluptuous lady is shown in a diaphanous gown with poppies at her temples and in her hair at the ends of locks fanned out around her head. In another few years this alien influence was far behind Leyendecker; his own inimitable style had been formed for the rest of his career.

For other poster artists of World War I, who were mostly trained in America, exposure to (or interest in) foreign influences was relatively rare and indirect in the first decade of this century. New European movements such as Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and abstract art were practically unheard of on Main Street America. The countrys better known painters, such as William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, John Twachtman, and Maurice Prendergast, were still under the sway of their earlier exposure to French Impressionism. Book and magazine illustrators, however, were more likely to have felt akin to slightly older countrymen like Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, who had focused on the American experience in a naturalistic, narrative way that corresponded to an illustrators need to make a printed story come to life visually. Painters like William Glackens, John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn (all trained newspaper illustrators) would carry on the slice-of-life narrative genre, but in so realistic a vein that they would be called "Ashcan" painters.

From 1908 on, Alfred Stieglitz had shown European modernists and American independents to New Yorkers in his fifth-floor gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, and in 1913 the famous Armory Show had caused a stir among sophisticated Americans both pro and con modernist art. Theodore Roosevelt, who later seemed in many ways to have characterized the age, reviewed the Armory Show for The Outlook and concluded that "the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or near-Impressionists." America, in general, had little respect for the Old Worlds autocratic institutions or any inclination to ape the alien fads of Europes bohemian, anarchistic artists. Royal Cortissoz, the prominent art critic of the New York Herald put it this way: "The United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute so many perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperiling the republic of art in the same way."

Given the countrys outright suspicion of foreign ideas, her attitude toward the avant-garde, and the background and character of the artists enlisted to produce most of the governments "pictorial publicity" in World War 1, it would have seemed un-American if all of these posters had been seen to follow the lead of Europes art posters. Perhaps because mostly they did not, very few of these dramatic works have been included in histories of the poster -- and usually it is the same three or four examples. No doubt other reasons may be responsible for the disregard of many spectacular World War I posters (commerce may seem less distasteful to some critics than patriotism), but there has been little effort, except among collectors, to explore this genre in breadth or depth. In an essay on the history of posters in the Museum of Modern Arts catalog Word and Image, one writer dismisses them by saying that the "use of styles thought to be popular with the general public and the temptation to say too much and show too little killed the majority of war posters." Well, if for some art historians the majority of American World War I posters seem to have been "killed" by such misjudgments of their creators, they certainly did not meet their deaths without first handsomely accomplishing their primary mission. Admittedly this is not the first criterion for inclusion in a history, but many a beautiful poster from this genre lies unknown and unappreciated in collections all across the country

THE POSTER ARTISTS

Except for artists like Penfield, J. C. Leyendecker, Treidler, and Louis Fancher, the majority of contributors to the war effort were not themselves experienced poster designers. Gibson, Flagg, Christy, and numerous others received the training of fine artists but chose to go into illustration -- possibly because of financial reasons or so that their talents would be showcased before a far larger audience. The distinction between artist and illustrator had not then become so rigid, and Flagg went so far as to say that "the only difference between a fine artist and an illustrator is that the latter can draw, eats three square meals a day, and can afford to pay for them." However, Christy was actually obliged to drop out of the painting class of William Merritt Chase when it was learned that he sold work for magazine publication.

There were, to be sure, recognized fine artists among those who produced posters for the war effort -- men like Kenyon Cox, Arthur G. Dove, Henry Reuterdahl, Robert J. Wildhack, Edwin H. Blashfield, Joseph Pennell, William Glackens, George Bellows, and Frank E. Schoonover -- but most participants were indeed from the ranks of popular magazine and book illustrators. An illustrators job, according to Flagg, was to "enter into the spirit of the story and actually know each character" before picturing a scene. With aims different from those of successful poster designers such as Bradley and Penfield, the illustrator was trained not to simplify and eliminate but to be realistic, detailed, and, above all, evocative. Remington, for instance, was a stickler for accuracy in the details of his work for Harpers and Colliers; he traveled west regularly to record the variety in dress and weapons of various Indian tribes and the equipment and escapades of the U.S. Cavalry in the field. Along with Christy, Glackens, Reuterdahl, and George Luks, Remington went to Cuba as an artist/correspondent in the Spanish-American War. Had he not died following an operation in 1909, Remington would certainly have contributed posters to this later war.

Flagg, Christy, and Harrison Fisher, among other illustrators, were also much sought-after portraitists. Their work evoked the sumptuous bravura painting style of the nineteenth century, particularly that of John Singer Sargent, where bold brushwork and build-up of forms through the juxtaposition of rich colors constituted the ideal. Because of their popular success as artists, these men had little reason or inclination to adjust their well-known styles to what others thought more appropriate for poster work. Who is to say that posters of a different sort would have been more effective? At any rate, the simplification of forms and flat patterning so valued by some poster historians is hard to come by in the output of the governments Division of Pictorial Publicity Except in the case of those who had done this kind of work before, like Penfield, Phillips, and Fred G. Cooper (who seems to have contributed the lone woodcut to the war effort), the artwork in these posters derives mostly from an American tradition of narrative, documentary, and historical genre painting. In numerous ways these posters, as posters, are more akin to the spirit and intention of Cheret than to poster designers who came after. Many World War I graphics have Cherets exuberance and color, and most share his vision of posters as murals. Not content with simply delivering a pitch, these works take on the resonance of paintings begging to be hung. Arguably the most beautiful of them all is J. C. Leyendeckers "Order Coal Now." One could not easily pass this by without making a note to check the coal bin well before winter sets in.

The neglect of these often extraordinary posters in art-historical circles may well stem in part from their not building upon European precedents; there is, however, little doubt that they succeeded in their primary purpose of exhorting the intended strong response from Americans of their period. Making dramatic use of emotion-laden symbols such as the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and Uncle Sam, these posters served as a call to action when democracy was in peril and reinforced an Americans pride in his country, his readiness for sacrifice in her defense, and his innate patriotism.