3 Sachplakat, The First World War, and Dada
 

see also:

Dadaism

The Art Nouveau design styles discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 gradually diminished in popularity between 1905 and 1914. This chapter traces three major reasons behind this decline. First, there was an inevitable change in fashion, as the once "New Art" began to look dated. Designers and members of the public who had once been captivated by its dense ornament found themselves wanting less, not more. Second, the expanding customer base for graphic designers included clients with different needs from those of the entertainment industry that dominated the Art Nouveau period. Early in the twentieth century, more and more companies that had previously eschewed graphic design were feeling the need to present a burnished image and attractive products to consumers. Third, the onset of war between the major European powers in 1914 focused designers work on furthering nationalist causes. The First World War would have a lasting impact on graphic design and its patrons. Later in the chapter, an art movement spawned in reaction to the war, "Dada," introduces a number of new design principles that had broad consequences for graphic design later in the twentieth century.

Sachplakat in Germany

The first decisive blow against the dominant Art Nouveau styles was struck not by an established artist, but by an amateur designer named Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972). While the details of his early life are unclear, it is known that Bernhard was born in Stuttgart to a family that did not support his artistic aspirations. His name at birth was Emil Kahn. In his teens, Bernhard briefly attended an school in Munich, where he also saw an international selection of An Nouveau posters that included everything from the most ornamental work by Alphonse Mucha to the more sim­plified posters of the Beggarstaff Brothers. In 1903, Bernhard settled in Berlin, seemingly without any real prospects as an artist—or as a poet, another field that he reportedly dabbled in at this time.

Lucian Bernhard and the Priester Breakthrough

It was at some point while in Berlin that Emil Kahn became Lucian Bernhard, perhaps as a response to conflict with his father, who may have disowned him at this time, or in an attempt to assimilate more effectively into a German society rife with anti-Semitism by effacing the Jewish ancestry recognizable in his surname. Whatever the case, the newly minted Bernhard decided to enter a poster competition for the Priester match company. This type of contest was quite common at the time, as there was no standardized profession of graphic design or established com­munity of professionals to which clients could naturally turn. Bernhard's first draft for his entry showed a smoking cigar astride an ashtray next to a pair of matches. These elements rested on a checkered tablecloth. The most dramatic element of the compo­sition was the smoke from the cigar, which, replicating Jugendstil cliche, transformed midstream into a bevy of beautiful young dancing women. Bernhard used a flat brown background derived from his knowledge of the Beggarstaffs and Japonisme. Floating in the space above the table was the company's name, Priester. Overall, the poster displayed the influence of both the Japanese style and the festive atmosphere favored by many Art Nouveau designers.

As Bernhard later told the story, he next showed the maquette, or model, of the poster to an acquaintance, who mistook it for an advertisement for cigars. This was a natural assumption, because the smoke from the cigar was the only element of the poster that showed a dramatic flourish. Recognizing his mistake, Bernhard began a process of "addition by subtraction," gradually removing any element that could possibly "compete" with the matches for the viewer's attention (fig. 3.1). For his final draft, Bernhard left only the two red matches, the company name in block letters, and the neutral colored background. It is not clear, although it seems likely considering the harmonious balance of the final image, whether Bernhard rescaled the matches when he created this new, simpler composition, or whether his final draft was strictly a case of the elimination of the superfluous cigar, tablecloth, etc.

The story does not end with Bernhard's submission of the poster to Priester's judges. In an even more dramatic twist, his image was reported to have been immediately thrown in the trash by the judges, only to be rescued by Ernst Growald, an executive for the advertising agency Hollerbaum & Schmidt, which was overseeing the competition. Growald, who would become an important client-patron of Bernhard in subsequent years, is said to have glanced in the garbage can and exclaimed, "This is my first prize! This is genius!" and a new career for Bernhard as well as a revolutionary change in the design of German posters had begun.

Why exactly was the image for Priester matches so extraordi­nary? Looking back at Chapter 1, it would seem that both Leonetto Cappiello in Paris and the Beggarstaff Brothers in London, to give just two examples, had used similar, simplified designs that drew on Japonisme. While it is arguable that Bernhard has taken these earlier attempts at reductive composi­tions to a new extreme, the real innovation in the Priester poster lies in its tone. The Beggarstaffs' poster for Harper's uses an unre­lated image of a Beefeater, one that had actually been intended to publicize a completely different product, in an attempt to add a theatrical flourish to the advertisement. Similarly, Cappiello's poster for Maurin absinthe features a rather bizarre allegorical fig­ure of a green demon in order to enliven its message. Also, both these posters, and especially Cappiello's, are quite lively from a visual standpoint. In stark contrast, Bernhard's poster displays only the two matches and the company's name, and it does so while completely eschewing any flair, allegorical flourish, or kinetic colorism. It is this simple communication of a declarative message, addressing the viewer forthrightly as if to say, "Here is the product, this is its name," that makes Bernhard's work stand apart. It is this clarity that earned this style of poster the name Sachplakat, translatable roughly as "object-poster." In sum, Sachplakflt designs such as this one looked both to the past, showing a strong Japanese influence, and to the future, because their radical simplification and blunt messages later became a key part of modern advertising.

Because Bernhard was vague, even deliberately obtuse, when it came to divulging the details of his life and career, historians are unsure of the credibility of this famous story of the casual genesis of a poster that revolutionized graphic design. Whether or not the story is apocryphal is in some ways beside the point; what is more important is the fact that the story was considered worth telling at all. Up to this point in history, the artistic decisions that went into the creation of a commercial poster were not really believed to be worth thinking about or telling stories about. The fact that people cared enough to tell and retell this anecdote says more about the rising status of graphic design than do the details of the episode themselves. There is an analogy here with the history of painting and painters' struggle to be taken seriously as an important profession. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, numerous anecdotes of dubious credibility about painters' lives began to be told—that Leonardo da Vinci had died in the arms of the French king, for example—and these narratives represented part of the struggle for painters to be taken seriously, a struggle that graphic designers faced early in the 1900s.

The Sachplakflt style needs to be understood in terms of the historical dominance of Art Nouveau in 1905. Its radical simplifi­cation did not exist in a vacuum, but represents a direct rejection of the ornamental complexity of Art Nouveau. The relationship between the Sachplakat and Art Nouveau is therefore one that scholars call "dialogical," meaning that the style came about as part of a dialogue, in this case with the Art Nouveau style. The Sachplakat style offered an alternative to corporate clients such as Priester, who were dismayed by the obvious "airiness" of Art Nouveau graphics, whose complexity of style they felt could obscure their product. It could be argued that an exceedingly deorative poster such as those designed by Mucha actually competed with the product it was supposed to be selling, so that it was unclear what the poster was really about—the product or the poster itself? If the prospective consumer is likely only to glimpse the poster while passing through the city streets, it is necessary that the product's basic function and name be instantly recogniza­ble. In contrast, the product being proffered in many Art Nouveau posters had to be aggressively sought out by the viewer after somewhat longer contemplation. Furthermore, the Art Nouveau style's alliance with the Symbolist and Aesthetic move­ments of the 1890s could well have tainted the movement with the "decadent" label, something that purveyors of consumer goods wanted to avoid, especially in aesthetically conservative countries such as Germany or the United States.

     Bernhard was highly sought after following his success in the Priester competition, and he established himself, and the Sachplakflt style, as the advertising mainstay for many German companies. In 1906, he opened his own firm, which eventually employed more than twenty graphic designers. In 1907, he became a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund, an honor indicative of the strength of his reputation. The relationship with Growald and Hollerbaum & Schmidt served as a continuous source of important corporate commissions. Fine examples from the prewar period include this poster for Bosch sparkplugs from 1913 (fig. 3.2), in which a bold juxtaposition of orange and blue creates a striking background for the neutral color of the sparkplug. The rectangular box enclosing the name of the company plays off the irregular starburst that represents the electric spark.

The Sachplakat Phenomenon

The owners of the advertising and lithography firm of Hollerbaum & Schmidt immediately attached themselves to both Bernhard and the overall Sachplakflt phenomenon, signing several additional designers to exclusive contracts. Included in this grouping, sometimes called "The Six," was the Viennese artist Julius Klinger (1876-1950), whose poster for the Mohring Chandelier Company of 1909 is one of the icons of Sachplakat style (fig. 3.3). Klinger had trained in Vienna at a technical institute, where he later became a magazine illustrator. His early works show the influence of the curvilinear Art Nouveau promoted by the Vienna Secession movement. After moving to Berlin, he came under the influence of first the Beggarstaffs and then the new style initiated by Bernhard. The Mohring poster displays its product alone and without any setting, eschewing the narrative devices that drive so many advertising messages.

    The striking advertisements by Hans Rudi Erdt (1883-1918) for Hollerbaum & Schmidt include one for Opel cars completed in 1911 (fig. 3.4). In a variation on the style, Erdt does not display the product, a type of automobile, but the consumer—in this case, the distinguished-looking face of a man with driving goggles perched on his head. Like the Beefeater from the Beggarstaffs' portfolio, the contour is broken in several places and the man's collar flows into the flat field of green. The closest thing to a representation of a car is the wheel shape of the outlined "O" in Opel, which serves as a metonymic device—that is to say, it stands for the entire car, just as the figure is intended to project the confident feeling of owning one. In the previous year, Opel had introduced its first racing car, in an attempt to add glamour to its stock production line. Erdt's poster captures this element of prestige associated with the brand, which stands in contrast to the less emotional message of Bernhaxd's Bosch poster.

3.3 Julius Klinger, Poster, Mohring Chandelier Factory. 1909. Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.

Julius Klinger, Salome, 1909
 

3.4 Hans Rudi Erdt, Opel, 1911. Poster Deutsches Histonsches Museum, Berlin

Ludwig Hohlwein

Aside from Bernhard, the most successful representative of the Sacbplakat style was the German designer Ludwig Hohlwein (1874-1949). An architect by training, Hohlwein lived during the 1890s in Munich, where he participated in the Vereinigte Werkstatten fur Kunst im Handwerk ("United Workshops for Art and Crafts"). This organization, dedicated to Arts and Crafts principles and the creation of finely crafted goods, also promoted the art of the poster. The United Workshops' output in graphic design tended toward strong figurative elements, which can be seen in Hohlwein's poster publicizing "Richard Strauss-Week" (1910; fig. 3.5). Mixing abstraction and three-dimensional modeling, Hohlwein placed a fairly detailed figure in a space that lacks an identifiable horizon line defining it. The design is also abstract in its stark orthogonal framework, through which the vertical figure and her staff are linked together by horizontal lines of text.

In 1911, Hohlwein established himself in Berlin as a graphic designer in the Sacbplakat mode. In posters for a men's clothing company, Hermann Scherrer, Hohlwein displayed his penchant for Beggarstaff-like reductiveness (fig. 3.6). However, Hohlwein has a tendency to maintain more volumetric rendering of form in pans of the image, an element of the style he had practiced in Munich, than Bernhard or the others. Hohlwein's hybrid style mixes the simplicity of the Sacbplakat, including its restriction in the amount of text to the name of the company, or product, and an occasional short copy line contained a rectangular block, with a projection of upper-class elegance and refinement not typical of the style. Here, the well-bred dog and riding accessories are sug­gestive of an affluent lifestyle. Additionally, his posters often show a flair for self-conscious design, particularly vivid color and abstract patterning, which distinguishes them from the other artists who pursued the Sacbplakat style. In this example, the black and white checkered pattern of the man's riding outfit creates a two-dimensional plane that is in tension with the surrounding, more three-dimensional looking, elements.

A poster that Hohlwein produced for the Marco Polo Tee company frames the product in an exotic manner more akin to Art Nouveau posters than to Sacbplakat. The image works by putting the viewer in the position of an affluent consumer who is being served the product. The poster features a Japanese woman, presumably a geisha, a trained professional who administers to the needs of upper-class men (fig. 3.7). Hohlwein has self-consciously imitated the style and subject matter of Japanese woodblock prints of the Bijin-ga variety, which display beautiful women, in the manner in which he overlays flat planes with different patterns. The artist's initials, "LH," are inscribed into the yellow pattern that adorns her shoulder. Of course, the yellow rests on a violet field, reproducing a harmonious juxtaposition of complementary colors. Another dramatic passage involves the back of her head, where her black coif blends seamlessly into the abstract background pattern. Other posters for Marco Polo by Hohlwein depicted African servants. For twenty-first-century eyes, it is hard to view posters such as these outside the context of the brutal European conquest of Africa, which was a major source of Europe's wealth at the time. Coming at the height of Germany's colonial empire, the image of servile foreigners would satisfy the viewer with a reminder that their country's reach stretched around the globe.
 

Posters and Typography

The most important journal devoted to graphic design in Berlin was founded by a dentist and poster collector named Hans Josef Sachs. In 1905, Sachs had spurred on the creation of the Verein der Plakatfreunde ("Association of Friends of the Poster"), a pro­motional organization. Sachs recruited Bernhard to act as artistic consultant to the association, and to design its first logotype. In 1910, Sachs desired to publish a journal devoted to his passion, and Das Plakat (1910-21) was born. Bernhard designed a poster to publicize the journal in 1916, in which a woman is shown closely examining a poster on exhibition (fig. 3.8). The image bears a striking resemblance to the imprimatur that Jules Cheret had created for the Les Mahres de Affiche series, an emblem with which Bernhard was surely familiar. In Bernhard's poster, the form of the woman is no more volumetric than the poster affixed to the wall. Neither the figure nor the poster is attached to the ground plane. The only indication of a ground is the rectangular bar centered under the figure; it serves a dual purpose, as a ground line and as a visual demarcation between the image and the text under it. Perhaps indicative of his high status as a graphic designer a decade after the Priester contest, is the manner in which Bernhard uses his name as a compositional device to balance the rectangle formed by the poster frame in the upper left. The blocklike, symmetrical form and simplified sans serif lettering of the name, "Bernhard," contrast with the flowing faux blackletter of the journal's title at the base of the image. In terms of circulation, Das Plakat was the most successful poster journal ever produced in Europe, peaking at 5,000 copies for an issue published in 1918, an incredible number for such a specialized magazine.

    During the early twentieth century, there was an ongoing dispute as to whether or not Germans should rely on the classic roman types that prevailed in the rest of Europe, or maintain their national tradition of blackletter, especially schwabacher and fraktur, the two sixteenth-century scripts that had Germanic origins. The German authorities seemed to be undecided as to whether or not to maintain a style of type that separated German publications from those of most of the rest of Europe. At the start of the century, newspapers and mainstream literature were all printed in fraktur, while the school system taught young people to write in gothic script. At the same time, a wealth of publications in Germany, especially those that wanted to look modern to the reader, embraced the roman tradition. In 1911, the German parliament had considered forbidding the use of blackletter scripts in state schools and government documents. This "Dispute of the Scripts" had resulted in the defeat of the new legislation, and Germany had continued on a path of dual roman and blackletter writing styles, sometimes representing separate spheres of activity, sometimes published side-by-side in official documents.

    Several typefaces that attempted to integrate elements of both traditions are symptomatic of this dilemma. In fact, the Art Nouveau types designed by Peter Behrens and discussed in Chapter 2 functioned by transforming the broken curves of fraktur into curvilinear decorative elements. In 1914, Friedrich Bauer (1863-1943) designed an excellent hybrid type called Hamburger Druckschrift. Bauer's effort represents an attempt to reconcile this conflict in a visual sense by including formal elements from both traditions. Hamburger Druckschrift has a calligraphic structure that is recognizably tied to blacklctter, but all the dramatic flour­ishes, broken curves, rhomboid and diamond terminals have been suppressed. Also, some of the least legible characters to readers used to roman type have been simplified, such as the "K," "S," and "X." The type appears light in comparison to the dense color of most blackletters, and has taken on the wide proportions and open letter forms of roman type.

    The Sachplakat poster artists themselves clearly sided with the German industries that wanted a modern look to their advertise­ments, and so embraced roman lettering. The Sachplakat designers contributed to roman typography in Germany, especially after their popularity caused a whole host of designers to copy the plain, block letter style of their hand-drawn posters. In 1912, Frankfurt's Flinsch foundry published Bernhard Antiqua, a type­face based on the lettering in Bernhard's original Priester matches poster (fig. 3.9). Originally produced for the Linotype machine, this bold roman face preserves some of the idiosyncratic letter-forms of Bernhard's hand-drawn work, such as the lower-case "e" that drops below the baseline. After the First World War broke out in August 1914, the pool of Sachplakat designers grouped in Berlin around Hollerbaum & Schmidt found new work, as they shifted from the promotion of industry to the needs of the German war machine.
 

3.8 Lucian Bernhard, Das Plakat, 1916. Poster.

3.9 Lucian Bernhard, Bernhard Antiqua Typeface, 1912.

The First World War

On June 28, 1914, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was visiting Sarajevo, was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist who resented the Austro-Hungarian Empire's domination of the Balkan states. Because of a series of alliances and security guarantees among the major powers in Europe, the initial conflict between Austria-Hungary and the Serbians precipitated by the assassination quickly led to a much broader conflict. The war pined the Allies—Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and the United States (after 1917)—against the Central Powers—Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Turkey. One of the most portentous events of the twentieth century, the "Great War" resulted in the collapse of four empires, including those in Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia, and set the stage for continuing European conflict throughout the 1920s and 1930s. While the precise number of casualties from the war is even today uncertain, scholars estimate that as many as 20 million people were killed and 33 million wounded. The war's vast scale and use of civilian-soldiers had a greater impact on European populations than earlier European conflicts, which had been fought by small professional armies.

    In terms of the use of graphic design, the First World War created a pressing need to influence the views of potential recruits and financial backers, as well as to garner the general support of the population to maintain backing for a conflict that, when it broke out in the summer of 1914, had been expected to end "by Christmas." It is important to remember that journalists' access to the war was essentially non-existent, so citizens of the belligerent nations were often completely ignorant of the scope of the horror at the front. As the war dragged on and casualties mounted into the many millions, governments became even less forthcoming, refusing to publish statistics detailing the number of missing, dead, and wounded.

    The one consistent form of government communication to its citizens was through the posters that were slathered on hoardings across the cities of Europe. Of course, the content and style of these posters were tightly controlled by government agencies, so that the messages therein were just as likely to mislead viewers as to enlighten them. Many of the posters discussed here were in fact collaborations of necessity, not choice, as the government officials in charge of publicity often wrote the text themselves after com­missioning the image from an artist. At other times, old images were recycled with new text as the occasion demanded.

    Thus, the First World War led to an enormous acceleration in the production of posters as different governments sought to rally their own citizens to support the war effort. When the war began, Britain had the smallest army of all of the European powers, total­ing only about 160,000. Because theirs was the only country in the conflict that lacked a military draft, the British authorities had the greatest need to encourage volunteers. While enthusiasm for the war ran high early in the conflict, an initial onslaught of vol­unteers quickly dried up as casualties mounted. During the eighteen months before a draft was instituted early in 1916, the British government relied heavily on posters to encourage young men to join the fighting. This recruitment need resulted in hun­dreds of individual posters, with production totals numbering in the millions. The production of posters was centralized in the hands of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC), a branch of the War Office. The PRC's campaign was apparently successful, as over 2.5 million British men joined the military between August 1914 and January 1916. However, those numbers were not enough to feed the war machine on the front and so conscription became essential, while poster designers turned to other themes. The precise role that graphic design played in fueling recruitment is essentially unknowable, although anecdotal evidence suggests that many posters strongly resonated with the British citizenry.

Stylistically, there was an abrupt halt to the proliferation of decorative Art Nouveau, Japonisme, and other abstract styles, along with a new commitment to a more conventional type of realistic representation. There are two major reasons for this trend; first, the conservative taste of the members of the PRC, who felt that more traditional, natural styles had a greater appeal for the largest cross-section of the population; and second, the fact that the majority of posters were designed in-house by commer­cial lithography firms that used their own printers in both design and production roles. Even as styles regressed, designers devel­oped new sophistication in manipulating the population through subject matter. For these reasons, the First World War paradoxi­cally diminished the status of graphic design as an art form. The war poster became in most cases strictly a vehicle for government propaganda, while the three-decades-long effort by designers to enhance the artistic qualities of the poster fell by the wayside.

    Among the most influential types of posters designed to bolster British recruitment were those that used a direct appeal, bordering on a command, from a respected military leader. The most memorable of this group was a 1914 poster by Alfred Leete (1882-1933) depicting Lord Kitchener (1850-1916), a national icon and the Secretary of State for War, who oversaw the recruit­ment drive (fig. 3.10). Leete made the original design for the September 1914 cover of the monthly magazine London Opinion, then remade it as a poster at the behest of the PRC. While the original version of the poster was drawn by hand, a second poster was unique among British designs in that it used a photograph for its portrait of Lord Kitchener.

Lord Kitchener was so famous that it was unnecessary to record his name; rather, his picture is integrated into the middle of the text, "Britons, [Lord Kitchener] Wants You." Kitchener's dramatically foreshortened right arm ends in his pointed index finger, a finger that complements the semblance of direct eye con­tact between him and the potential recruit. This dramatic gesture became the cornerstone of an entire genre of appeal, the "pointing poster." The typography in this poster is rather undistinguished, as an eclectic variety of bold display type delivers its message, if nothing more. Leete was not a graphic designer per se, but rather an illustrator and cartoonist for Punch magazine. The widespread success of this poster of Kitchener leads invariably to a number of pointed questions. How important is graphic design to the cre­ation of an effective poster? If this rather rudimentary design and typography were successful, is it by definition a "good" poster?

The "pointing" design was widely copied, and variations of it appeared almost immediately. A second poster by Leete features John Bull, a personification of England who had been invented in the early eighteenth century, shown in his typical dress of tailcoat, breeches, and Union Jack vest (fig. 3.11). This powerful country squire addresses the viewer with a stern glare and a damning admonition framed as a question, "Is it You?" The moral reproach explicit in the question is as bold as the comportment of Bull himself. Partly because of a long tradition of shielding the general population from the horrors of war, and partly to keep up morale, there is rarely any actual fighting on display in recruitment posters. The glimpse of a small conflagration behind the line of dutiful soldiers is only minimally suggestive of a conflict that included days such as July 1, 1916, on which 19,000 British soldiers were killed at the Somme. Years such as 1916, when this poster appeared, caused the infantryman and poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) to write "What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims."

A second genre of British war poster stressed the comradeship and excitement of life as a soldier, depicting the war as something akin to a heroic adventure. Confronted in a poster by a train filled with fresh-faced recruits pointing at them in a friendlier fashion than Lord Kitchener or John Bull, young men read, "There's Room for You" and felt that they did not want to miss out on the journey of a lifetime (fig. 3.12). Posters such as At the front (1915) display a subsequent moment, when the trip to the front has landed the new recruit into the midst of an adventure; the kinetic action of mounted troops under fire in a blaze of color is truly seductive (fig. 3.13). The rearing horse in the foreground is being brought under control by a cavalryman, suggesting the polished professionalism of troops in the army. Inspired perhaps by the scenes of lion hunts made popular by the French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), this dramatic image presents the war in the most romantic of terms. Both these posters feature a composition through which the central image functions like a window into another world, an exciting one of color and comradeship. The poster contrasts that romantic vision with the flat, neutral color of the surrounding border and letter­ing. In this manner, the lack of flair shown in the design of the border and type works to enhance the message, in so much as it stands in for the drab day-to-day existence of young men who resist the call to arms.

Emasculating Messages

For those recruits who proved immune to either the direct appeal of John Bull or the sense of romantic adventure offered by imagi­nary comrades, British recruiters developed an even more caustic weapon—emasculation. Emasculation, the questioning or weakening of a man's virility, was the most potent psychological attack that any designer could muster. In 1915, Edward Kealey initiated the theme with his poster Women of Britain Say "Go!"—which sought to persuade women to pressure their husbands into joining the war effort (fig. 3.14). Kealey's message makes use of the tradi­tional Victorian notion of "separate spheres," through which each gender was thought to have its own natural environment— women in the home and men in public life. Kealey displays this concept in a literal fashion, as the mother and children are seemingly embraced by the doorway of their home as the soldiers placed across a balustrade march off as part of their male role. The theme of emasculation centers on the little boy who clutches at his sister's skin, suggesting that men who stay home are akin to preadolescent children clutching their mommies. The illustration is again the heart and soul of the poster, as the lettering does little more than enunciate the theme. This retrograde style has retreated from the advanced composition of sophisticated lithographs from the 1890s by artists such as the Beggarstaffs or Aubrey Beardsley.

The amateur genesis of so many British war posters is exemplified by the story behind the creation of the most famous picture of emasculation ever made, Daddy, What did you do in the Great War? (fig. 3.15) As his son Paul later recounted, the printer Arthur Gunn asked himself this question one evening in 1915 at home. Recognizing effective emotional blackmail when he saw it, Gunn suggested to his friend, the children's book illustrator Savile Lumley, that it could form the kernel of an effective recruiting poster. In order to heighten the impact of the question, Lumley, author of comics such as The Boy's Own Paper, transformed the interlocutor from Paul Gunn into a tittle girl sitting on her father's lap. In this image the little boy at the man's feet enhances the moral reproach inherent in the scene, as he plays with toy soldiers, signaling that even at such a young age he has more masculine instincts than his father. Lumley's poster, especially the shamefaced visage of the emasculated patriarch, is a masterpiece of bullying propaganda, while its completely uninspiring design does nothing to take away from such blunt condemnation. As stated above, the effectiveness of this imagery is far from certain, and the extreme manipulation of the viewer was greeted cynically by some contemporary viewers. However, it remained the most potent image of the war years in many people's minds. The author George Orwell (1903-1950) mused many years later: "I have often laughed to think of that recruiting poster, 'What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?' ... and of all the men who must have been lured into the army by just that poster and after­wards despised by their children."

As the war dragged on year after year with no end in sight, British authorities were compelled to address the civilian population's discontent. A new wave of posters produced after 1916 served to rally the home front, and none performed the feat with more alacrity than the "atrocity" poster. In seeking to unite civilians behind the war, designers turned to images of violence and cruelty that had been avoided in earlier posters. Red Cross or Iron Cross?, by David Wilson (1873-1935), is one of the finest examples of this genre, displaying a favorite theme, the paradox of the inhumanly vicious German nurse. This is a rare example of a poster whose effectiveness is driven more by its text than its illustration (fig, 3.16). While the image of the nurse and two German soldiers is adequate, it lacks the gutwrenching impact of, for example, Lumley's stricken father. However, the last three lines of text, beginning with "The German 'Sister' pours it on the ground before his eyes," together create a staccato rhythm that drives home the brutality of the act. What is most important from a design point of view is the balance of forces—image and text—at play in a poster like this one. Wilson deftly used the inexpensive red and black palette to reinforce the message of the gulf between the conduct of British and German nurses. While there are, of course, no confirmed facts behind this poster or others like it, the theme of the sadistic nurse had particular resonance in England, home to Florence Nightingale (1820-1910). Nightingale, a national hero who died in the years just before the war, had revolutionized the nursing profession, having recognized the role that sanitation played in morbidity and mortality when she had worked at the front during the Crimean War (1854-56). Her story added further resonance to the image, in that it became part of an implicit contrast in the viewer's mind. Wilson, a newspaper cartoonist, became a graphic designer only for the duration of the war.

 

3.14 Edward Kealey, Women of Britain Say "GO!" 1915. Poster.
Lithograph on paper. Imperial War Museum, London.

3.15 Savile Lumley, Daddy, What Did YOU Do in the Great War?. 1915. Poster.
Lithograph on paper. Imperial War Museum, London.

3.16 David Wilson, Red Cross or Iron Cross?, 1917. Poster.
Lithograph on paper. Imperial War Museum, London.

Canadian War Posters

At the time of the First World War, Britain retained its colonial legacy of control over the political and military affairs of Canada. Still a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, Canada in 1914 was a part of the British Empire, a status quo that was maintained until the Statute of Westminster was signed in 1931. Naturally, Canadian recruitment posters featured many of the same manipu­lative appeals as their British counterparts. Canadian posters also relied on realistic illustration, rather than avant-garde abstraction, in the British manner. The recruiting poster shown here replicates the "pointing" style developed by Alfred Leete, combining the personal appeal of the hand gesture with a rousing quote displayed like a banner at the top of the image (fig. 3.17). The question, "Are you one of Kitchener's own?", refers to the specific regiment that is recruiting, in this case the 244th, based in Montreal, which was known as "Kitchener's own." In contrast to the British posters, which made broad national appeals, many of the Canadian designs were aimed at specific populations, such as the men of the city of Montreal. In a literal display of flag-waving patriotism, the majority of the poster is taken up with a Union Jack that appears to be draped from the top, as it would hang at local recruiting stations. The uses of the Union Jack, originally a royal flag, gradually expanded over the centuries and eventually included its status as an insignia of the British Army. St George's emblem, a red cross on a white ground, is the dominant motif of the flag.

     Because of Canada's large French-speaking community, many posters produced there, especially in Quebec, were published in both English and French versions. Starting in 1916, all of the belligerents in the war had become reliant on war loans in order to finance their armed forces. One poster shows yet another variation of the pointing style, with this time a harried-looking soldier at the front making the direct appeal (fig. 3.18). Instead of instilling guilt for the purposes of recruitment, this soldier is urging French-speaking Canadians to subscribe to a "Victory Loan." The intensity of his gaze is unparalleled in the pointing genre, and considering the millions of war casualties suffered by the time this poster was produced in 1917, this otherworldly soldier would seem to be calling out to his fellow citizens at home from an unmarked battlefield grave.

A fine example of the Canadian penchant for addressing narrow audiences in order to bolster recruitment can be seen in the two versions of this poster aimed at Jewish Canadians, and published in both English and Yiddish (figs. 3.19, 3.20). This complex image throws a multiplicity of themes at the viewer. The banner slogan at the top makes a rather universal appeal, invoking a long­standing theme of Judaism that could refer to everything from the biblical Exodus from Egypt to the civil and economic rights gar­nered during the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. One level below that slogan there are three photos of famous Jewish Britons integrated into a collage of Union Jacks, including in the center a picture of Rufus Daniel Isaacs, the Lord Chief Justice of Great Britain, who had joined the peerage in 1914, and become a Viscount in 1916. Other parts of the appeal are suggestive of the adventurous nature of war as well as what is portrayed as a Jewish debt to Great Britain for their emancipation in Europe. The man whose bonds are being severed by a British soldier says, "You have cut my bonds and set me free—now let me help you set others free!"
 

3.19 & 3.20 Anonymous, Britain Expects Every Son of Israel to Do His Duty, 1917.
Posters in English and Yiddish. Imperial War Museum, London.

The United States

The United States entered the First World War on the side of the Allies in April 1917. In the war's earlier years, the United States had prospered as its industries sold millions of tons of munitions and other goods to the Western Allies. The period between 1915 and 1917 saw increasing tension between the United States and Germany as German submarines attacked merchant ships carrying these exports, killing a number of Americans. The American declaration of war followed on the loss of five vessels early in 1917, after Germany had implemented a new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. In the ensuing year and a half, the American navy assisted Great Britain in destroying the German submarine threat. In terms of the land war, the greatest American contribution came in the summer and autumn of 1918, when army troops under John Pershing (1860-1948) assisted the Allies in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which broke through Germany's Hindenburg Line. By the end of the war in November 1918, the United States had deployed nearly 2 million fighting men in France.

    German attacks on Allied shipping provoked a number of prewar contretemps between the United States and Germany. The most fractious dispute involved the sinking by a German submarine of the British luxury liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915. One hundred and twenty-eight Americans were killed in the attack, which occurred off the coast of Ireland. A sentimental newspaper report described "a mother with a three-month old child clasped tightly in her arms. Her face wears a half smile. Her baby's head rests against her breast. No one has tried to separate them." In Boston, the American illustrator Frederick Spear pro­duced this image, which became the basis of a recruitment poster (fig. 3.21). Perhaps one of the most compelling atrocity images ever published, it shows an ethereal mother and child sinking into the murky depths.
 

3.21 Frederick Spear, Enlist, 1915. Poster. Color lithograph.