Martin Hardie - War Posters: The Historical Role of Wartime Poster Art 1914-1919

A. WOHLFELD.

F RAUEN UND M DCHEN ! S AMMELT F RAUENHAAR ! (Women and girls! collect womens hair!)

Poster appealing for gifts of womens hair, issued from the office of the Collecting Committee, Berlin.

WAR

POSTERS

The Historical Role of Wartime Poster Art 19141919

Selected and Edited by

Martin Hardie

and

Arthur K. Sabin

Dover Publications, Inc.

Mineola, New York

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2016, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by A. & C. Black, Ltd., Soho Square, London, in 1920. The original title was War Posters Issued by Belligerent and Neutral Nations 19141919.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hardie, Martin, 18751952, editor. | Sabin, Arthur K. (Arthur Knowles), 18791959, editor.

Title: War posters: the historical role of wartime poster art 19141919 / selected and edited by Martin Hardie and Arthur K. Sabin.

Description: Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016014996| ISBN 9780486800264 (paperback) | ISBN 0486800261

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914-1918Posters. | World War, 19141918Art and the war. | BISAC: ART / Prints. | HISTORY / Military / World War I.

Classification: LCC D522.25 .W37 2006 | DDC 769/.499403dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014996

Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

80026101 2016

www.doverpublications.com

TO

FRANK PICK, E SQ .,

OF THE UNDERGROUND ELECTRIC RAILWAYS COMPANY, IN HONOUR OF HIS BRAVE AND SUCCESSFUL EFFORT TO LINK ART WITH COMMERCE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ARRANGED UNDER THE NAMES OF ARTISTS AND GROUPED UNDER THE COUNTRIES OF ISSUE

Illustrations marked with an asterisk (*) are in colour.

GERMANY

GREAT BRITAIN

FRANCE

GERMANY AND AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

(When still compelled to fight and bleed,

When, suffering deprivation everywhere,

You go without the coal and warmth you need,

With ration-cards and darkness for your share

With peace-time work no longer to be done,

Someone guilty there must be

England, the Arch-enemy!

Stand then united, steadfastly!

For Germanys sure cause will thus be won.)

AMERICAN

ANGLO-INDIAN

Unite, ye men,

And from his strongholds drive the foe!

Nothing but deeds like these can win

A fame that shall endure.

Recruiting Poster, issued in Bombay, 1915.

OTHER COUNTRIES

DUTCH

CANADIAN

ITALIAN

CZECHO-SLOVAK

RUSSIAN

GERMAN

AUSTRIAN

AMERICAN

I.POSTERS AND THE WAR

N EVER in the history of the world have the accessories of ordinary civilised life met with so searching a test of their essential quality as during the War. All national effort throughout the belligerent countries was organised and directed to serve a single purpose of supreme importance. This purpose in its turn served as a touchstone to sort out whatever was useful and valuable in everyday things, and shaped the selected elements into weapons of immense power. The poster, hitherto the successful handmaid of commerce, was immediately recognised as a means of national propaganda with unlimited possibilities. Its value as an educative or stimulative influence was more and more appreciated. In the stress of war its function of impressing an idea quickly, vividly, and lastingly, together with the widest publicity, was soon recognised. While humble citizens were still trying to evade a stern age-limit by a jaunty air and juvenile appearance, the poster was mobilised and doing its bit.

Activity in poster production was not confined to Great Britain. France, as in all matters where Art is concerned, triumphantly took the field, and soon had hoardings covered with posters, many of which will take a lasting place in the history of Art. Germany and Austria, from the very outset of the War, seized upon the poster as the most powerful and speedy method of swaying popular opinion. Even before the War, we had much to learn from the concentrated power, the force of design, the economy of means, which made German posters sing out from a wall like a defiant blare of trumpets. Their posters issued during the War are even more aggressive; but it is the function of a poster to act as a mailed fist, and our illustrations will show that, whatever else may be their faults, the posters of Germany have a force and character that make most of our own seem insipid and tame.

Here in Great Britain the earliest days of the War saw available spaces everywhere covered with posters cheap in sentiment, and conveying childish and vulgar appeals to a patriotism already stirred far beyond the conception of the artists who designed them or the authorities responsible for their distribution.by staggering blows at our very life as a nation. Then, and not till then, a Government which was always halting to wait and see, or moving slowly behind the nation, at last got into its stride. Artists understood the call and responded. The poster, inspired by an enthusiasm unknown before, became the one form of Art answering to the needs of the moment, an instrument driving home into every mind its emphatic moral and definite message. It is characteristic that the first truly impassioned posters we saw in England were in aid of Belgian refugees or the Belgian Red Cross. They dealt with the violation of Belgium; and the stirring appeal of the work done by G. Spencer Pryse and Frank Brangwyn, R.A., in those early days will always linger in the memory.

So numerous were the posters issued in every country, both by the Governments concerned and the various committees dealing with relief work and other aspects of the War, that the international collection acquired by the Imperial War Museum exceeds twenty thousand. Large numbers of these, many of them consisting of letterpress only, are outside the scope of the present volume, which is intended to make accessible to the public in a convenient form reproductions of a small selection distinguished for their artistic merit. The collection of original War posters acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum has provided most of the illustrations. It comprises several hundred posters from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other countries, in addition to those issued by Great Britain and her Allies; and it illustrates, in a compact form, the finest artistic uses to which colour-lithography was put as a weapon in the World War.

The small collection made for this volume is necessarily arbitrary. Our illustrations are often about one-twelfth the size of the originals, and the limit in size may perhaps be considered to detract from the value of the reproductions. This, however, has been considered, as far as possible, in selecting the examples chosen. A strong, impulsive design does not depend entirely upon size for the force of its appeal, nor does it change in character from being reduced; but a poster badly designed, though passable on a large scale, may be an unintelligible jumble in a small illustration. In many cases a design is knit together by its reduction, and so viewed as a whole more compactly. Its publication in book form gives it also a permanence and ultimately a wider audience than the original can hope to gain.

This thought of the ephemeral character of the poster as such has, in the first instance, prompted the publication of this volume. A poster serving the purposes of a war, even of such a world cataclysm as that during which we have passed during the last five years, is by its nature a creation of the moment, its business being to seize an opportunity as it passes, to force a sentiment into a great passion, to answer an immediate need, or to illuminate an episode which may be forgotten in the tremendous sequence of a few days events. In its brief existence the poster is battered by the rain or faded by the sun, then pasted over with another message more urgent still. Save for the very limited number of copies that wise collectors have preserved, the actual posters of the Great War will be lost and forgotten in fifty years.