Flags and Faces : The Visual Culture of America's First World War

David M Lubin

ISBN 10: 0520283635 / ISBN 13: 9780520283633

Published by De Gruyter, 2015

About this Item

Neuware - Shows how American artists, photographers, and graphic designers helped to shape public perceptions about World War I. This book considers how flag-based patriotic imagery prompted Americans to intervene in Europe in 1917, and contemplates the corrosive effects of the war on soldiers who lost their faces on the battlefield.

Seller Inventory # 9780520283633

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Flags and Faces : The Visual Culture of America's First World War
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520283635
• ISBN 13: 9780520283633
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 210W x 159H x 14D millimeters 210 millimeters width by 159 millimeters height by 14 millimeters depth
• Weight: 360 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Flags and Faces, based on David Lubin’s 2008 Franklin D. Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas, shows how American artists, photographers, and graphic designers helped shape public perceptions about World War I. In the book’s first section, “Art for War’s Sake,” Lubin considers how flag-based patriotic imagery prompted Americans to intervene in Europe in 1917. Trading on current anxieties about class, gender, and nationhood, American visual culture made war with Germany seem inevitable. The second section, “Fixing Faces,” contemplates the corrosive effects of the war on soldiers who literally lost their faces on the battlefield, and on their families back home. Unable to endure distasteful reminders of war’s brutality, postwar Americans grew obsessed with physical beauty, as seen in the simultaneous rise of cosmetic surgery, the makeup industry, beauty pageants, and the cult of screen goddesses such as Greta Garbo, who was worshipped for the masklike perfection of her face. Engaging, provocative, and filled with arresting and at times disturbing illustrations, Flags and Faces offers striking new insights into American art and visual culture from 1915 to 1930.

About the Author

David M. Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, teaches art history, film studies, and popular culture. His books include Act of Portrayal, Picturing a Nation, the BFI monograph Titanic, and Shooting Kennedy, which received the Smithsonian Institution's Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in American art.