With powerful, often shocking immediacy, the 317 posters reproduced and discussed in this volume document the political and military conflicts of our century. These works reveal their meaning most clearly when we do not relegate them to the function of illustrating a text or see them merely as specimens of the applied arts, but take them seriously as unique combinations of historical witness and aesthetic object. Drawn from Russia, Central and Western Europe, and the United States, from the turn of the century to the aftermath of the Second World War, the posters form a bridge between the claims of ideology and the state on the one hand and the support or submission of millions of men and women on the other. How can men be persuaded to fight for their party or country, and how can women be convinced to enter the workforce in wartime and retreat to the home when their men return? How can women be brought to believe that losing their husbands and sons is a noble sacrifice? Where can money be found to pay for the costs of the war and of reconstruction? Are guilt, compassion, and fear sufficient to bind the homefront to the fighting men? What is the most effective way to dehumanize the enemy, whether foreign or domestic? These are some of the issues that the posters in this volume lay bare and begin to explain. Together text and image open fresh perspectives on half a century of war, revolution, and renewed war, and point toward a new kind of integrative history. Except for seven posters, the images in this book are from the archives of the Hoover Institution on War, Peace and Revolution at Stanford University. Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, Herbert Hoover began to collect documents, including posters, from the warring powers. He laid the foundation for one of the world's great poster collections, now consisting of some 75,000 posters as well as of nearly 40,000 proclamations and other purely typographical announcements.
Reproducing 317 posters in the Hoover Institution's collection from the Soviet Union, western and central Europe and the United States, this punchy survey focuses on the two world wars, but also traces events and styles from the Belle Epoque to postwar Europe. Among the book's interesting revelations: during WW I, American and British posters used images of atrocity far more frequently than did German posters, while Russia and Germany were the principal exploiters of atrocity propaganda in WW II. American visual responses to the Second World War ranged from Ben Shahn's sophisticated attack on Nazi brutality to crude, racist caricatures of Japanese. Post-1945 posters include graphics protesting Stalinist repression, nuclear arms, German remilitatization and U.S. intervention in Vietnam. In their thoughtful narrative, Peter Paret (a Princeton historian), Lewis (an art historian at the College of Wooster in Ohio) and Paul Paret (a graduate student in art history) consider posters both as works of applied art and as agents of persuasion and control. History Book Club selection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This handsome, powerful, and disturbing book collects 317 examples from the Hoover Institution's choice collection of war propaganda posters, primarily from the period 1915-45. Posters from major combatants are presented in their historical context, giving vivid reminders of the poster's power to persuade and inflame (among the images shown are a ratlike creature caught in a "Jap trap" and the "eternal Jew" depicted as a usurer). The book is better focused than similar efforts, such as Walton Rawls's Wake Up America!: World War I and the American Poster ( LJ 1/89). Unfortunately, coverage since 1945 is much too brief, scarcely acknowledging the poster's role in Vietnam War protests or the recent democratic revolutions. However, this book will have permanent value in any political history collection.
- Stephen Rees, Bucks Cty. Free Lib., Levittown, Pa.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
