World War I in 40 Posters by Linder Ann P.;

Author:Linder, Ann P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811765305
Publisher: Stackpole Books

How do you sell war loans, enlistment, and charitable contributions to Americans? The same way the ad men had been selling for a decade: communal values of hard work, patriotism, the “get it done” spirit, and, of course, sex. The sexually attractive female resonates (even with women) across a century of American advertising. Even the immensely successful Red Cross fund and membership appeals were driven by images of pretty young women, to say nothing of Howard Chandler Christy’s saucy young beauties encouraging enlistment in the Navy, the Marines, and the Motor Corps of America.68

Gibson consistently encouraged his artists to paint ideas, not events.69 Christy, one of the most popular illustrators in America, clearly took the advice to heart in his depiction of Lady Liberty for the Third Liberty Loan. She stands in the center of the poster beneath a stormy sky, massed formations of troops marching behind her. Her pose is dynamic, brimming with urgency, challenging the viewer with an inescapable dilemma: either fight, or buy bonds—no other courses of action are possible. And with such enticement, who could refuse?

The American posters of the First World War are heavily peopled with the allegorical figures of Liberty and her male counterpart, Uncle Sam. Artists working within Gibson’s injunction to paint ideas turned easily to existing allegorical figures to embody those ideas. America abounded in classically inspired statues of justice and liberty. They were a familiar cultural vocabulary at county courthouses and state capitols across the nation, and the Statue of Liberty, unveiled in 1886, provided a preexisting symbol of American democracy.70 But long before the Statue of Liberty, abstract virtues such as liberty, justice, and truth were embodied as females in art because the nouns designating those abstractions were grammatically feminine in Greek and Latin. The feminine designation descended through the Romance languages, retaining the gendered idea even in languages such as English, where grammatical gender has disappeared.71 This theory also suggests why so many of the allegorical figures in posters, and not only American ones, seem to resemble statues.

Many American posters follow the lead of the Statue of Liberty and depict Liberty as a stern, static figure, clothed in concealing Grecian draperies or the U.S. flag. But Christy gives us a different Liberty, closer to Delacroix’s revolutionary Marianne than to the standard allegorical figure of the period. In the first place, she is very scantily clad for 1917. Her diaphanous draperies cling and reveal rather than flow and conceal. Her navel is visible and her skirt wraps around her thighs in a V-shape, suggesting the pubis. Although she isn’t displaying the bare breast of earlier Liberties, the breasts are barely concealed and her armpit and side are quite bare. This poster probably raised a few eyebrows among the prudish, although many Americans were accustomed to seeing statues in classical dress. With her flowing dark hair and bracketed by two American flags, Liberty’s slender figure and ecstatic expression are meant to entice and challenge. She is an eroticized figure designed to sell, in this case Liberty Bonds.

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