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Weapons of Mass Communication: War Posters
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Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Rd, London, SE1 6HZ
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- When Time Out put a call out to readers asking for a candidate to represent the magazine in the London mayoral elections, the image chosen to illustrate the story was a no-brainer: Lord Kitchener’s famous pointing finger. First seen on WWI recruiting posters and thereafter a landmark of British iconography, Alfred Leete’s image is one of nearly 300 war posters on display at the Imperial War Museum’s new exhibition on the art of propaganda, ‘Weapons of Mass Communication’, which comes with an excellent accompanying book of the same title by James Aulich (£20, Thames & Hudson).
‘We’ve got 15,000 posters in our collection,’ says Richard Slocombe, the exhibition curator, ‘covering the spread of the last century from the British recruitment campaign of 1914, right up to 2003, with a poster from the coalition in Iraq warning against terrorism.’
Arranged in chronological order, the posters offer a fascinating insight into war, nationalism and xenophobia that is beautiful, horrifying and hilarious. Images range from the extraordinary anti-semitism of the Nazis to the steely-chinned idealism of the Americans, via breezy sexism, religious iconography, historical allegory, ludicrous camp, art deco, surrealism, impressionism, advertising and protest.
‘Propaganda is born through the poster, but the poster itself goes through an awful lot of development,’ says Slocombe, and it’s intriguing to see how posters change their message even during the course of one campaign. The British WWI posters are a case in point: at first the recruitment aims to sell the war as a great adventure – a huge crowd of soldiers is pictured cheering beneath the slogan ‘Come and join this happy throng off to the front’ – but within a year, emotional blackmail was being employed, most notably in Savile Lumley’s notorious, ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’ By the end of the war, focus had shifted: one poster depicts a group of fashionably attired women preparing for the future. ‘They represent the newly empowered citizenry,’ says Slocombe. ‘The images of Britannia and George and the dragon are starting to look tired. That rhetoric no longer washed and people wanted something back.’
What makes the exhibition particularly interesting is that it allows us to see what different countries are doing at the same time. Some themes are shared – a coin crushing the enemy is used by France, the UK and Austria-Hungary – but often there is a wild divergence. Compare the smart Tommy flogging Oxo with the ragged, snaggle-toothed French Poilu (‘hairy one’); the flint-eyed, pseudo-Christian German soldier with the gleeful bomb-riding American sailor – the latter an image borrowed by Kubrick for the closing scene of ‘Dr Strangelove’.
In WWII, these changes are even more marked. While the Nazis used powerful Art Deco Aryan-eulogising iconography, the Russians flogged the worker and the Red Flag for all they were worth. American posters offered an ideal of pluralism and freedom of speech (‘given the madness in Europe, no wonder people wanted a slice of America,’ says Slocombe), while the UK focused on the home front, with the non-militaristic ‘Dig for victory’ campaign, and promises to rebuild Britain’s crumbling infrastructure in the post-war world – ‘very pragmatic ideas, creatively presented,’ says Slocombe. This period also saw some of the worst demonising of the enemy, as well as some of the most strikingly original art, particularly that relating to the Spanish Civil War.
The exhibition closes with a look at the way propaganda posters have now been utilised by anti-war campaigners, from the deliberately amateurish style of anti-Vietnam protesters to the powerful and sophisticated brand identity of the current Stop The War Coalition, which uses famous artists and massive advertising agencies to get their message across.
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1 comment
As one of the founders of the Stop the War Coalition I enjoyed both the Imperial War Museum exhibition Weapons of Mass Communication and Peter Watts' review of the exhibitionin Time Out. But I must make just one important correction to Peter's review. He claims that the Stop the War Coalition uses 'massive advertising agencies' to get its message across. But this has never been the case. We neither have the money or the inclination to use such agencies. Infact we've done it the old way~volunteers and mass involvement. There is no better way...I'd be grateful if you could include this on your letters page.
Thanks,
John Rees, Stop the War Coalition