Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture

5. Young Blood: Parisian Schoolgirls’ Transformation of France’s Great War Poster Aesthetic

MARK LEVITCH Young Blood: Parisian Schoolgirls’ Transformation of France’s Great War Poster Aesthetic I n May 1918 poster hangers plastered bakery and store windows , post offices, trams, metro stations, and innumerable walls throughout Paris and the provinces with yet another series of wartime illustrated propaganda posters. The series of sixteen small-scale posters urged the French to conserve materials such as meat, sugar, coal, and gas, all in desperately short supply in this, the fourth—and though few could have predicted it, final—year of the First World War. The conservation theme of the posters was unexceptional, but their designs, by French wartime standards, were unprecedented (figs. 22–24). Bright colors, disorienting perspective, and naive drawing and lettering marked a complete break from the erstwhile dominant wartime poster style—sober compositions in which color had been virtually banished in favor of a self-consciously artful hand-drawn line. Yet despite what was by 1918 an increasingly divided cultural-political atmosphere, both the popular press and specialized art publications across the spectrum acclaimed the innovative new posters—albeit not for their fresh designs alone. The posters were equally heralded for being the creations of promising new French artistic blood: Parisian schoolgirls between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. The proximate cause of the government’s poster project 146 MARK LEVITCH was the need to boost morale amid Paris’s desperate late-war material shortages, and it was exceptionally shrewd propaganda . If children could face the war’s privations with the goodhumored abnegation suggested in their cheerful posters, then certainly Parisian adults had no business complaining about restrictions. The posters also resonated, however, well beyond their short-term propaganda value. Stylistically they challenged the prevailing grave wartime poster aesthetic, which itself re- flected deeper cultural ideas about what public art was appropriate during the war; children’s art, with its seemingly unimpugnable sincerity, became the only acceptable method of Fig. 22. Marthe Picard (16 years old), “Mangez moins de viande pour ménager notre cheptel“ (Eat less meat and save our livestock ), 1918. Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC2-4058, Library of Congress. YOUNG BLOOD 147 injecting color into what had been a virtually colorless visual culture. On a structural level, the posters—by virtue of their style and authorship—hinted at an imminent shift in the organization of French decorative arts, a branch in need of renewal if France were to compete economically with its German rival. The posters resulted from a state-sponsored competition launched in early 1918. The minister of provisions, Victor Boret, had recently viewed the exhibition “Le dessin dans les écoles primaires municipales pendant la guerre” (Drawing in the municipal primary schools during the war), showing Paris work in the city’s Musée Galliera in June 1917. The show had Fig. 23. Yvonne Vernet (14 years old), “Economisons le pain en mangeant des pommes de terre“ (Save bread by eating potatoes ), 1918. Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC2-4053, Library of Congress. 148 MARK LEVITCH generated great enthusiasm among both the public and the art elite, and the minister was convinced that using war-related children’s drawings like those he had seen at the show “would be a profitable means of propaganda.”1 A few months later, with war-related shortages worsening and war weariness growing, Boret initiated “voluntary restrictions” to supplement the already extensive rationing program.2 While intended to stretch limited home front resources further, thereby freeing unused materials for the war effort, the campaign was ultimately more moral than practical: launched amid the “patriotic gloom” that had set in after the workers’ strikes and army mutinies of spring 1917, which represented the first serious cracks in the Fig. 24. G. Douanne (16 years old), “Soignons la basse-cour. Je suis une brave poule de guerre. Je mange peu et produis beaucoup” (Let’s take care of the poultry. I am a fine war hen. I eat little and produce a lot), 1918. Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC2-4064, Library of Congress. YOUNG BLOOD 149 public’s ongoing support of the war effort, the new program was intended to remind restive civilians that the war’s outcome depended on their continued steadfastness and that any sacri fice they were asked to make was less onerous than that being made by soldiers.3 Minister Boret approached the organizer of the Musée Galliera exhibition, Paul Simons, principal inspector...