Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture

Epilogue

JEFFREY T. SCHNAPP Epilogue n olitical posters serve as a bridge between the new public sphere constituted by mass communications and the streets and squares that are the theaters of modern mass politics. They were (and in many developing countries they remain ) among the visual protagonists of the industrial metropolis , layered many high and many deep on kiosks and walls like the strata of a sociopolitical geology in which plate-tectonic shifts are measured in weeks rather than millennia. Pointing backward to the broadsheets of the eighteenth century and forward to the flickering pixels of late twentieth-century television advertising, these agents of mass persuasion come into their own with the widespread diffusion of industrial chromolithography at the conclusion of the nineteenth century. The emergence of posters as a dominant feature of the early twentieth-century cityscape cannot be explained by invoking technological factors alone. Aloys Senefelder’s discovery of lithography dates back to 1798. Godefroy Engelmann patented chromolithography thirty years later. By the mid-nineteenth century, a wholesale mechanization of paper production was under way, and the costs associated with color printing began to diminish due to the accelerated drying times obtained through the blending into printing inks of solvents like benzene. 370 JEFFREY T. SCHNAPP However significant, none of these developments guaranteed the rise to prominence of posters in general and of political posters in particular. Rather, posters triumphed within the broader setting of that second industrial revolution, which saw an explosion of new forms of mass communication in response to the cultural, sociopolitical, and economic needs created by industrialization, by the growth of literacy rates, and by the extension of suffrage to ever greater sectors of the population in modern nation-states. Sellers of goods, providers of services, entertainment venues, publishers, the state, protest movements, and labor unions—to mention but a few social actors —all required an inexpensive, fast, and efficient conduit to the multitudes: multitudes equipped with highly variable degrees of visual and verbal literacy; multitudes who could not always be counted upon to read daily newspapers; multitudes on foot and riding public conveyances, distracted and on the move. Before the advent of radio and television, that conduit was largely provided by posters. As the essays in this volume amply demonstrate, World War I marks a key threshold with respect to the role assumed by political posters. The reasons are adduced by every contributor : the distinctive challenges that the first fully mechanized war posed to the governments of modern nation-states; their need for recruitment campaigns to enroll ordinary citizens into mass armies; their reliance upon bond campaigns launched on the domestic front to support the war effort; their struggle to maintain the public’s faith in the face of the sheer scale and brutality of the war’s carnage. These challenges were shared by the governments of every combatant nation. (The addition of Italy, Austro-Hungary, Canada, Australia, and Japan to the book’s mix would leave the picture unaltered.) Yet behind these global challenges there are local stories to be told: stories of how specific artistic traditions inflect or deflect the messages EPILOGUE 371 of political poster art, of how the soldier-heroes whom posters celebrate are inscribed into genealogical myths stretching back to the nation’s beginnings, of how enemies are not just dehumanized in the generic sense but also transformed into an Other that is irreducibly opposed to the national Self. Within these local stories are embedded tales more local still: of visual or verbal twists and turns added by individual artists, of works produced by independent groups and communities in tension with more mainstream state-sponsored messages. The concept of propaganda does little to capture the complex layerings just evoked. If propaganda aims to “paralyze thought, to prevent discrimination and to condition individuals to act as a mass,” then the corpus of works examined here surely qualifies as propagandistic.1 Yet to reduce it to mere propaganda , assuming (which I do not) that mere propaganda even exists, would be to miss the nuances, ambivalences, and even artistry that the essays are careful to tease out. Some things are beyond dispute—that World War I posters were weapons in a battle for public opinion, that they were deployed to propagate myths of collective redemption and damnation, that the artists who created them operated under sometimes severe ideological and artistic constraints. To acknowledge this...