The Art of Devastation, Part 7: The End of War

The Art of Devastation exhibition, jointly presented by the American Numismatic Society and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, explores for the first time on American soil the intertwined roles of posters and medals not just among European authorities, artists, and audiences, but among those on this side of the Atlantic as well, where they also served to shape public opinion of the war and help steer Americans into it. The original exhibit ran from January 27–April 9, 2017 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.

Cartoonist and poster artist Bert Thomas rendered British soldiers feeding a machine gun with war bonds instead of bullets in this poster published in 1918 by the National War Savings Committee. The Committee became a major producer of British posters during the latter part of the war, and Thomas supplied many of those, and through it became an official artist for the war bonds campaign. A long-serving, prolific cartoonist for Punch and London Opinion, Thomas was born in Newport, Wales, and apprenticed with a metal engraver while launching his cartooning career for newspapers in Swansea. His war posters frequently carry a modern, concise design with a judicious use of flat planes of colors and words. They frequently call to mind posters by artists in the German Sachplakat movement and those by the Beggarstaff Brothers in Britain in the late 1890s.

(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of John T. Spaulding, RES.37.1117. Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Jules Abel Faivre was one of the most well known war-poster artists and cartoonists in France. This memorable poster from 1918 advertised France’s Liberation Loan, also called the Fourth National Defense Loan, which sought to raise funds for the war effort. Using a style that prized the art and skill of drawing, Faivre portrayed a robust array of Allied flags bearing down upon a subdued Kaiser Wilhelm II. Born in Lyon, Faivre trained there at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts and in Paris at the École Julian. He is perhaps most well known for his illustrations for Le Rire, L’Assiette au Beurre, and other satirical magazines and the newspaper Le Figaro. Although French artists devised war posters in a number of representational styles, many of them with training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and other traditional art schools relished a conservative approach in their posters that was rooted in rigorous training in drawing the figure.

(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of John T. Spaulding, RES.37.658. Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

In this lithographic poster from 1918, the American painter and illustrator Haskell Coffin rendered an allegorical figure of winged Victory carrying a sword and palm branch. Filling the sheet, she exemplifies the American Renaissance ideals of beauty and classicism prevalent in art in the US at the end of the 19th century. A plea for buying war savings stamps and encouraging thrift, the poster urged viewers to “save for your country, save for yourself.” In Coffin’s words, he chose to render a “lyric” version of Victory, favoring “sweetness and tenderness” over the “vain and glorious” (The Elevator Constructor 16, no. 5, May 1919). Coffin preferred depicting young, attractive, and fashionable women as his main subjects, and these images often graced the covers of magazines, such as Leslie’s Illustrated, Photoplay, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, he moved with his family to Washington, D.C., and trained there at the Corcoran School of Art and with the academic painter Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris at the Académie Julian.

(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of John T. Spaulding, RES.37.705. Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Signed on June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the event that launched the war, the Treaty of Versailles brought the conflict officially to a close. The treaty required that Germany accept guilt for starting the war, accept terms that were designed to weaken the country militarily, and accept crippling war reparations to the Allies. By the mid-1920s, attempts were made to renegotiate some of the terms as Germany’s economy crashed and political instability was rampant. By the mid-1930s, with the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, the Germans began to repudiate the terms as vindictive and harsh. By the end of the decade, a newly remilitarized and spiteful Germany attacked its neighbors launching the Second World War.