WWI: The Invention of Modern Propaganda
War posters, with Catharina Slautterback of the Boston Athenaeum
At the Boston Athenaeum, Catharina Slautterback presides over a collection of thousands of posters from the First World War, which make for an interesting parallel case to the war’s photography. Select posters are being presented starting on September 10 and running through January 2015 in an exhibition entitled “Over Here!: World War I Posters from Around the World.”
Ms. Slautterback chose three posters that seemed to her to show how Britain, Germany, and France established themselves as fearsome war powers on the homefront.
Audio excerpts of our interview are included below each image.
This one stands out because of its high-design aesthetic, not in the conservative magazine style of most of the war posters. It might just as well come from the Summer of Love, except for the array of knives on it. And Slautterback points out that we miss the violence of this poster because of its modern look, even to the point of forgetting what the bayonets are supposed to do.
This German poster touts “Our Smashing Success” in 1914: the wreck of Liège, Belgium, using shells just like this one, in the first battle of the war. Throughout the Germans preferred the blackletter typefaces and monochrome compositions seen here, which make for a harsh contrast with some of the rainbow-colored optimistic American examples on show at theMuseum of Fine Arts.
The Howitzer that fired this shell (depicted at Originalgröße, or full size, on the poster) came to be known as Dicke Bertha, or “Big Bertha”. It was so named, some say, for Bertha Krupp, the heiress and director of the Krupps corporation, which then made armaments and today makes coffee machines.
Slautterback’s last poster was intended to celebrate, or at least raise money for, an army of black Africans fighting fiercely alongside French soldiers. But what is this drawing supposed to do: amuse, impress or terrify? And why did all those feelings seem to lie so close together when it came to this war, and not to others?
The tree, Slautterback says, is a motif of these posters: it promised that, come spring, the war would end happily.
Thanks to Catharina Slautterback and Patricia Boulos of the Boston Athenaeum for arranging this interview and for providing images. Their exhibition, “Over Here!: World War I Posters from Around the World”, runs from September 10, 2014, to January 31, 2015.
