War Posters Issued by Belligerent and Neutral Nations 1914-1919 Part 1

War Posters Issued by Belligerent and Neutral Nations 1914-1919.

by Various.

I.--POSTERS AND THE WAR

Never in the history of the world have the accessories of ordinary civilised life met with so searching a test of their essential quality as during the War. All national effort throughout the belligerent countries was organised and directed to serve a single purpose of supreme importance. This purpose in its turn served as a touchstone to sort out whatever was useful and valuable in everyday things, and shaped the selected elements into weapons of immense power. The poster, hitherto the successful handmaid of commerce, was immediately recognised as a means of national propaganda with unlimited possibilities. Its value as an educative or stimulative influence was more and more appreciated. In the stress of war its function of impressing an idea quickly, vividly, and lastingly, together with the widest publicity, was soon recognised. While humble citizens were still trying to evade a stern age-limit by a jaunty air and juvenile appearance, the poster was mobilised and doing its bit.

Activity in poster production was not confined to Great Britain. France, as in all matters where Art is concerned, triumphantly took the field, and soon had h.o.a.rdings covered with posters, many of which will take a lasting place in the history of Art. Germany and Austria, from the very outset of the War, seized upon the poster as the most powerful and speedy method of swaying popular opinion. Even before the War, we had much to learn from the concentrated power, the force of design, the economy of means, which made German posters sing out from a wall like a defiant blare of trumpets. Their posters issued during the War are even more aggressive; but it is the function of a poster to act as a "mailed fist," and our ill.u.s.trations will show that, whatever else may be their faults, the posters of Germany have a force and character that make most of our own seem insipid and tame.

Here in Great Britain the earliest days of the War saw available s.p.a.ces everywhere covered with posters cheap in sentiment, and conveying childish and vulgar appeals to a patriotism already stirred far beyond the conception of the artists who designed them or the authorities responsible for their distribution.[1] This, perhaps, was inevitable in a country such as ours. The grimness of the world-struggle was not realised in its intensity until driven home by staggering blows at our very life as a nation. Then, and not till then, a Government which was always halting to "wait and see," or moving slowly behind the nation, at last got into its stride. Artists understood the call and responded. The poster, inspired by an enthusiasm unknown before, became the one form of Art answering to the needs of the moment, an instrument driving home into every mind its emphatic moral and definite message. It is characteristic that the first truly impa.s.sioned posters we saw in England were in aid of Belgian refugees or the Belgian Red Cross. They dealt with the violation of Belgium; and the stirring appeal of the work done by G. Spencer Pryse and Frank Brangwyn, R.A., in those early days will always linger in the memory.

So numerous were the posters issued in every country, both by the Governments concerned and the various committees dealing with relief work and other aspects of the War, that the international collection acquired by the Imperial War Museum exceeds twenty thousand. Large numbers of these, many of them consisting of letterpress only, are outside the scope of the present volume, which is intended to make accessible to the public in a convenient form reproductions of a small selection distinguished for their artistic merit. The collection of original War posters acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum has provided most of the ill.u.s.trations. It comprises several hundred posters from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other countries, in addition to those issued by Great Britain and her Allies; and it ill.u.s.trates, in a compact form, the finest artistic uses to which colour-lithography was put as a weapon in the World War.

The small collection made for this volume is necessarily arbitrary. Our ill.u.s.trations are often about one-twelfth the size of the originals, and the limit in size may perhaps be considered to detract from the value of the reproductions. This, however, has been considered, as far as possible, in selecting the examples chosen. A strong, impulsive design does not depend entirely upon size for the force of its appeal, nor does it change in character from being reduced; but a poster badly designed, though pa.s.sable on a large scale, may be an unintelligible jumble in a small ill.u.s.tration. In many cases a design is knit together by its reduction, and so viewed as a whole more compactly. Its publication in book form gives it also a permanence and ultimately a wider audience than the original can hope to gain.

This thought of the ephemeral character of the poster as such has, in the first instance, prompted the publication of this volume. A poster serving the purposes of a war, even of such a world cataclysm as that during which we have pa.s.sed during the last five years, is by its nature a creation of the moment, its business being to seize an opportunity as it pa.s.ses, to force a sentiment into a great pa.s.sion, to answer an immediate need, or to illuminate an episode which may be forgotten in the tremendous sequence of a few days' events. In its brief existence the poster is battered by the rain or faded by the sun, then pasted over with another message more urgent still. Save for the very limited number of copies that wise collectors have preserved, the actual posters of the Great War will be lost and forgotten in fifty years.

But we must not forget that in every country concerned the poster played its part as an essential munition of war. Look through any collection of them, and you will see portrayed, in picture and in legend, which he who runs may read, the whole history of the Great War in its political and economical aspects. The posters of 1914-1918 ill.u.s.trate every phase and difficulty and movement--recruiting for naval, military, and air forces; munition works; war loans; hospitals; Red Cross; Y.M.C.A.; Church Army; food economy; land cultivation; women's work of many kinds; prisoners'

aid--and hundreds of problems and activities in connection with the country's needs. The same sequence of needs can be traced in the posters of Germany and Austria, where a stress even greater than our own is revealed, not merely in the urgent appeals for contributions to war loans, but in the sale by German women of their jewels and their hair.

For obvious reasons only a limited number of the posters could be reproduced in colour, the main portion of the plates in the book being in black and white. But since the primary element counting for success in the poster is design, it follows that excellent colouring will not save a badly-designed poster from failure, however much it enhances the power of one already successful. Indeed, we may go further and claim that ineffective or quite bad colouring often fails to mar entirely the success of a good design. The examples selected are not heavy losers by being reproduced mostly in monotone; for they are essentially posters depending on design and not merely pictorial advertis.e.m.e.nts. Their purpose is innate in their structure; they have their story to tell and message to deliver; it is their business to waylay and hold the pa.s.ser-by, and to impose their meaning upon him. The best of them have done this brilliantly.

II.--GREAT BRITAIN

Shortly after the War began, an "Exhibition of German and Austrian Articles typifying Design" was arranged at the Goldsmiths' Hall, to show the directions in which we had lessons to learn from German trade-compet.i.tors as to the combination of Art and economy applied to ordinary articles of commerce. The walls were hung with German posters, and one felt at once that while our average poster cost perhaps six times as much to produce, it was inferior to its German rival in just those vital qualities of concentrated design, whether of colour or form, and those powers of seizing attention, which are essential to the very nature of a poster.

While we have had individual poster artists, such as Nicholson, Pryde, and Beardsley, whose work has touched perhaps a higher level than has ever been reached on the Continent, our general conception of what is good and valuable in a poster has been almost entirely wrong. The advertising agent and the business firm rarely get away from the popular idea that a poster must be a picture, and that the purpose of every picture is to "point a moral and adorn a tale." They seldom realise that poster art and pictorial art have essentially different aims. If a British firm wishes to advertise beer, it insists on an artist producing a picture of a publican's brawny and veined arm holding out a pot of beer during closed hours to a policeman; or a Gargantuan bottle towering above the houses and dense crowds of a market-place; or a fox-terrier climbing on to a table and wondering what it is "master likes so much"--all in posters produced at great expense with an enormous range of colour. The German, on the other hand--there was an example at the Goldsmiths' Hall--designs a single pot of amber, foaming beer, with the name of the firm in one good spot of lettering below. It is printed at small cost, in two or three flat colours; but it shouts "beer" at the pa.s.ser-by. It would make even Mr.

p.u.s.s.yfoot thirsty to glance at it.

Our British love for a story in a picture has accounted for an immense amount of ingenious artistry falling into amorphous ineffectiveness. It is the essence of the poster that it should compel attention; grip by an instantaneous appeal; hit out, as it were, with a straight left. It must convey an idea rather than a story. From its very nature it must be simple, not complex, in its methods. If it has something eccentric or bizarre about it, so long as it is good in design, that is a good quality rather than a fault. Even about the best of our war posters one feels that they are too often enlarged drawings, excellent as lithographs to preserve in a collector's portfolio, but ineffective when valued in relation to the essential services that a poster is required to render. We must regretfully admit that when it comes to choosing ill.u.s.trations for a volume such as this on their merits as posters, not as pictures, it is difficult not to give a totally disproportionate s.p.a.ce to posters made in Germany.

Our British war posters are too well known and too recent in our memory to require any lengthy introduction or comment. The first official recognition of their value to the nation was during the recruiting campaign which began towards the close of 1914. The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee gave commissions for more than a hundred posters, of which two and a half million copies were distributed throughout the British Isles. We hope it is not true that, in their wisdom and aloofness, they refused the offer of a free gift of a six-sheet poster by Mr. Frank Brangwyn, R.A. It is, at any rate, certain that they possessed a poor degree of artistic perception, and, added to this, a very low notion of the mentality of the British public. Hardly one of the early posters had the slightest claim to recognition as a product of fine art; most of them were examples of what any art school would teach should be avoided in crude design and atrocious lettering. Among the best and most efficient, however, may be mentioned Alfred Leete's "Kitchener." But if one compares Leete's head of Kitchener, "Your Country Needs You," with Louis Oppenheim's "Hindenburg," the latter, with its rugged force and reserve of colour, stands as an example of the direction in which Germany tends to beat us in poster art.

While these early official posters perhaps served their purpose--and if they did, it was thanks to the good spirit of the British public and not to the artistic merit of the posters themselves--a series of recruiting posters was issued by the London Electric Railways Company. Even before the War, this Company, or rather their business manager, Mr. F. Pick (for in regard to posters Mr. Pick might well say "L'etat, c'est moi"), was setting an example in poster work by securing the services of the best artists of the day. Their recruiting posters were a real contribution to modern art. They served their purpose, and at the same time were dignified in conception, design, and draughtsmanship. Standing high among them in n.o.bility of appeal and power of drawing were Brangwyn's "Britain's Call to Arms," and Spencer Pryse's "Only Road for an Englishman."

Though they were not issued till 1916, we might mention here the series published by the London Electric Railways Company at the time when the restrictions regarding paper prevented the general distribution of posters at home. It was then that the Company thought of the friendly idea of sending to our troops overseas a greeting of the kind so many of them had been familiar with in old days in London. Four posters, to awaken thoughts of pleasant homely things, were sent out for use in dug-outs and huts in France and other places abroad. Each was headed with the words: "The Underground Railways of London, knowing how many of their pa.s.sengers are now engaged on important business in France and other parts of the world, send out this reminder of home." The drawings were the free gifts of the artists who designed them--George Clausen, R.A., Charles Sims, R.A., F.

Ernest Jackson, and J. Walter West. It was a most admirable idea, admirably carried out, and, as were their recruiting posters, a p.r.o.nounced testimony to the patriotic and disinterested att.i.tude of a great business inst.i.tution. Everyone who served abroad knows how much these posters were appreciated as a decoration in Army messes, Y.M.C.A. huts, and elsewhere.

To return to the official use of posters, very much better work was produced in 1915 by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, and also under the auspices of the Ministry of Information, the authorities having learned at last that, at home, a poster might be a work of art, and that, abroad, an "official artist" might be deemed worthy of a subaltern's rank, rations, and emoluments. Among good posters for which the Government was at this time responsible may be mentioned Bernard Partridge's "Take up the Sword of Justice," Guy Lips...o...b..'s "Our Flag," Doris Hatt's "St. George,"

Caffyn's "Come along, Boys," and Ravenhill's "The Watchers of the Seas."

In this connection it is amusing to recall a wireless message circulated from Berlin on October 2, 1915, in which appeared the statement: "To-day the exhibition of all English recruiting posters published up to the present was opened for the benefit of the German Aeronautic Fund. The exhibition is a great material success, notwithstanding the general disappointment at the poor and inartistic designs." It is, of course, an essential part of national propaganda to decry the quality of whatever is produced by the enemy; but we must admit that in this instance some truth was embodied in the judgment of these hostile critics. It came as a wholesome counterblast to the probably inspired laudatory articles which a little before this date had appeared in our own Press telling us of "several million of forceful and often fine" posters, and that "the h.o.a.rdings of England have never borne a better message conveyed in a better manner." That many of the posters were comparative failures goes without saying: and there was one real blunder. In connection with the War Savings Campaign the Ministry had the excellent idea of using as a poster Whistler's famous masterpiece--his "Portrait of the Artist's Mother," now in the Louvre. Nothing could have been better: but then they got someone to write across the beautiful background, in paltry lettering, "Old age must come." There could be no better example of our British idea of enforcing a moral. It was an act of vandalism--impossible in France--almost as cruel as the firing of a sh.e.l.l into Rheims Cathedral.

And Whistler, who spent hours in considering where he should place his dainty little b.u.t.terfly signature, must have turned in his grave, or wished that he could have returned to earth to produce a new edition of his "Gentle Art of Making Enemies."

To Mr. G. Spencer Pryse belongs the honour of first realising in actual productions the needs of the time. Mr. Pryse was in Antwerp at the outbreak of war, and thus was an eye-witness of much of the tragedy which overtook Belgium. On the actual scenes of the evacuation were founded his pathetic lithograph of the Belgian refugees struggling into steamers to escape from the advancing terror. Shortly after, he obtained a commission to act as a despatch-rider for the Belgian Government, in which capacity he visited all parts of the front line both in Belgium and in France, and saw a good deal of desultory fighting. Before he was wounded, he drew several of the series of nine lithographs ent.i.tled "The Autumn Campaign, 1914," which were published early in 1915. His poster "The Only Road for an Englishman" was of the same period, followed soon afterwards by his powerful pictorial appeal on behalf of the Belgian Red Cross Fund. It is interesting to know that even under the most difficult conditions, and under fire, his drawings were made, not on paper, but on actual lithographic stones carried for the purpose in his motor-car.

The outstanding figure among poster artists, both in quant.i.ty and for technical accomplishment, was Mr. Frank Brangwyn, R.A. His "Britain's Call to Arms" was produced in 1914 by the Underground Railways Company, and circulated in large numbers. The huge lithographic stone upon which this was drawn was subsequently presented, as the joint gift of Sir Charles Cheers Wakefield, Lord Mayor of London, and the artist, to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it is preserved and exhibited. His invention and activity as a designer of war posters were very considerable. The number of poster designs from his hand produced during the War is at least fifty, without taking into account such additional work as the propaganda lithographs published by the Ministry of Information. Though Mr.

Brangwyn's first war poster was prepared in conjunction with the Underground Railways, he was always willing and eager to make designs for any deserving cause, and among the committees he a.s.sisted by his vigorous work may be named the 1914 War Society, the Belgian and Allies' Aid League, the National Inst.i.tute for the Blind, and the _Daily Mail_ Red Cross Fund. Practically all these posters were done as a free gift by the artist; and their number and quality stand as a splendid record of national service. Heaven preserve Mr. Brangwyn from an O.B.E.! But one wonders whether the Government has no suitable reward for one who spared no effort and sacrificed himself and his time and talent in a purely impersonal desire to serve his country.

III.--FRANCE

Before the Beggarstaff Brothers initiated the reform movement in British poster art--the early phase of which, despite the effective colour sense of Walter Crane, pa.s.sed away all too soon with the death of Aubrey Beardsley--Cheret, Steinlen, and Mucha were already at work in France, the first and eldest of these masters being practically the creator of the modern poster in its more individual characteristics. A good deal of the Victorian heaviness was still with us in the eighteen-nineties: we liked good solid meals; our theatres offered us feasts of ponderous sentimentality; and so the British merchant and advertising agent, employing a poster artist, bade him tell us of the things we liked best--sauces, soaps, melodramas, tea, and stout. For still the idea was prevalent that the successful advertiser appealed to his public most when he told them about something they already knew and liked: a sweet domestic scene to linger in the memory after dinner and remind them of Tompkins'

pills; or a pleasant landscape executed with a kaleidoscopic richness of colour to persuade one to buy Fishville Sauce. There were, of course, many striking exceptions to this; but it was generally true enough to justify the American observer's criticism that British posters mostly depicted things to eat, or soap.

But France, being by temperament, by environment, and by tradition a far more artistic nation, with a much higher standard of general taste, responded more readily to the lighter and more fascinating touch of those artists who chose the street and the theatre entrance as their gallery. It is more than fifty years since Cheret started on his flamboyant comet-like career, setting Paris aflame (so to speak) with joyously wild, irresponsible visions of colour and line, delicate and fantastic.

Steinlen, Mucha, Gra.s.set, Toulouse-Lautrec, Willette, Bonnard, Guillaume, and others worked with him in more recent days, and among these are artists who have done masterly posters for France during the War.

It is still with the greatest reluctance that a drawing, even when it conveys a definite suggestion clearly, is accepted in England unless it is "finished": the value of a work of art is reckoned in accordance with the amount of patient craftsmanship which it displays. The French poster artist, on the contrary--and he obviously has the public as his supporter, or his vogue would cease--is often content to throw upon the s.p.a.ce at his command what, on this side of the Channel, any advertising agent would scoff at and reject as a "mere sketch." If the French artist can convey his suggestion, his idea, in a few hasty lines or brilliant touches of colour, he knows that his work is done, and is well content.

Looking at the French war posters as a whole, one feels that in no other country has there been the same poignant appeal, the same presence of a deeply-felt emotion. And these have been transferred to the posters with a spontaneity, a lightness, and an expressive sufficiency that make the French poster stand alone. Take the posters of Steinlen, Faivre, Willette, Poulbot, and that versatile master, Roll, whose death occurred while these notes were being prepared. They each have the brilliant quality of a sketch by a man who is master of his material. They are drawn with the fine, free gesture of the born narrator. All the balance and compactness of the French _conte_ are there, with every line inducing to intensity of expression. In the figures there is nothing of English photographic precision, nothing of Germany's force and brutality, but always a note of intense sympathy, of something subtly human. Rapid, slight, they may be; but there is a greatness and endurance in their design and their appeal.

The _poilu_, in the trenches or _en permission_, the _gamin_ of the streets, the worker in the field or hospital, the invalid who has been smitten by the heavy blows of war, are alive in these swift chalk-drawn studies.

The whole difference between the British and the French outlook is summed up in Jules Abel Faivre's poster for the _Journee Nationale des Tuberculeux_, with the poignant appeal of the figure in its luminous envelopment of sea and sky. There is no need for any vandal to write his descriptive note across the face of this to drive its message home. The sad tale is told at a glance; and its brief legend--"Sauvons-les" (Let us save them)--is not necessary to make the meaning clear, but rather it delivers an additional message--a note of resolution and purpose--to the awakened sympathy when the picture has done its work. Here everything necessary is said: not a superfluous touch to mar its purpose, nor a touch too little. Yet an English advertiser would never have been content with those two comforting hands which pathetically suggest so much. The suggestion to him would have been totally inadequate, and he would have insisted on a full-length nurse in uniform, or a hospital ward, and medicine bottles, and all sorts of needless detail.

In the earliest months of the War France was perhaps too heavily shocked by the onslaught, and too busily engaged in material organisation, to give much attention to the subject of posters. But for the _Journee du Poilu_ at Christmas-time, 1915 Steinlen, Faivre, Neumon, Poulbot, and Willette contributed designs which immediately set upon French war posters the stamp of genuine understanding of the purpose in view and appreciation of the material at disposal. So, through a long series of War Loan posters, "Flag-day" appeals, and posters relating to every phase of life where advertis.e.m.e.nt could be a valuable thing till the welcome end was reached, French artists produced an incomparable variety of brilliant designs, in which gaiety, pathos, humour, and tragedy were touched with a characteristic lightness of hand, and often touched with true greatness of conception.

Among those who have done the most distinguished work the artists named above have contributed a large proportion. Jules Abel Faivre, whose "Sauvons-les" has already been referred to at length, has perhaps earned more individual fame by his designs than any other French poster artist during the War. Several of his lithographs approach greatness, and two--the "Sauvons-les" and "On les aura!" both of which are ill.u.s.trated in this book--can be said confidently to attain it. In its way nothing could be better also than Poulbot's sketch of children collecting for the _Journee du Poilu_--"Pour que papa vienne en permission, s'il vous plait."

This artist has done several other very excellent posters, showing an intense understanding and appreciation of child life. The humour of Willette, exemplified in the delightful "Enfin seuls...!", reproduced here as ill.u.s.tration No. 31, and the dramatic sense of Charles Fouqueray, find ample material for expression, and in their hands it is finely used. Roll, the more complete artist, versatile and subtle in his work, master of many styles, proved that he, too, could design an appealing poster, as the fifth plate in this book testifies.

The poster artists of France were not to the same degree overshadowed by one great executant as were those of England by Brangwyn. But for all that, a figure stands out before the rest, both by his power as a craftsman and the weight and strength of his individual characteristics.

Theophile Alexandre Steinlen was at work upon posters twenty-five years ago, and even then he ranked among the first three or four leaders of this branch of art. Like Brangwyn in England, he is a master of the medium he uses--a great lithographer, whose consummate sense of draughtsmanship and design serves him in the expression of n.o.ble thought and in portraying the emotions of a profound, large-hearted patriot.

Mention must also be made of the posters by the distinguished Alsatian artist Hansi--a keen patriot, who was willing to spend himself generously in the service of an Alsace longing for freedom from the yoke of Germany.

The German Government offered a reward for information that should lead to his arrest, and issued proclamations to that effect, ostensibly on the plea that he had evaded service in their army, but actually because of the pen and brush that in his hands were powerful weapons which they could not afford to despise. His posters depict the fraternisation of French soldiers with the people of Alsace, and one of them the raising of the victorious tricolour once more over the Cathedral of Strasbourg. All honour to the artist, who, in the face of danger, and a fugitive from death, remained the supporter of a cause still far off from victory--a patriot whose work was full of courage and hope for an oppressed people.

IV.--GERMANY: AUSTRO-HUNGARY.

Though we are dealing in this volume with pictorial posters, it is difficult to refrain from mentioning the poster proclamations issued by the Germans on their occupation of Belgium. Many of these proclamations, of great historical interest, are in the possession of the Imperial War Museum. One of the earliest, posted at Ha.s.selt on August 17, 1914, immediately after the occupation of the town, threatens to kill a third of the male inhabitants should the German troops be fired upon. Another, posted in Andenne on August 21, 1914, states that by order of the German authorities about three hundred inhabitants had been ma.s.sacred or burnt alive, and that those of the men who were unscathed were taken as hostages and the women made to clear away the pools of blood and remove the corpses.

The most poignant of these poster proclamations are two in regard to the executions of Nurse Cavell and Captain Fryatt. The bill, signed by General von Bissing, October 12, 1915, issued at Brussels and printed in French on blue paper, announces that Nurse Cavell has been shot, with others.

Captain Fryatt had also been shot before the publication of the proclamation relative to him. This doc.u.ment, signed by Admiral von Schroder, dated at Bruges, July 27, 1916, and printed in German, Flemish, and French, in parallel sections, reads:

"Charles Fryatt, of Southampton, captain in the English Merchant Service, who, although not enrolled in the armed forces of the enemy, attempted on March 28, 1915, to destroy a German submarine by ramming. For this act he was condemned to death by the Naval Council of War and executed. A perverse act thus received its just, if tardy, chastis.e.m.e.nt."

The only known copy of this poster is in the possession of the French Government, as evidence of German iniquity for which reparation must be exacted. It is worth noting that all these proclamations are rude specimens of typography, a fact indicating the difficulty which the Germans had in getting them printed.