Describing Images of the National Self: Popular Accounts of the Construction of Pictorial Identity in the First World War Poster

Abstract

The First World War poster can claim a place of particular importance in any study of the ways in which ideas about national identity have been given pictorial form. The unprecedented scale of international poster production during the war years can be seen in retrospect to have signalled the emergence of modern graphic design, with its recognition of the need to communicate effectively with a mass audience. This is not to suggest that the designers of these posters appeared, as from nowhere, with a brand new set of ideas about nationhood and how it could be rendered visible; many of them had established reputations in the fine arts, in advertising or in political cartooning prior to the war. What the switch to the medium of the war poster changed was the scope of the artists' responsibilities. Instead of addressing, say, the typical Punch reader or exhibition-goer, they now faced the challenge of devising ways of conveying the imperatives of the war message to a far larger and potentially less attentive audience. Principal among those imperatives, regardless of the specific purpose of individual poster designs, was the idea that the national self was distinct from (and superior to) the enemy other. The subject of the present article is the way in which the poster's role in the construction and maintenance of a national consciousness was discussed in contemporary writings in Britain and the United States.1 How far was the novelty of the poster artist's task recognised at the time, and in what terms was it described? The answers are in some ways surprising: the war poster's handling of national identity was certainly discussed in a very different way to that of the longer-established medium of the political cartoon. An example will help here. Some of the most outspoken British commentary on the depiction of enemy nations during the First World War occurred in the twenty-six part 'Land & Water' Edition of Raemaekers Cartoons, which was published fortnightly in London from February 1916 onwards. At the price of a shilling, each part featured a dozen cartoons by the Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers, each onejuxtaposed with a page of text by a British writer. This unusual but revealing format, in which, as it were, a fixed and approved interpretation of the propaganda image is presented to the reader alongside that image, used texts by such well-known writers as Hilaire Belloc, John Buchan and G. K. Chesterton. The texts frequently drew particular attention to the physical characteristics of the depicted Germans in order to emphasise their ridiculousness or their loathsomeness. Taking for granted the truthfulness of Raemaekers's depiction of one enemy soldier, for instance, Chesterton wrote that 'to be conquered by such Germans as these would be like being eaten by slugs' 2 Central to the integrity of Raemaekers's vision was the idea of his objectivity, as Sue Malvern has noted. Part 1 of the series had a preface by Henry Asquith which stated that Raemaekers 'shows us our enemies as they appear to the unbiased eyes of a neutral', and the same issue also described the artist as being 'entirely sincere and untouched by racial or national prejudice'.3 If Raemaekers's objectivity allowed him to present the truth of the enemy body, it was his 'genius' which was described as enabling him to reveal that body to be the outer sign of something more profound and collective. As Horace Annesley Vachell wrote of the drawing 'Serbia' (Fig. 1):