War Posters Research Articles

UKRAINIAN DIGITAL ART DURING THE FULL-SCALE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR

The purpose of the article is to find out how the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war and today's technological innovations affected the artistic community, the themes and the creative methods of Ukrainian digital art. The authors of the investigation, on the one hand, consider the digital works of Nikita Titov, Albina Yaloza, Kateryna Lisova, Mykhailo Rai, Oksana Chepelyk, Yulia Shibirkina, Zibra AI, ZViT, Beata Kurkul and Maria Sharlai, and others, and on the other hand, they highlight the biggest events related to the demonstration of digital art, in particular, “Artists support Ukraine”, “Meta History: Museum of War”, “Peace Letters to Ukraine”, “Art on the battlefront”, “UBIENNALE”, “Ukrainian wartime poster”, and others. The analysis of the collected material revealed that the vast majority of war posters are works of digital art, which in general has become one of the leading media in the work of Ukrainian artists. On the one hand, this was the result of a number of steps taken by the Ukrainian authorities aimed at liberalizing the cryptocurrency market, and encouraging computer game developers to fundraise with the help of NFT in support of Ukraine, on the other hand, the threat of Russian air attacks prompted representatives of the creative class to transfer a significant part of their activity to online, and see the benefits of digital art, which, compared to most traditional media, requires significantly less effort and resources to create, securely store, sell and display. The use of neural networks as a tool to create digital art has become one of the trends in war-themed art, but no catastrophic changes for visual art and design have been detected yet. A significant historical event after February 24, 2022 was the unprecedented support of Ukraine from the world cultural community, in particular, international developers of computer games, as well as famous artists of contemporary art, including Marina Abramovych, Ron Arad, Banksy, Francesco Vezzoli, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Ivan Messak, Lorenzo Quinn, Luke Tuymans, and others.

Islamic art and visualities of war from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic

AbstractThis article explores how Islamic art was produced and used in Turkey within the context of modern warfare during World War I, the War of Independence, and the nascent Republic – a subject still relatively understudied in Turkish history, as well as in international cultural histories of modern warfare and histories of modern art in the Middle East. Drawing on previously overlooked visual and textual sources such as calligraphic panels, miniature paintings, war posters, and religious timetables produced during the years 1914–1924, we examine the ways in which Islamic arts were articulated with the experience of war through both individual actions and official policies, revealing how Ottoman artists tried to make sense of war and how Islamic genres and motifs were appropriated, and sometimes subverted, in the service of the nationalist cause. We show that far from exhibiting a sharp discontinuity, the transition from Ottoman–Islamic to Republican–nationalist artistic content was gradual, involving the reappropriation and repurposing of Islamic motifs and techniques in a manner that reflected the religious mindset of the elites and masses in the early twentieth century.

Mobilizing a Nation: Persuasive Appeals in Vietnamese War Posters

How did the government of North Vietnam use propaganda posters during the Vietnam War (1955–1975) to rally Vietnamese people's support of its war efforts and successfully drive the Americans out of Vietnam? Through an interpretive analysis of the iconography and texts found in 141 posters, this study demonstrates four thematic appeals in Vietnamese posters during the Vietnam War: 1/ Emotional appeals (hate and sympathy; pride and indomitability); 2/ Social unity (dedication; allegiance and solidarity); 3/ Authority and leadership; and 4/ Idealized future. The study delivers fresh insights for research in social marketing, communication, art history, political science, and Asian studies.

ОБРАЗ ВІЙНИ В АМЕРИЦІ ТА ОБРАЗ АМЕРИКИ У ВІЙНІ: СТРАТЕГІЇ ВІЗУАЛЬНОЇ ПРОПАГАНДИ США У 1939-1945 РОКАХ

The article explores the strategy of American visual propaganda during World War II. The author demonstrates how the methods and forms of propaganda reflected the general trends in the socio-political life of the United States from 1939 to 1945. The strategies adopted by the state were aimed at shaping the image of the war within the country, which was geographically distant from the theaters of war, as well as creating practices for representing the image of America in the global conflict. This approach was driven by the fact that the issue of relations between the United States and the outside world, particularly with European countries, was traditionally associated with the problem of self-identification of Americans, who were born as a nation in the struggle against the former metropole. It has been established that the success of military propaganda was ensured, in particular, by the infrastructure of social relations in the field of art created by the New Deal reforms, namely, the Federal Art Project (FAP) program. Collaborating with the state in the 1930s, artists emphasised the «American» and democratic nature of US art, which allowed it to be successfully instrumentalised during the war to serve ideological needs. According to the author, one of the most demonstrative examples is the interpretation of the concept of «Four Freedoms» by F. D. Roosevelt in the paintings of N. Rockwell, who «translated» the president's abstract statements into a visual language understandable to the people. Several projects organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which were supported by US ministries, are also indicative. These include the 1941 war poster competition and the exhibition project «Airways to Peace. An Exhibition of Geography for the Future,» featuring politician W. Willkie. Due to the predominant use of radio and cinema in the dissemination of propaganda, the work of MoMA during World War II acquired special significance: both the artist and the viewer were endowed with an important social function of participating in the defense of the country's freedom and independence. The article shows how the direct involvement of the population in the process of propagating (re)production contributed to the rapid acceptance by Americans of the political goals of the United States during the war and in the post-war world.

Marvel’s Captain America Civil War poster: An analysis based on the Grammar of Visual Design

Movie posters, a multimodal genre used to attract viewers, are a complex form of communication that contains verbal and visual semiotic resources. The entertainment company Marvel has created a cinematic universe where movie posters play an essential role in marketing. Despite Marvel’s global influence in sociocultural practices, few studies investigate its movie posters. Hence, this study analyzes the visual structures used in the Captain America: Civil War theatrical movie poster, drawing on the Grammar of Visual Design, specifically the representational, interactive, and compositional metafunctions. Regarding the representational metafunction, results show a bidirectional transaction, highlighting the faceoff between the two teams of heroes. Their symmetry also hints at classificational processes. Concerning interactional meanings, the heroes gaze at each other, inviting viewers to observe the image from a social distance while keeping some detachment. Moreover, the camera angle creates an equal power relation between the main heroes and viewers. Finally, compositional meanings strengthen the separation between the two teams through different elements, but they simultaneously indicate the teams will reunite. Thus, these three kinds of visual meanings together provide an adequate summary of the movie plot and aptly contribute to the construal of a future conflict between the two teams.

“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

Muriel Rukeyser and the Security of the Imagination: Poetry and Propaganda in 1940s America

This article begins by situating Muriel Rukeyser's call for ‘the security of the imagination’ within the highly charged historical contexts of the 1940s, a decade bracketed not only by war but by America's growing obsession with security – from President Roosevelt's ‘Four Freedoms’ speech of 1941 to the rise of McCarthyism at the end of the forties. It then examines how Rukeyser's work as a propagandist, a poet and an essayist in the 1940s was deeply shaped by her involvement with the American security services. It further shows how Rukeyser sought to combine words and images in both her war posters and her poems in an attempt to forge an expansive, inclusive and antifascist mode of representation. In a significant departure from other studies of this period, this article brings original archival sources into contact with Rukeyser's poetry, and reads these literary and archival documents through the theoretical lens of security studies. In the face of an increasingly paranoid, repressive political climate, Rukeyser's wartime propaganda work and poetry offers ways of thinking past dominant assumptions structuring the discourse of security.

Fighting for a Free World: Ben Shahn and the Art of the War Poster

During the Second World War, the Graphics Division of the Office of War Information played a crucial role in the development of visual propaganda in American culture. Revisiting this period and in ...

Vizual'nyy yazyk «krasnykh» i «belykh» plakatov perioda Grazhdanskaya voyny v Rossii

Vizual'nyy yazyk «krasnykh» i «belykh» plakatov perioda Grazhdanskaya voyny v Rossii

The Cognitive Principle of Relevance and its Application to Anti Iraq War Posters

Relevance theory is a psychological model for understanding the cognitive interpretation of language, was developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986 and republished in 1995. They argue that the thing that causes an input to stand out from others is its relevance to the receiver and that every utterance creates in the addressee an expectation of relevance. The underlying assumption of relevance theory is that in any given context, the addressee has to assume that what people say is relevant. In this paper the problem of the cognitive principle of relevance theory presented by Sperber and Wilson is approached in its application to the posters painted by people who are opposing an American led war against Iraq. The analysis will be conducted to find out how these posters achieve a successful communication and how is that the audience recognizes that the designer of each poster has something to say that matters, something that is relevant and how the addressee understands the content of these posters and how he/she uses their cognition to interpret the posters’ contents and finds them relevant as they are apposing the war against Iraq.

Aesthetics, Ethics, and Poster Art in World War I France and the United States

After briefly reviewing current scholarship on illustrated posters, their state of conservation in key archives, and their utility as a source for writing history, this article contrasts the mechanisms of poster production and distribution in France and the United States, then highlights key differences in posters’ form and discursive content. Whereas artists and government officials in the United States embraced the direct transfer of commercial advertising strategies to war posters, cultivating sensationalist motifs that emphasized American moral superiority, demonized the German enemy, and eroticized warfare, the French created a distinctly humanistic style of war poster that rejected prewar advertising norms in favor of a somber realism emphasizing the suffering, dignity, and commitment to duty of soldiers and civilians alike.

From Empowerment to Domesticity: The Case of Rosie the Riveter and the WWII Campaign

During WWII American women were asked to join in producing the “vital machinery of war” by working in factories building planes, by being nurses, and by being pilots among other jobs. Getting women to work in industries was a tremendous sales proposition as stated by Paul McNutt, the director of the War Manpower Commission in 1943. The war posters and magazine ads of the time reinforced the duty women had towards the war effort. Although women at the time were mostly occupying the private space, the war campaign of Rosie the Riveter inspired many of them to take their work to the public. This descriptive paper tried to answer the following two questions of inquiry: How did women’s employment during WWII become a temporary empowerment and what short and long-term changes in women’s lives were brought about by the war campaign of Rosie the Riveter. While the short-term changes brought women back to the private space and domesticity, some of the conclusions of the long-term changes in women’s lives dealt with variations in the workspace, salary, and military benefits. The influence of how empowered women felt following Rosie the Riveter is an inconclusive collection of the voices of those women during and after WWII.

The War on the Wall. Polish and Soviet War Posters Analysis

Every war is not only the fight of the armies but also a war of the ideologies. One of the forms of the ideological war is propaganda posters. Over forty posters presented and analyzed in this article come from the Polish-Soviet war in 1919-1921. The research work is based on grounded theory procedures adopted for visual data analyses. Particularly useful was a method of coding families worked out by Barney Glaser and modified to the visual data analysis by Krzysztof Konecki. The author reconstructed several basic motifs, formal solutions, and communication strategies (i.e., continuity and continuation versus avant-garde and revolution, image of the enemy and “one’s own” imagination, strategic conversion) used by artists-ideologists from both sides of the conflict.

Examining the Evolution of Cinematic Posters of the Decades 1981 – 2001s

By far, the examination of the evolution of cinematic posters of war in 1360-80 in Iranian cinema is mostly from the perspective of aesthetics. The purpose of aesthetics concerns with technological advances in graphics technology and photography and its professional application in forming the posters. War posters in the 1981 were mostly designed by hand which was more costly due to lack of facilities and technology. By the advent of the computer to the field of designing, a new form of poster designation has been started. Over time, the impact of technology will be manifested. This development (the use of computer - photography) is somewhat peaked in the 2001. Given the above, we reach the conclusion that the posters of the Iranian cinema had a developing evolution since the 1981's as the computers and photography played a significant role in improving the posters which bring savings in cost and time.

The renaissance of 'Keep Calm and Carry On'

ABSTRACT In the twenty-first century, 'Keep Calm and Carry On' and other Second World War posters have grown in popularity, particularly in the United Kingdom, but also globally. This article returns us to the original history of 'Keep Calm and Carry On': how it was planned, prepared, created and then abandoned in 1939. We consider why the Second World War remains important in British memories, and how the poster, rediscovered in 2000, has become so important in more recent times of recession.

Picture this: World War I posters and visual culture

I. Introduction Reading World War I Posters. Pearl James (University of Kentucky) Imaginings of War: Posters the Shadow of the Lost Generation. Jay Winter (Yale University) II. War Poster Campaigns Images: Comparative Readings Clash of Civilizations: Representations of the Hun in British American War Posters. Nicoletta F. Gullace (University of New Hampshire) Iron Warriors versus Chivalrous Knights--Military Virtues versus Civic Values: German British Representations of the Battle of Materiel and Slaughter. Stefan Goebel (University of Kent) Regression Versus Progression: Comparing Fundamental Differences in the Language of German American Posters of the First World War. Jason Lieblang (University of Toronto) Jakub Kazecki (University of British Columbia) III. Envisioning the Nation Imagining National Aesthetics Young Blood: Parisian Schoolgirls' Transformation of France's Great War Poster Aesthetic. Mark Levitch (University of Pennsylvania) Race Empire in French Posters of the Great War. Richard S. Fogarty (SUNY-Albany) Images of Racial Pride: African American Propaganda Posters in the First World War. Jennifer D. Keene (Chapman University) Segodniashnnii Lubok: Art, War, National Identity. Andrew Nedd (Savannah College) IV. Figuring the Body in the Context of War Images of Femininity in American World War I Posters. Pearl James (University of Kentucky) Humanitarians He-Men: Recruitment Posters the Masculine Ideal. Meg Albrinck (Lakeland College) Iconography of Injury: Encountering the Wounded Soldier's Body in American Poster Art Photography of World War I. John M. Kinder (Indiana University) Epilogue. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Stanford University)

War posters: weapons of mass communication

Published to accompany an exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum, this book features more than 250 superb full-color illustrations of hard-hitting propaganda and groundbreaking graphic art. It encompasses iconic images such as Alfred Leete's Your Country Needs You as well as additional material drawn from the world of advertising and documentary photographs of posters in situ. Through posters, the author examines the social, political, ethnic, and cultural aspirations of America, Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Covering topics as diverse as advertising in World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, Germany and Occupied Europe in World War II, anti-nuclear campaigns, and Vietnam, the book is comprehensive and highly analytical, yet accessible.

Japan against Japan

On December 8, 1941, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, a prominent émigré Japanese artist in New York, awoke to find himself an “enemy alien” after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. “A few short days has changed my status in this country, although I myself have not changed at all,” Kuniyoshi wrote. His statement reveals astute foresight into a new historical period in which he would have to grapple with his racial and national identity vis-à-vis Japan, the country of his birth, and the United States, his adopted home.This essay examines the underlying contradictions in Kuniyoshi's wartime work, in particular his "anti-Japan" war posters for the Office of War Information, the federal agency in charge of war propaganda. The government's enlistment became a double-edged sword, for it simultaneously recognized Kuniyoshi's American artist status as the basis of enlistment, and reinforced his “Japanese-ness” that rendered him the “enemy.” His war posters became critical loci where Kuniyoshi negotiated through vexing issues of allegiance, loyalty and self-preservation.

Canadian National Identity through the Prism of First and Second World War Propaganda Posters

War posters often call upon a series of symbols and personifications of the nation in order to spark the citizen’s sense of patriotic duty. In the case of Canada, the propaganda posters produced during the two world wars allow us to study the creation process for this common register of symbols. On one level, the posters illustrate the movement from the status of dominion within the Empire to that of independent nation. This change in status obliged the country to invent a series of national symbols, and to discard the First World War strategy of appealing to isolated groups of citizens according to their ethnic or cultural origins. The Second World War posters reveal the federal government’s plan to create a new pan-Canadian nationalism, a process that would continue into the 1960s.

Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War

In the popular imagination, World War I stands for the horror of all wars. The unprecedented scale of the war and the mechanized weaponry it introduced to battle brought an abrupt end to the romantic idea that soldiers were somehow knights in shining armor who always vanquished their foes and saved the day. Yet the concept of chivalry still played a crucial role in how soldiers saw themselves in the conflict. Here for the first time, Allen J. Frantzen traces these chivalric ideals from the Great War back to their origins in the Middle Ages and shows how they resulted in highly influential models of behavior for men in combat. Drawing on a wide selection of literature and images from the medieval period, along with photographs, memorials, postcards, war posters, and film from both sides of the front, Frantzen shows how such media shaped a chivalric ideal of male sacrifice based on the Passion of Jesus Christ. He demonstrates, for instance, how the wounded body of Christ became the inspiration for heroic male suffering in battle. For some men, the Crucifixion inspired a culture of revenge, one in which Christ's bleeding wounds were venerated as badges of valor and honor. For others, Christ's sacrifice inspired action more in line with his teachings?a daring stay of hands or reason not to visit death upon one's enemies. Lavishly illustrated and eloquently written, Bloody Good will be must reading for anyone interested in World War I and the influence of Christian ideas on modern life.