Items13The creator’s order
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Lord Kitchener Wants YouThe most copied image in wartime persuasion began as a magazine cover, not a government commission: Alfred Leete drew Lord Kitchener for London Opinion in 1914, and the design was then adapted as a recruiting poster. Its lesson is direct address. The foreshortened finger and level stare single out…0 - 2
Daddy, What Did You Do in the Great War?No enemy, no trench, no flag. Savile Lumley's 1915 poster for the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee sets the war in an armchair some years later, where a child asks the title question and the father's uneasy face supplies the answer he cannot give. The idea came from a printer, Arthur Gunn, who is…0 - 3
On les aura! (1916 poster)One of France's most celebrated posters of the war sold debt, not enlistment. Jules-Abel Faivre's 1916 design for the Second National Defense Loan shows an ordinary soldier, rifle at his side, arm flung up as he calls his comrades on, in a pose that echoes François Rude's volunteers on the Arc de…0 - 4
Helft uns siegen! (1917 poster)Germany's answer to the war loan appeal points no finger and promises no glory. Fritz Erler's soldier for the sixth war loan of 1917 wears the new steel helmet, a gas mask and grenades, barbed wire around him, and simply looks past the viewer. "Help us win!" is asked on his behalf.
Set beside the…0 - 5
I Want You for U.S. Army (1917 poster)James Montgomery Flagg openly borrowed the Kitchener pose and handed it to Uncle Sam, using his own reflection for the face. More than four million copies were printed in 1917 and 1918.
Seen next to its British model, it shows how a proven technique travels and improves. The direct stare and…0 - 6
Destroy This Mad Brute (1917 poster)Harry R. Hopps's Army recruiting poster turns Germany into a giant ape in a spiked helmet marked "Militarism," wading ashore with a half-dressed woman who stands for America and a bloodied club labeled "Kultur." The message is that the war will come to American soil unless men enlist now.
It is…0 - 7
Have You Volunteered? (1920 poster)Proof that a technique has no politics. During the Russian Civil War, Dmitry Moor took the same pointing finger that Britain and America had used and gave it to a Red Army soldier, rifle in hand, factory chimneys smoking behind him. The Russian word for "You" fills the top corner in red, so the…0 - 8
Madrid: The "Military" Practice of the Rebels (1937 poster)This is the hardest poster on the list to look at, and that was the point. The Spanish Republic's Ministry of Propaganda set a photograph of a dead child, morgue tags still attached, against bombers flying in formation, and printed it in English and French rather than Spanish.
Two shifts make it…0 - 9
Keep Calm and Carry OnThe most famous British poster of the Second World War is one most Britons never saw during it. The Ministry of Information designed it in 1939 as one of three morale posters and printed almost 2.5 million copies, but kept this one in reserve for a German invasion, while its siblings "Freedom Is in…0 - 10
Careless Talk Costs Lives (propaganda)Britain's campaign against loose talk ran in several tones at once, which is what makes it worth studying. It began in February 1940 with the Punch cartoonist Fougasse, who drew the Ministry of Information's warnings for free and made them funny, so readers could recognize themselves without…0
