Flags and Faces: The Visual Culture of America's First World WarFlags and Faces, based on David LubinÕs 2008 Franklin D. Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas, shows how American artists, photographers, and graphic designers helped shape public perceptions about World War I. In the bookÕs first section, ÒArt for WarÕs Sake,Ó Lubin considers how flag-based patriotic imagery prompted Americans to intervene in Europe in 1917. Trading on current anxieties about class, gender, and nationhood, American visual culture made war with Germany seem inevitable. The second section, ÒFixing Faces,Ó contemplates the corrosive effects of the war on soldiers who literally lost their faces on the battlefield, and on their families back home. Unable to endure distasteful reminders of warÕs brutality, postwar Americans grew obsessed with physical beauty, as seen in the simultaneous rise of cosmetic surgery, the makeup industry, beauty pageants, and the cult of screen goddesses such as Greta Garbo, who was worshipped for the masklike perfection of her face. Engaging, provocative, and filled with arresting and at times disturbing illustrations, Flags and Faces offers striking new insights into American art and visual culture from 1915 to 1930. |
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Advertising aesthetic American Art Anna Coleman Ladd Art for War's Art Museum artists beauty Belázs campaign Childe Hassam City depicted Early Morning Edward Steichen Elsie de Wolfe eyes facial Fifth Avenue film Fixing Faces Figure French Friedrich Garbo's face gas mask George Bellows German Gillies glamour Glamour Photography Greta Garbo Harvard Hassam's flag paintings Henry Tonks History Hollywood House of Morgan human images Ivan Albright Liberty Loan Library of Congress look Lusitania Lyrical Left magazine makeup modern movie Murphy lectures Museum of Art nation Noire et blanche nose Notes to Pages Oil on canvas Otto Dix Paintings of Childe patriotic Paul Strand Pennell photograph plastic surgery political Portrait Masks posters postwar preparedness radical Randolph Bourne Rights Society Rubinstein sculpted social soldiers Spreckley Stimson studio surgical symbol tion ugliness United University Press viewers Visual Culture Wall Street War’s War's Sake Figure women World wounds York young