Posted September 2nd, 2009 by Kate. Filed under Art, Conservation
The following blog post was written by Sara Croft, Print Room Intern. She worked out of the Registration Department which is part of the Collection Support Division of the IMA. Her project was to do a physical inventory of our flatfiles in our Print Room Storage. This included many W.W.I and W.W.II posters.

Sara Croft
The current economic situation is an issue that is known to all living generations. Those of us who understand the purpose of being “green” act as if the idea is, or should be, second nature. However, there was a time when people all around the world needed to be taught how to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Some of it was so extreme that it became propaganda, specifically during the first and second world wars.
As an intern in the Print and Drawing department, I have uncovered some of this propaganda in the form of war posters. The IMA houses a variety of French, Russian, British, Canadian, Mexican, and American posters with subject matter pertaining to war bonds, consumption, food rationing, health and safety issues, enlistment, and many other topics.
Many of these posters ended up at the Herron Art Institute during both world wars. They first arrived when the school became a site for men to register for the draft, two months after the first war. It would have been important for young men to be surrounded by war propaganda while they enlisted in the military as to create high morale. Whether the poster constructed an image of a clean shaven, happy soldier with a bright smile or it showed the excitement and joy of being out of the battlefield, those images became iconic to those on the home front who only knew of those images when they thought about their loved ones at war. There was no such thing of live Internet feed or constant updates of information that would have actually shown the tumultuous lives the soldiers were really living.

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