Flags and Faces - The Visual Culture of America''s First World War

"From the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 to the declaration of war against Germany in 1917, American artists and designers used their well-honed visual skills to campaign for or against intervention. During this period, Old Glory assumed its present role as a patriotic icon. After the war, as Americans tried to forget the horrors their soldiers had encountered abroad, medical advances in facial reconstruction for disfigured combatants gave rise to cosmetic plastic surgery and a flourishing makeup industry, elements in a conspicuously new distaste for plainness and aging and obsession with youth and beauty. Flags and Faces analyzes these respective aspects of American visual culture in the shadow of the First World War"--Provided by publisher.

Summary

Flags and Faces, based on David Lubin’s 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 book’s first section, “Art for War’s Sake,” 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, “Fixing Faces,” 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 war’s 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.

Product details

• Authors: David M Lubin, David M. Lubin, Lubin David M.
• Assisted by: David M. Lubin (Editor)
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 21.02.2015
• EAN: 9780520283633
• ISBN: 978-0-520-28363-3
• No. of pages: 124
• Series: Franklin D. Murphy Lectures; Franklin D. Murphy Lectures
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries; USA, First World War, ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945), HISTORY / Military / United States, ART / American / General, History of Art, Art treatments & subjects, United States of America, USA, Early 20th century c 1900 to c 1950, Art & design styles: c 1900 to c 1960, c 1914 to c 1918 (including WW1), The Arts: treatments and subjects, c 1914 to c 1918 (World War One period), HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / World War I