ART OF WAR 2 SERIES

propaganda.ДЄlthough most artists remained in the United States recording life on the home front and producing artwork in the name of national defense, some artists went overseas to capture the realities of combat and war's aftermath.

Wyeth and James Montgomery Flagg, became effective instruments of U.S. Reproduced by the millions on posters, stamps, stickers, and booklets, Benton's and Shahn's images, along with those by other popular artists like N. Shahn's 1942 work This Is Nazi Brutality informed viewers about specific Nazi atrocities committed in Lidice, Czechoslovakia.

ART OF WAR 2 SERIES

Benton's eight-part series of paintings, The Year of Peril, imagined the widespread devastation that a Fascist victory might bring to the United States. Other artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn inspired wartime participation by dramatizing the threat posed by the Axis nations. Originally commissioned by The Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell's paintings were reproduced by the Office of War Information on four million posters, which encouraged war bond purchases and reminded the public of core American values. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address, for example, became the focus of an enormously successful 1943 War Bond campaign. Norman Rockwell's depictions of the ' Four Freedoms' outlined in President Franklin D. Perhaps the most important way in which artists aided the war effort was by allowing various government agencies and corporations to reproduce their works in posters. Throughout the war, the group sponsored several important exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art's 'Road to Victory' show, which paired inspiring photographs with text by the poet Carl Sandburg to boost public morale after the defeat at Pearl Harbor, and the 1943 traveling exhibit 'America and the War,' which brought war-themed artwork to twenty-six cities across the nation. In 1942 twenty-three separate art organizations were consolidated into the Artists for Victory group, which served as the principal liaison between the federal government and the more than ten thousand artists who joined the group. Heeding Grant's call, thousands of artists banded together to create works that would aid national defense and spur the nation to victory. Even before the United States entered the war, the regionalist painter Grant Wood called upon his fellow artists 'to awaken the public to what it stood to lose' while offering his own works depicting the beauty of everyday American life (Haskell, p. Instead of painting murals and running community art centers, federally employed artists were designing camouflage, illustrating military manuals, producing maps, and decorating canteens.ДЄlthough some artists worked directly for the government through programs like the FAP, many more artists served the war effort by creating images that boosted morale and reminded the American public what they were fighting for. The art historian Jonathan Harris estimates that by 'the end of 1941, 80 percent of Project work was being produced for the National Defense Program' (p. In 1940, however, FAP projects shifted from uplifting the spirits of Americans hard hit by the economic ruin of the 1930s to helping the nation prepare for war. Designed to put the nation's artists back to work during the Depression, the FAP sponsored the creation of thousands of public artworks that celebrated regional identities and themes from American history.

Thanks to New Deal programs such as the Federal Art Project (FAP, 1935вЂ“1943), a close working relationship between the federal government and American artists already existed when the United States entered World War II. Depictions of the battlefield and home front incorporated icons of American culture and reinforced the nation's identity as a patriotic, virtuous, and democratic people. Whether serving in military or civilian positions, artists not only helped to create an extensive pictorial record of World War II, but they also aided local and national campaigns to boost morale, promote conservation, sell war bonds, and encourage national unity among all Americans. Although their contributions might not seem as obvious as those of war industry workers, nurses, and servicemen and -women, American painters, sculptors, graphic designers, illustrators, and photographers lent their talents to the war effort in numerous and important ways.

Art of war 2