Enlist
Artist
Laura Brey
Printer
National Printing & Engraving Company, Chicago
United States
Date1917
Dimensions38 x 25 in. (96.5 x 63.5 cm)
ClassificationsPoster
Credit LineGift of Peter A. Blatz
Object numberPH.44
DescriptionLaura Brey was one of only a handful of female artists to design recruitment posters during World War I. She was teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1917 when she won a contest for designing an army and navy recruitment poster (and a $500 prize). The poster contest, one of many held during the war, had been requested by Captain Frank R. Kenney, head of army recruitment in northern Illinois. He announced to the participating students that: “There is in all of us an element that responds to the latent bravery in our blood. That is the thing to reach… every man conceives of himself, at times, as a fighter. I am not an art critic, but I do know that we want to put up posters for the fighters. This is no moment for symbolic stuff.” Brey seems to have heeded this advice in a poster intended to appeal to the upper-class man who is not completely sure he wants to relinquish his comfortable existence for the dangers and hardships of war. In her winning composition, a refined, rather languid man in evening clothes looks wistfully through the window of a shadowy interior at the robust, manly doughboys marching resolutely past under the billowing folds of the U.S. flag. As he considers the question “On Which Side of the Window are YOU?,” he looks toward the sunlit scene as if forming a new sense of clarity about his moral and patriotic duty.On View
Not on view
