Olin & Uris Libraries

Along with heroic iconography, artists often relied on landscape imagery to inspire nationalistic pride. Connecting agrarian tradition with peace, they offered idyllic scenes of farming in stark contrast to the war-scarred European battlefields with their ominous barbed wire and endless trenches. In one instance, an uncredited German recruitment poster asks young men to enlist as the best way to protect rural traditions. In another, the Hungarian artist Pal Sujan’s design for a fundraising exhibition in Pozsony (now known by its Slovakian name, Bratislava) recalls Van Gogh’s wheatfields literally and stylistically, which he has set jarringly against the mechanical arm that a veteran must use to harvest wheat. The illustrator and graphic designer Edward Penfield similarly used agricultural imagery. Penfield’s design was commissioned by the United States Food Administration (under the direction of Herbert Hoover) to persuade Americans to conserve wheat and preserve the U.S. food supply for military efforts.