Flags and Faces - (Franklin D. Murphy Lectures) by David M Lubin (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"Basing its arguments on considerable research, Flags and Faces asks us to reconsider American visual culture at a critical modernist moment, in light of the Great War. This is vintage Lubin: freewheeling, incredibly smart, and hugely inventive."--E. Bruce Robertson, Professor, Historyof Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara

"David Lubin's characteristically forceful and lucid approach to the interpretation of American visual culture during times of stress is on full display in Flags and Faces. The book's correlation of male faces damaged by war with the 1920s cult of the ideal female face (on film and elsewhere) is particularly ingenious and convincing."--Hollis Clayson, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University

Review Quotes

"An interesting and brief introduction to America's visual culture in the context of World War I."--Susana Rocha Teixeira "H-Net (H-Soz-u-Kult)" (9/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

David M. Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, teaches art history, film studies, and popular culture. His books include Act of Portrayal, Picturing a Nation, the BFI monograph Titanic, and Shooting Kennedy, which received the Smithsonian Institution's Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in American art.