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.