Art: Posters for Britain

Two months ago, shortly after the U. S. Government had carried out its destroyers-for-bases deal with England, William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies decided to hold a competition for a poster to help publicize its work. The Committee was promptly swamped by some 1,000 entries. Last week the Committee put 90 of them on exhibition in Manhattan, asked the public to help a gilt-edged jury pick the winners. On their choice for first prize both public and jury agreed. It was a picture of a bleak, bare no man’s land on which a solitary, leafless tree stood silhouetted. Its simple motto: “Lest we regret. . . .” Its painter: Manhattan freelance Commercial Artist Arthur Hawkins Jr.

Of the remaining entries, some were better art than poster art. Most commented on of all were four queer-looking items which were neither, but which might well have brought awesome whispers from fanciers of U. S. primitives. These were by a bedridden ex-gob named Robert S. Owen, who painted them while lying on his back in his Colorado Springs home. Painter Owen’s posters, reminiscent of the childlike, words-of-one-syllable cartoons of Hearstman Nelson Harding, belched and dripped with arson and mayhem, made Europe’s troubles look like a chamber of horrors. In one a bolshevik-bearded, Kaiser-helmeted Nazi labeled Absolutism horsewhipped a half-clad damsel named Humanity, while the sausagelike corpses of Liberty and Justice lay strewn behind them across the map of Europe. Circumspect White Committee officials, who feared Painter Owen’s horror scenes might affect stomachs rather than sympathies, hung them inconspicuously, hoped nobody would pay much attention to them. “No wonder he is bedridden,” shuddered one official.