Bulletin Board Patriotism

To get the propaganda of patriotism under way, many a U.S. patriot has been thinking about posters. By last week, some of these thoughts had already taken shape, were ready for the nation's bulletin board:

> Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which three months ago decided that the best way for artists to attract the Government's attention was to compete for it, last week opened an exhibition of 30 prize-and merit-winning posters on defense subjects. They were as different from 1917's posters as World War II from War I: in none of them was any gauze, sentimentality, misty goddesses.

With a composition as clean as an Airacobra's wing, Vienna-born Posterman Joseph Binder won $500 for the best design for Army Air Corps recruiting. A deft color job that made the most of his abstractionist science won Painter John Atherton of Ridgefield, Conn, first money for the best poster boosting Treasury defense bonds. The Treasury announced that it would purchase Atherton's winner and 16 others. The Army promised to take a look at the best work in the Army Air Corps division.

> In Washington, onetime Commercial Artist William B. Phillips of Office of Emergency Management's Information Division, with the aid of N. W. Ayer's Art Director Charles Coiner, had rounded up 24 of the top-drawer U.S. postermen, had already finished two nifty jobs for OPM. Adviser Coiner (who designed NRA's Blue Eagle) did the first one; the other was by Jean Carlu, famed one-armed French posterman, now in the U.S., whose mural blandishments on behalf of French railways were once widely known and chuckled at in France.

With more jobs as slick as Carlu's, OEM's poster outfit may become a central art bureau working for all defense agencies. Besides the OPM assignment, it is doing jobs for the Agriculture and Interior Departments and the Civil Service Commission. Proud of its products, it pays artists $250 for big color posters. Trade fee for such work would be $500.

> FORTUNE, in its forthcoming August issue, will present a portfolio of privately devised defense posters by Joseph Binder, George Giusti, Herbert Bayer, Howard Liberman, Jean Carlu, Edward Steichen.

When it comes to art, both Army and Navy still hanker after gauze and goddesses. The Army's prime favorite is still James Montgomery Flagg's World War I Uncle Sam, pointing imperiously and saying: "I Want YOU." The Navy's oldtime winner was a throat-catcher Howard Chandler Christy--a wistful girl who says: "Gee, I wish I were a man--I'd join the Navy." The Navy is itching to use it again.

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