News: Wartime Posters go Digital
May 27, 2003, received from Michael Moody
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The Imperial War Museum in London and Manchester Metropolitan
University have been awarded over £300,000 by the Arts and
Humanities Research Board to fund a three-year project to
catalogue, digitally photograph and publish online 10,000
posters from the Museum's internationally important
collection.
Posters to be included in the project include British recruiting posters issued during the first two years of the First World War such as Alfred Leete's famous design of Lord Kitchener, as well as designs by well-known artists such as Abram Games and Fougasse (C K Bird). The collection also includes German posters, and illustrates the high quality of German and Austro-Hungarian graphic design during the First World War period, notably by designers like Ludwig Hohlwien, Lucian Bernhard and Hans Rudi Erdt. French posters included in the project are principally concerned with war savings and charities, and contain designs by Abel Faivre, Sem, Steinlen, Lucien Jonas and Poulbot. This is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its type in Britain, documenting the social, political, ethnic and cultural aspirations of various nations from the First World War to more recent-conflicts. The project will open up a large proportion of the poster collection to academic, curatorial and general audiences for the first time. A searchable database will be made available through the Visual Arts Data Service (www.vads.ahds.ac.uk) and through the Museum's website (www.iwm.org.uk). An archive of high resolution images will also be created, which will be available for future research and reproduction purposes. This resource will be online from Summer 2004. For further information and images please contact Vanessa Berman on 020 7416 5316, vberman@iwm.org.uk |