Tour of En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I at the Special Collections Exhibition Gallery – 9:30 a.m.

On the centenary of the Great War’s commencement, En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I explores the conflict through French graphic illustration of the period. The exhibition presents themes essential to a deeper understanding of the war in France: patriotism, propaganda, the soldier’s experience, as well as the mobilization of the home front as seen through fashion, humor, and children’s literature. Like no other conflict before it, the Great War was a war of images. Its scale, duration, and intensity were brought home to the public by media and technologies that, in some cases, were well established, but in others seemed novel and even startling. Films, photographs, lithographic posters, illustrated books, prints, and postcards—many in huge quantities—were part of an international propaganda effort that had few parallels before or since. It offered special opportunities to artists with established reputations and rich possibilities for those just beginning their careers.