LACMA exhibit reflects media’s impact in World War I

The last decade has seen an increased amount of media concerning The Great War, which can be attributed to its recent centenary. We saw Sam Mendes’ film “1917” win the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in 2020 and a second movie adaptation of “All Quiet on the Western Front” was released recently on Netflix. However, a new exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), “Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media,” aims to bring a new perspective to this wave of content by exploring how the media spectacle influenced, represented and propagandized the global fighting. 

The exhibit, curated by Timothy O. Benson and opened on December 3, identifies four essential roles of media, which organize its array of mixed media contents: mobilizing the masses, imagining the battlefield, facilitating the global war, and containing the aftermath. The first section of the exhibition (“Mobilizing the Masses”) explores how art and other types of media were used to encourage each citizen’s dedication to the war effort; the exhibit begins with a series of propagandistic posters and prints which motivate enlistment into the military whether through patriotic images of Uncle Sam (I want YOU for U.S. Army) or through Harry Hopps’ demonic portrayals of Germany as an apelike monster holding a struggling Lady Liberty in his arms. 

“Imagining the Battlefield” explains how the media bridged the gap between soldiers and civilians with various interpretations of the frontlines. In this section, the mixed media nature of the exhibit – which includes paintings, posters and photographs as well as film and audio clips – is especially valuable because new advancements in photography and film helped this war, and its unprecedented human toll, to be documented more authentically than any other up to that point. Visitors to the exhibit are similarly immersed in an array of mass media, allowing us to experience what might have been felt by the media-consuming public during this time frame. While looking at a mural-sized photograph of troops in “No Man’s Land,” for example, the viewer also simultaneously takes in the commotion of conversations and bombing noises from the surrounding film clips.

A unique part of the First World War displayed in “Facilitating the Global War” was the involvement of diverse groups of people within the European war effort; one work of French painter Raymond Desvarreux portrays Native American “code-talkers” while another portrays a Black soldier in the segregated 15th Infantry of the New York National Guard. Furthermore, Benson does not ignore the contributions that were made to the war by those living in Europe’s colonial holdings; A lithograph print by depicts an enthusiastic Senegalese soldier fighting among his French and Indo-Chinese comrades. A seating area with available headphones allows visitors to listen to haunting audio recordings of those taken as war prisoners, including those from the colonies fighting in the European war. 

“Imagined Fronts” concludes wth an examination of how the media contained the aftermath of the First World War — how the media viewed itself, how it depicted recuperating soldiers, and how we ended up in a similarly devastating global conflict less than 20 years later. Conrad Felixmuller’s work “Soldier in Madhouse” is an essential part of this summary, demonstrating how soldiers suffering from what was then referred to as “shell shock” (nowadays, PTSD) were left after the war. “Vote Social Democratic,” a poster created by 1923 poster, which uses a collage of documents which refer to the devastation of the war to encourage votes for the political party, a testament to how the war changed the European political landscape. 

As LACMA CEO Michael Govan said, “LACMA has long been at the forefront of exploring how the intersection of art, media and technology affects the ways in which we see the world.” “Imagined Fronts” does just that, informing visitors how this war was truly carried by the media, and allows us to reflect on its ever-present role today. The diverse array of materials “Imagined Fronts” presents are at the very least creatively arranged; it immerses us in a historical event which art critic Christopher Knight claims is a “blank spot in the American habit of forgetfulness.” 

The exhibit is located in the Resnick Pavilion building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will be available until July 7, 2024. 

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