Crossfire--Cover Girls, Cinematic Convoys, and Canvases in Circulation: US Art and Entertainment Around World War II

During World War II, battle-fatigued American GIs encountered radio, periodicals, and Hollywood films. On leave, they saw Broadway plays and the newest fashions. Understudied is the fact that US artists contributed to these same mass media systems, shaping the era’s visual culture. As this generation passes away some 80 years later, preserving this history becomes more urgent, as symposia demonstrated (Université Paris Diderot, 2019; Courtauld, 2021).

This session seeks wide-ranging papers that critically re-examine 1940s US art (1938-1952) and its relationship to the era’s entertainment industries. It asks how artists transformed and created images within these media networks. Dynamic cinematic images, the visual glut of periodicals, and highly personalized images while radio listening afford sites for reassessing the art, illustration, and propaganda posters of this pivotal decade. This session welcomes submissions exploring interchanges between art, image circulation, and entertainment, as creators addressed issues of censorship, social justice, and identity, echoing current struggles of war and media oversaturation.

Examining interactions between 1940s US art and entertainment, this session invites submissions from students, scholars, and curators focusing on, but not limited to, the following:

How did Hollywood cinema and radio broadcasting inform art-making?

How did artists shape Broadway and fashion industry networks?

What can 1940s periodical illustrations tell us about the multifaceted realisms that circulated throughout the era?

How did artists and media creators fight against oppression––fascism, internment, homophobia, sexism, racism?

How did entertainment and visual culture drive home-front knowledge of wartime technologies (conquering battlefield diseases, advances in communications, atomic warfare)?