Hope & Fear

Hope & Fear vividly illustrated two opposing approaches to this conflict: pro-war posters, and the War Series lithographs of George Bellows. Some of America’s most well-known illustrators created posters for the war effort, intended to assist the government in persuading citizens to embrace the importance of U.S. involvement in “Europe’s war.” Meanwhile, Bellows’s dark, tragic lithographs live on the other side of the spectrum through their portrayal of wartime brutalities and victims. These highly pained scenes illustrate Bellows’s personal take on the atrocities German soldiers inflicted upon the innocent civilians of neutral Belgium.