The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
James Montgomery Flagg · a recruiting poster of 1917, colour lithograph, the image as printed, scored as one work in its edition · Uncle Sam in half length and frontal, in a top hat with a starred band, a blue coat and a red tie, white goatee and hard gaze, his right forefinger pointed straight out of the sheet at whoever stands before it · below him “I WANT YOU FOR U.S. ARMY” and at the foot “NEAREST RECRUITING STATION”, with a space for the station’s address · made for the recruiting of the United States Army after the country entered the war in April 1917 · copies in the Library of Congress and many other collections · no single sheet is the work
Mode
Recruiting poster: a commissioned instrument of the state, drawn by a magazine illustrator and printed for the street
Mythos
The nation as a stern patriarch who calls the young to war; the elder who sends the sons, made one figure with one gesture
Phase
1917, after the American entry into the war in April; the British pointing figure of 1914 turned from a commander to the nation
Presentation
Colour lithograph on poster paper, in an edition; red, white, blue and flesh, with black for line and lettering
Register
Summons: stern, direct and singular; a jolt of being singled out rather than a transport
Scale
One figure, one gesture, two lines of display lettering and a line for the station; an upright sheet at the scale of a person
Governing Proposition
In 1917, after the United States entered the war, the illustrator James Montgomery Flagg drew Uncle Sam for an army recruiting poster: an old man in a starred hat, seen from the waist up and straight on, his eyes set to meet the viewer and his forefinger foreshortened so that it comes out of the sheet. Under him the poster says what he wants, and at its foot it says where to go. The formula was British, found three years before for a general; Flagg gave it to the nation itself and put the demand in the first person. The wager of the image is that one face and one finger can make the state’s claim on a body into a look that nobody standing in the street can step out of.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
James Montgomery Flagg, the American illustrator, born in 1877 and dead in 1960, drew the image for the recruiting of the United States Army after the country entered the war in April 1917. It was printed as a colour lithograph. Uncle Sam is shown in half length and straight on, in a top hat with a starred band, a blue coat and a red tie, with a white goatee and a hard gaze fixed on the viewer. His right forefinger points straight out of the picture at whoever stands before it. Below him are the words “I WANT YOU FOR U.S. ARMY”, and at the foot “NEAREST RECRUITING STATION”, with a space left for the station’s address.
The unit scored is the poster of 1917 as printed, and the edition is one work. No single sheet is scored and no unique original is the work: copies are held in the Library of Congress and in many other collections, and the image that did what this work did is the printed one, which stands now whole in many surviving sheets. The many later uses of the image, its reproductions and its parodies are its afterlife and are context, not the unit.
The elements are few: one figure, one gesture, two lines of display lettering, and a small line for the station. The colours are essentially red, white, blue and flesh, with black for the line and the lettering. The figure fills the upper two thirds of the sheet, the head on its vertical axis. It is a small form, and it is judged on the scale used for every image, as a made thing and as an argument; its fame is counted once, where the rubric counts it.
Movement II
The hand and forefinger are foreshortened directly toward the viewer, so that the tip of the finger is the nearest point in the picture and lies close to the centre line. The eyes are drawn frontal, so that they meet the viewer from any position before the sheet. Between them the picture leaves no place to stand outside its address: the finger comes at you and the eyes follow you. The subtractive test finds almost nothing idle. Without the finger the old man addresses no one; without the frontal eyes the finger points at no one in particular; without the pronoun the demand has no object. The Inevitable stands at 7.8, second of the twelve, held below eight because what is made necessary is small.
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely. A painting in a gallery would be looked at rather than looking; a film would move the eyes off the viewer; words alone would lack the face. Only a still image at the scale of a person, frontal and facing the street, can say that the address is to you, singly, wherever you stand, and the foreshortened finger leaves the sheet precisely because the sheet is flat. The lettering is set as a block that reads as speech. The Living Form stands at 7.6: the form is the instrument of what the work knows, and what it knows is narrow.
The foreshortening is the hardest thing in the picture, and it is resolved; a weaker one and the poster fails. The head is drawn with a magazine illustrator’s fluent authority, brow and mouth set hard in a few strokes, and the colour is limited and flat enough to carry at a distance. The coat and the hat are rendered in a generic manner, the figure is stiff, and the painted surface from which the sheet was printed is lost in the lithograph. The Made stands at 7.5, sure commercial illustration that bears load, and two tenths above Duchamp’s Fountain (7.3 on this axis), the chosen object of the same year.
Movement III
The design was not Flagg’s first. In Britain Alfred Leete had drawn Lord Kitchener pointing out of the picture at the viewer, first as a cover of the magazine London Opinion on 5 September 1914 and then as a British recruiting poster. The pointing figure and the demand addressed to the one looking were his, and they had proved themselves in Britain three years before the United States entered the war. Flagg’s poster inherits them directly, and the American cartoon tradition of Uncle Sam with them.
The departures are real. The general becomes a personification, so that the demand comes from the nation itself rather than from a commander. The comic Uncle Sam of the cartoonists is made grave. And the demand is turned into the first person: where the British poster told the viewer what the general wanted, this one has the nation say “I want you”, which tightens the address to a single speaker and a single hearer. The transfer from a man to a nation is a real change of meaning, and it keeps the work above pastiche.
But the stake was small. The formula had worked, the poster was commissioned to recruit, and every choice in it was a wager placed on a proven path, which the rubric names as no swerve. The Swerve stands at 6.4. Pressure on Tradition stands higher, at 7.6, carried by reach rather than force: the poster reorganised no possibility of its kind, and the colour lithographic recruiting poster was a mature form, but the figure became the standing image of Uncle Sam for the twentieth century, its summons a formula of American speech and advertising, its parodies a small genre. Fountain, the same year’s other American landmark, holds The Swerve at 9.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, and stands at 8.0: the force this sheet lacks is exactly Fountain’s.
Movement IV
Uncle Sam was a personification of the United States from the early nineteenth century, developed by cartoonists, Thomas Nast among them, and often drawn as a lean comic figure. This picture fixed him. The stern patriarch of the starred hat and goatee has been, for a century, what the nation looks like when it wants something. Under him lies an old and load-bearing pattern: the father who calls the sons to war, the elder who sends the young to die, the nation as a family whose head may demand a son. That pattern is why the words land as a summons and not as a request.
The myth is held as type rather than built through particulars. The figure has no story and no cost is shown; what is archetypal in it is the borrowed form of the national personification, carried by one face and one gesture and thin elsewhere. The Archetypal Deep stands at 7.6. Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, the other American wartime icon on the desk, stands above it there at 8.4 and at 7.9 overall: a found image of a real event, with a grandeur of its own, where this one is a drawn instrument.
What the poster brings into view is that the modern state at war addresses the citizen singly and in the second person, and that its address takes the form of a face and a finger. It makes the state’s claim on the individual body visible as a gaze, and the image remains the plainest picture of what it is to be summoned. But it does not see what it shows. It is the claim’s instrument, not a reflection on it; what it lays open was laid open later by those who studied and parodied it, turning the finger back on the state. The Unconcealment stands at 7.0.
Movement V
At the top of the sheet is the starred hat, the most emblematic thing in the picture; at its foot is a line for the nearest recruiting station and a blank for its address, the most practical. One law holds them. Everything in the image is addressed outward, to you and to an act: the hat names who asks, the eyes and the finger find the one asked, the words state the demand, the station is where it is met. The picture’s myth ends in an address and an errand. Nothing turns inward or away. The Inner Law stands at 7.4, a law complete and unbroken over a range of one figure and two lines.
At 109 years the image is whole, in many surviving sheets, and its presence has been continuous and of the widest kind: reproduced, parodied and taught without break since 1917. Poster paper is fragile, but the edition was large and the survival of the image is not in doubt. The rubric’s charge for a surface fixed to its moment applies, a call for one army in one war, and holds the figure off the widest tenth; the image has already outlived that war and been put to other work for a century. The Imperishable stands at 9.1, highest of the twelve, level with Tower Bridge, a national emblem of about the same age. Returned to, the picture gives what it gave at once, and The Bottomless Well stands at 6.4.
It holds the state, the singled-out individual, war by implication, the family in the patriarch, and national myth in a costume, all in one gesture; labour, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and The Encompassed stands at 6.2. Its lift is a jolt, single and brief, and The Sublime stands lowest, at 6.0. This is what holds it in Tier III: its form and coherence clear their floors and its survival is the strongest thing about it, but its disclosure is an instrument’s, its myth a borrowed type, its turn a wager on a proven path and its elevation one effect. It stands at 7.2, a tenth below Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster (7.3), the nearest in kind, which it leads on four axes, The Imperishable among them, and trails on six; and below Alphonse Mucha’s Gismonda (7.6), whose making and departure are larger.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing to remove. Take away the finger and the picture is a portrait of a stern old man that addresses no one. Take away the frontal set of the eyes and the finger points at no one in particular. Take away the hat and its stars and the old man is not the nation. Take away “YOU” and the demand has no object; take away the line for the recruiting station and it has no place to be met, and the poster stops being an instrument. Each part is required by what it has to say: you, now, here. What holds the axis below eight is that the necessity is a received formula well executed, over a small thought.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Disclosure through image is credited fully. What the poster brings into view is that the modern state, at war, addresses the citizen singly and in the second person, and that its address takes the form of a face and a finger: the nation made a person who wants you. It makes the state’s claim on the individual body visible as a gaze one cannot step out of, and that has held; the image is still the plainest picture of being summoned. What holds the axis is that the work enacts the condition rather than disclosing it. It is the claim’s instrument, not a reflection on it, and what it lays open was laid open later, by those who parodied and studied it. It shows the mechanism without seeing it.
Score: 7.0 / 10
There is a moment near the uncanny: the eyes that follow, the finger that seems to leave the sheet, the old face set hard. Met on a wall at full size, the effect is a jolt rather than a transport, a small dread of being singled out. The axis is indifferent to the kind of elevation, and the response is real; but it is one effect, brief, and the same each time. There is no grandeur in the figure, whose stiffness is the point, and no beauty is sought; the colours are the flag’s colours and lift nothing. The height reached is low and does not recur within the image, and this is the lowest of the twelve.
Score: 6.0 / 10
Here the image does more than evoke. Uncle Sam existed before Flagg, a personification of the United States from the early nineteenth century developed by cartoonists, Thomas Nast among them, often as a lean comic figure. This picture fixed him: the stern patriarch of the starred hat and goatee has been, for a century, what the nation looks like when it wants something. Under him the archetype is old and load-bearing, the father who calls the sons to war, the elder who sends the young to die, the nation as a family whose head may demand a son; it is why “I want you” lands as a summons and not a request. What holds the axis: the myth is held as type, with no story and no cost shown.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is direct: Alfred Leete’s Kitchener of 1914, pointing out of the picture at the viewer, and the American cartoon tradition of Uncle Sam. The departures are real. The general becomes a personification, so that the demand comes from the nation rather than a commander; the comic Uncle Sam is made grave; the demand is turned into the first person, which tightens the address. But the stake was small. The formula had proved itself in Britain, the poster was commissioned to recruit, and every choice in it is a wager placed on a proven path, which the rubric does not count as a swerve. It stands above pastiche because the transfer from a man to a nation is a real change of meaning.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The poster knows one thing, that the address is to you, singly, wherever you stand, and only a still image at the scale of a person, frontal and facing the street, with eyes and finger aimed outward, can say it. A painting in a gallery would be looked at rather than looking; a film would move the eyes off you; words alone would lack the face. The foreshortened finger comes out of the sheet because the sheet is flat. The lettering reads as speech, weighted to the pronoun. The form is the instrument of the knowledge. What holds it in the sevens: the knowledge is narrow, and the form was found by another before it was Flagg’s.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: more than a century of presence, and a large literature on American propaganda and the iconography of Uncle Sam in which the poster is a standard exhibit. The image has also been reopened again and again by parody and reuse, each reading a new meaning into the finger. But the yield is in its uses, not in the image. Returned to, the picture gives what it gave at once: there is little formal depth to find, no second figure, no space, no ambiguity in the address. Its afterlife is long and its well shallow. It stands above Cattelan’s Comedian (6.3 on this axis) and below Gursky’s Rhein II (7.2), whose questions about the photograph are in the image.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Field: the American poster and popular image, and wartime propaganda, of the 1910s. Intrinsic force is modest: the poster reorganises no possibility of the poster, the direct-address pointing figure belongs to Leete, and the colour lithographic recruiting poster was a mature form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the figure became the standing image of Uncle Sam for the twentieth century; the pointing summons “I want you” is a formula of American speech and advertising traceable to this sheet; and its parodies form a small genre of their own. That is reach without force, in a field where much of the force was borrowed, and the reach carries the figure well above what the force alone would hold.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 109 years. Form: whole. The image is what Flagg made, in many surviving sheets, and no part that carries its meaning is lost. Presence: continuous and of the widest kind, reproduced, parodied and taught without break since 1917; fame is presence, and earns a tenth at most. Fabric: poster paper is fragile, but the edition is large enough that the survival of the image is not in doubt. One charge, the rubric’s own: the surface is fixed to its moment, a call for one army in one war. The image has outlived that moment and been put to work again for a century, which is the evidence the axis asks for; the widest tenth is withheld for the topical surface.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of illustration and the colour lithographic poster, to the anchors common to every medium. The making is sure: the head drawn with a magazine illustrator’s fluent authority, the hard lines of brow and mouth carried in a few strokes; the foreshortening of the hand, the hardest thing in the picture, resolved so that the finger reads as coming out of the sheet; colour limited and flat enough to carry at distance; lettering clear and weighted. The making bears load: a weaker foreshortening and the picture fails. What holds the axis is that this is skilled commercial illustration, not command at the top of the art: the coat and hat are generic, the figure stiff, the painted surface lost in the lithograph, the design received.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the starred hat at the top of the sheet and the line for the nearest recruiting station at its foot, the most emblematic and the most practical. One law holds them: everything is addressed outward, to you and to an act. The hat names who is asking, the eyes and the finger find the one asked, the words state the demand, and the station is where it is met. Nothing in the picture turns inward or away; there is no background and no second figure. The law is complete and unbroken. What holds the axis is the rubric’s warning that narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one figure and two lines, and a unity this narrow is easily achieved.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The orders held: the state, as the personified nation; the individual, as the singled-out “you”; war, by implication; the family, in the patriarch who calls up the young; national history and myth, in the figure’s costume. They are integrated in one gesture, which is the poster’s real achievement on this axis. But most of them are present by implication only, and labour, the sacred, the natural order, and any consciousness beyond the one moment of being summoned are absent. The figure clears its own floor and sits second lowest of the twelve; a low figure on a small form describes the form, one man and one demand on a sheet made to be read in passing.
Score: 6.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Inevitable at 7.8, then The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6. An image whole in many surviving sheets, present without break for 109 years and already outliving the war it was made for; a small set of parts each required by one demand, you, now, here; a figure that fixed the nation’s personification for a century; a flat form in which the foreshortened finger leaves the sheet and the eyes find every viewer; and a reach in speech, advertising and parody that carries the poster far beyond its borrowed force.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 6.0: one jolt of being singled out, brief and the same each time, with no grandeur and no beauty sought. Next above it, The Encompassed at 6.2: the state, the individual and the family held in one gesture, most of them by implication, with labour, the sacred and the natural order absent. Then The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 6.4: a turn of a proven British formula from a general to a nation at a small stake, and an image read at once, whose long afterlife lies in its uses rather than in the picture.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.6, The Made at 7.5, The Inner Law at 7.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met only at The Imperishable, 9.1, and unmet on the other four: The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6, The Unconcealment at 7.0 and The Swerve at 6.4 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Unconcealment, 7.0, The Sublime, 6.0, The Swerve, 6.4, The Bottomless Well, 6.4, and The Inner Law, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.2. Three of the five summit conditions are met, the Necessity Cap, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The twelve sum to 86.6, an average of 7.22 that displays 7.2. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the image and of its documented record, not from a sheet in hand. The work scored is the recruiting poster of 1917, the image as printed in colour lithography, its edition scored as one, with no single sheet the work. What stands now is the image whole in many surviving sheets, copies held in the Library of Congress and many other collections; poster paper is fragile, but nothing that carries the image has been lost. The source of the design is Alfred Leete’s Kitchener pointing at the viewer, a cover of London Opinion of 5 September 1914 and then a British recruiting poster; it is context, as are Uncle Sam’s earlier history in cartoons and the image’s later uses and parodies, of which none is named. The only words given are those printed on the poster. No statement by the maker or by any critic is quoted, and the wording of the British design is not given. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them an earlier magazine use of the image and its date and line, the maker’s account of who sat for the face, the government office within which the poster was made and who directed it, the number of copies printed, the dimensions of the sheet, the relative sizes of the lines of lettering in the standard printing, a reissue for a later war, and any particular parody.