This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 7/28/2018
Hopps, H.R (1869 – 1937). Destroy This Mad Brute/Enlist. San Francisco: Schmidt Lithograph Co., ca. 1917. U.S. Army overprint. Minor expert over-coloring in margins at all corners, a few mild abrasions. Generally crisp, clean, and bright. A-. Linen backed. Pre-dating King Kong by a decade and a half, this visceral call to enlist played on the heartstrings of American men by summoning up deep-held fears of a German invasion. Lady Liberty, half-naked, lies in the arms of the German brute striding ashore, a cudgel emblazoned with the word “kultur” in his blood-smeared free hand. Hopps’s violent, sexual, overpowering design embodies everything that scared Americans at home, far from the Western Front, where things were anything but quiet.