A Pacifist Viewpoint
Boardman Robinson (1876-1952)
Europe, 1916
Lithographic crayon, ink, and
gouache on paper, 1916
Prints & Photographs Division
LC-USZC4-3901
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The years just prior to World War I were a period of intense political
activism among American artists. Radical art and politics converged
in the socialist journal The Masses, which became a
forum for the pacifist viewpoint of artists like Boardman Robinson
who saw the war as the product of international competition among
industrial capitalists. Such powerful and provocative anti war statements
by Robinson and his colleagues led to the eventual suppression and
demise of the journal during World War I, when the United States
Post Office used the newly enacted Espionage Act to ban its distribution.
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