The U.S. entry into World War I is remembered as a catalyst for domestic activism. American visual artists notably participated, using their talents in a few different ways. Some of their efforts are widely known, such as the iconic poster campaigns featuring Uncle Sam by James Montgomery Flagg; or sculptors with the Army’s 40th Corps of Engineers creating camouflage to hide troops from airplanes and employing baffle painting to obscure boats from submarines. A lesser-known group of artist volunteers found ways to use their creative talents in New York. Called Art War Relief, members from a group of art societies formed a coalition under the auspices of the American Red Cross.

On the homefront, Red Cross chapters grew from a few hundred in the beginning of 1917 to over 3000 by the end of 1919. Chaired by Mrs. Ripley Hitchcock, Art War Relief was auxiliary 282 of the New York County Chapter. The committee consisted of women representatives from 30 organizations, such as the Art Students League, the National Sculpture Society, the National Academy of Design, and the Decorators Association of New York. The group coordinated book drives, gathered clothing for refugee children in the Allied countries, and ran re-education programs for returning soldiers.

Active in this group was Edith Marion Day Magonigle. A muralist who often collaborated with her architect husband, Harold Van Buren Magonigle, she served as the chair of Art War Relief’s Painting Committee. At the time of her selection, Magonigle had already communicated with YMCA’s Camp Upton in Long Island, donating stage sets for one-act plays early in 1918. Officially beginning her chairmanship in February, Edith Magonigle guided artist-volunteers in the creation of landscape targets for use in training camps, and coordinated their dispersal across the United States. Edith Magongle’s files on the Art War Relief, included within her husband’s papers, document this critical work.

By the time the U.S. entered World War I, it had been decades since the nation was involved in a large scale conflict. Suddenly, troops needed to be recruited, mobilized, and trained. Landscape (or designation) targets had been used in Europe to educate artillery officers in range-finding. A fairly recent development in military classroom instruction at the time, the demonstrator would use the landscape paintings to teach students how to refer to points in the field. Art War Relief’s canvases depicted typical French countrysides, to best help the cadets visualize what they might encounter abroad. The students were trained how to quickly discern and describe a target, using the clock-face method, mils or finger-widths - different means of using landscape features and measures to describe a target’s location. The purpose of this training was to standardize vocabulary, so that the combat troops could quickly and clearly communicate in the field.

Art War Relief’s Painting Committee furnished over 300 targets to 27 cantonments. While the Art War Relief was led by women, the creation and distribution of targets was not a women’s-only activity. The brothers H. Bolton and Francis Coates Jones made landscape targets their sole project, contributing fifty. Members of the Salmagundi Club and Ver Meer Studios, two New York institutions not officially connected to Art War Relief but enthusiastic for the targets project, were responsible for about half of the total. Over 100 artists participated in the nine-month effort. An exhibition of ten of these canvases was held at the Arden Gallery in May of 1918, and two were included in the Allied War Salon in December of that year.

Canvas sizes for targets varied between three by six feet and up to five by twelve feet. In general, they share a bright color palette and most importantly, accurate perspective. As of 1918, landscape sketching was still a skill taught to recruits. Photographs were considered to overemphasize the immediate foreground, whereas sketches could be reduced to their essential elements.

Edith Magonigle’s files on the Art War Relief comprise just a few folders in the Harold Van Buren Magonigle papers, which she gave to the Library (along with a number of Japanese prints, photographs, scrapbooks, and periodicals) in winter 1938, a few years after her husband’s death. These few folders, however, document her role as a coordinator. Primarily letters between artists and army commanders, these files also contain shipping records and a draft report (later published in the American Magazine of Art, volume 10). These records serve to highlight one of the unusual ways artists gave support from the homefront. After enough landscape targets were distributed for training, Magonigle continued to participate in domestic war work. After armistice, she designed a mural for the Victory Liberty Loan campaign drive demonstration on Park Avenue in Spring of 1919.

Further Reading
 

The Manuscripts and Archives Division in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building holds extensive collections documenting the American reactions to World War I. In addition to the set of papers highlighted here, there is the United War Work Campaign collection, American Fund for French Wounded, the European war scrapbooks, and the Victory Hall Association records. Pacifism dovetails with the suffrage movement in the Rosika Schwimmer papers, and decisions made in describing the Great War to Americans at home are found in the New York Times Company records, Adolph S. Ochs papers - as well as the more personal story of how the war impacted a prominent family. Published primary and secondary sources found throughout the Library’s catalog and databases, as well as government publications and art magazines on HathiTrust, GoogleBooks, and the Internet Archive, were helpful in researching this topic. Here is a small sampling which helped contextualize this post:

The Mayor’s Committee on National Defense, 1918 report on artistic efforts prepared by the Committee on Arts and Decoration chaired by Albert Eugene Gallatin.

Captain J.R. Cornelius’s “The Value of Landscape Targets” published in Scribner’s, volume 64 (1918), pp. 433-440. Featuring designation target paintings by Howard Russell Butler.

Small arms instructors manual, 1918 and Landscape sketching, 1917

For a satirical description about how landscape targets were used in the classroom, see Ian Hay’s chapter “Shooting Straight” in the First Hundred Thousand.

New York and the First World War by Ross J. Wilson

The photograph of Edith Magonigle for the Victory Loan drive is held in the Library's Photography Collection.