Propaganda and Hogarth’s Line of Beauty in the First World War

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Propaganda and Hogarth’s ‘Line of Beauty’ in the First World War assesses the literal and metaphoric
connotations of movement in William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century theory of a ‘line
of beauty’, and subsequently employs it as a mechanism by which the visual
propaganda of this era can be innovatively explored. Hogarth’s belief that
this line epitomises not only movement, but movement at its most beautiful,
creates conditions of possibility whereby the construct can be elevated from
traditional analyses and consequently utilised to examine movement in artworks
from both literal and metaphorical perspectives. Propagandist promotion of an alternate reality as a challenge
to a current ‘real’ lends itself to
these dual viewpoints; the early years of the twentieth century saw
growth in the advertising of conflict via the pictorial poster, instigating
intentionally or otherwise an aesthetic response from soldier-artists
embroiled on the battlefields. The ‘line of beauty’ therefore serves as a
productive mechanism by which this era of propaganda art can be appraised.