An Unusual Twist To The 1950s Anti Communist Narrative - Freedom Communist Style - Equal Rights And Justice - Vintage Barbed Wire

Treasures from THE POLITICS & POLITICIANS COLLECTION at The Willing Mind. By exclusive arrangement with The Grand Review.

Print size 24 x 11 and consciously formatted to work with a 24 x 11 frame. For further easy, inexpensive framing options, please feel free to contact us.

This print, the image and the message, stands on its own without any further explanation, as do all our works. You can spend just a moment with it in passing and drink in its moment in time, its style, its meaning.

But wait, there's more!

This is a very unusual image, and there are a great many levels further down into the rabbit hole that I've yet to explore. Some of them, I believe, are very dark passageways.

Here we have a common advertising blotter, the back of which you would use to scratch the nib of your fountain pen before the days of the ball point. It would more often than not have a stock pin up image with printed copy about a local coal company or bank, feed store or radio station.

This one has equal rights and simple justice themes, which should be dear to the hearts of every American but are often subverted to seem lefty and liberal, clearly stated yet wrapped in a fervent anti communist package. It advertises nothing, just promotes values, yet to add a spoonful of sugar it has been paired in the most unlikely yet equally important message that communists cannot speak up about these values or anything else not preapproved by the commie powers that be. That we were living in a time when you could be publicly pilloried for not towing the line seems to tie this communist censorship in with behavior here at home, behavior that, despite the very real communist global menace, is and was at its heart the antithesis of the virtues that we are supposed to love.

The artist employed to bring all this to life is working in a style that we immediately associate with the crazed passions of the covers of 1950s men's magazines. Typically, there would be torn clothes and a 50 caliber machine gun and a half naked mud spattered buxom woman clinging to his leg while he mowed down Nazis in the background, clinging to a rope while being dragged by a speedboat through a marsh, etc. This image is not 'sort of' that style, it is that style, and whoever was the art director of this and any accompanying blotters from this series would have turned to the men's magazine industry to bring in such an artist. The style just didn't exist anywhere else.

There has to be more than one. Nobody puts this kind of work into a one off. I have seen one other from this series. Similar in sentiment but not as powerful visually. Who caused them to happen, and why?

There are tiny initials in the bottom corner that associate it with a branch of the America labor movement of the 50s, trying at the time to disassociate themselves from any remnants of American communism and socialism that had been part of the founding of the labor movement. That said, with what little I know of labor history, I seem to remember that some of our labor movement was coopted by the American intelligence forces to prove their loyalty by misbehaving on our behalf overseas during that time.

This was the moment when I tugged the lines and started to get pulled back up to the surface for air. There is a bigger, deeper story here, but I had been sinking into it with no bottom in sight.

Time to make dinner for the family.

If anyone has further insight to this multi faceted tale, please let me know. For now, please enjoy the straightforward message of this print, and know that it really stands at a crossroad from a strange moment in our history.

• Handmade item
• Materials: Art stock enhanced matte paper, archival ink
• Made to order
• Only ships within United States.

SHIPPING

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A NOTE ON OUR PROCESS, OUR CHOICES AND THE QUALITY OF THE GRAPHIC CRAFTSMANSHIP THAT GOES INTO OUR PRINTS.

Every print we deem exciting enough to present to the public via our Etsy store or available here at our studio has gone through a number of steps. The first of those is always discovering and falling in love with an obscure image, always an original that we can hold in our hands. That image is speaking to us, sometime screaming “Don’t leave me here. See what I am, what I was, what I can be, what I SHOULD be!”

There is a real sense of excitement involved, and a great many smiles and knowing grins when we make that deal and bring that ancient print, that battered photo, that scrap of ephemera that contains some scrap of genius from an unknown commercial artist home with us, knowing already how we mean to approach its restoration.

There is the heady promise of a further hunt just as real as what drags a weekend fisherman out of bed at 3AM to work a favorite brook as we start our research, looking for that great backstory, and both ready and willing to tumble down as many rabbit holes as are revealed to us to get that story.

Then there is a meticulous digital restoration that is as often as much fun as riding a vintage Moto Guzzi on a winding coastal road. I don’t care if that sounds crazy, it really is like jumping in the saddle! So many choices, so many chances to take to subtly or spectacularly give new life to otherwise permanently obscure images.

This dedication and the ongoing rush of joy in the accomplishment of it, and the opportunity to share the results in our studio and here on Etsy, is the fire of passion that keeps these engines roaring. We make every effort to ensure our customers are not just satisfied but thrilled, and we happily stand 100% behind our work.