Vintage Poster Archives
Keep Us Flying 1943 | WW2 Propaganda Poster Reyneau
Keep Us Flying 1943 | WW2 Propaganda Poster Reyneau
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A Tuskegee Airman grips his parachute harness and looks skyward against a flat blue ground. The composition is close, direct, and human in scale: less a recruitment graphic than a portrait, which is exactly what it is. Betsy Graves Reyneau painted the figure from a live sitting with Lieutenant Robert W. Deiz (1919–1992) of the 99th Fighter Squadron, 332nd Fighter Group, at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, in 1943.
Reyneau had arrived at Tuskegee to paint scientist George Washington Carver for the Harmon Foundation's travelling exhibition of portraits of prominent African Americans. Deiz asked to watch her work and she chose him as the subject for the US Treasury Department's war bonds commission. Printed by the US Government Printing Office (catalogue reference WPD 576), this was the first American war bonds poster to depict a Black serviceman. At the time, the Tuskegee Airmen were still routinely dismissed by parts of the US military establishment as unfit to fly combat missions. Deiz went on to fly 93 missions and destroy multiple enemy aircraft over North Africa and Italy.
The poster is held in the permanent collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Smithsonian accession nmaahc_2011.168) and the Imperial War Museums. The design is in the public domain under CC0. This reproduction is printed using the giclée process on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, preserving the realist brushwork, the saturated navy text bar, and the controlled sky-blue palette Reyneau used throughout her civil-rights-era portrait work.
Draws particular interest among collectors of WW2 home-front material, historians of the Tuskegee Airmen, and those researching the intersection of American propaganda and civil rights history.
