Vintage Poster Archives
Schlaikjer Make Haste Safely 1942 | WW2 Poster
Schlaikjer Make Haste Safely 1942 | WW2 Poster
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A bandaged factory worker faces the viewer head-on, one eye obscured by a cloth dressing, rendered in Schlaikjer's oil-sketch portrait style against a near-black ground. To his right, three lines of cerulean sans-serif type: 'AMERICA is the loser, too- when avoidable accidents stop production.' Below, a red band carries the US Army's instruction in white cursive: 'Make Haste Safely.'
Jes Wilhelm Schlaikjer (1897-1982) was appointed War Department artist in 1942, bringing two decades of portrait and magazine illustration experience to the US Army's wartime communication programme. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a prize-winning academician of the National Academy of Design, Schlaikjer produced posters for recruitment, the Red Cross, and workplace safety. This poster belongs to the US Army Safety Program series, issued at a moment when industrial accident rates threatened the production capacity that the Allied war effort depended upon. The original is held at the National Archives (NARA record 535351) and in the Smithsonian Institution's NMAH Archives Center.
The composition directs everything toward the worker's face: the near-black background strips away any context beyond the injury itself, and the bandage, placed across the eye, makes the argument without a word. The warm amber and cerulean palette, lit from below-left, is characteristic of Schlaikjer's approach: painterly, credible, rooted in the figurative tradition of Robert Henri's circle, applied with the directness the poster format required.
Reproduced from the archival source on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. Held in the permanent holdings of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
