Vintage Poster Archives
Von Schmidt Save Gas 1944 | WW2 Home Front Poster
Von Schmidt Save Gas 1944 | WW2 Home Front Poster
Couldn't load pickup availability
A wounded soldier fills the poster field from brow to collar. His M1 helmet is unstrapped, a white bandage pressed beneath the rim, blood running down the right side of his face. His expression is not anguish. It is a level, unblinking challenge, the gaze of a man who has already paid the price the viewer has not yet been asked for. Above and below, sage green condensed capitals against a solid cobalt blue ground ask the question: Have You Really Tried to Save Gas by Getting into a Car Club?
Harold von Schmidt (1893–1982) designed this poster for the United States Office of Price Administration, published by the US Government Printing Office in 1944. By that year, von Schmidt was not working purely from the imagination. He had been recruited as a war correspondent for King Features Syndicate and had flown on bombing missions over Europe. The soldier he painted carries the weight of that observation. The US civilian gasoline rationing programme, introduced in 1942, sorted car owners into three tiers, A, B and C stickers, with the lowest-tier drivers receiving as few as three gallons per week. Car clubs, the period term for organised carpooling, were the primary mechanism for extending that allowance. Von Schmidt's poster reframes the car journey not as a convenience but as a ballot: a daily vote on whether the civilian is pulling their share.
The composition is deliberate in its restraint. No battle scene, no flag, no allegory. A single face, cropped close, occupies the entire picture plane. The cobalt blue ground reads as both sky and void, isolating the soldier as the sole subject. The warm ochre and burnt sienna of the flesh tones, built up in von Schmidt's oil-painting manner, sit in strong chromatic contrast against the cool blue, the technique he developed across two decades of Saturday Evening Post cover illustration, here put to wartime use.
Reproduced on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. A considered piece of WW2 home-front graphic communication, as relevant to students of American illustration history as to collectors of wartime propaganda material.
