Freedom Pavilion | 1939

Freedom Pavilion: Germany Yesterday-Germany Tomorrow, 1939, by Lester Beall

This powerful modernist poster features a striking red and blue colour scheme divided horizontally across the composition. It was designed as promotional material for the proposed "Freedom Pavilion: Germany Yesterday—Germany Tomorrow" at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The upper half displays a vibrant red background with a photomontage of the Statue of Liberty holding her torch aloft on the right side, connected by diagonal white lines to the lower blue section. On the left side against the red backdrop is a silhouette of a distressed young girl with her hand raised, marked by a yellow arrow pointing toward her. The lower blue portion of the poster contains the bold text "FREEDOM PAVILION" in large red capital letters, with "GERMANY YESTERDAY—GERMANY TOMORROW" in yellow beneath it. A small black star appears in the left side of the blue section.

The 1939 New York World's Fair opened on April 30, 1939, in Flushing Meadow, Queens, with the forward-looking theme "the world of tomorrow" and the slogan "Dawn of a New Day." While most major world powers participated in the Fair, Nazi Germany was notably absent, creating an opportunity for anti-Nazi voices to propose alternative representations. The Freedom Pavilion was conceived as a structure that would "highlight the achievements of pre-Nazi Germany as well as those of current German exiles" like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Thomas Mann, the prominent Nobel Prize-winning German refugee, proposed that the pavilion would show that German exiles were "doers and creators" rather than mere "critics and victims of an evil system." The pavilion was meant to "show Americans everything that fell to ashes in Germany as the Nazis rose to power" and serve as "a vivid reminder that Germany before Hitler was a land where thought and religion were free." Despite receiving initial approval from the State Department and fundraising efforts to raise $250,000 for its construction, the pavilion project was ultimately abandoned due to lack of time to properly complete the exhibits.

Lester Beall (1903-1969) was one of the major American graphic designers who contributed to the 1939 World's Fair, alongside other notable figures such as Paul Rand, Joseph Binder, and Ladislav Sutnar. This poster maquette for the Freedom Pavilion demonstrates Beall's masterful use of "thrust and counter-thrust" with "angled photographs and white reversed line" to create visual tension, skilfully employing the Statue of Liberty to balance the silhouetted photograph of the crying girl. Beall was deeply influenced by European avant-garde movements and was fascinated by photomontage, which he described as allowing "subject matter which is widely divergent in time, space and content to be united in a single surface."