["This Is the Enemy" Poster Maquette]

Playing dead for this poster design, Bassman and her husband, Paul Himmel, act out an encroaching Nazi threat. Bassman conceived the project for a national propaganda competition held at the Museum of Modern Art. Posters had been a focus of her early training with Alexey Brodovitch, and this wartime collaboration reflects the influence of the Soviet modernists he promoted in his class. Adapting a Constructivist vocabulary of counter-poised angles and flat planes of color, they cast the war’s urgency in stark terms. The project was a touchstone for Bassman, emblematic of not only her design influences but also the travails of working with Brodovitch, who ultimately submitted an alternate design without her pictures or her credit.