"In the Same Boat”: British and American Visual Culture During the Second World War— Episode 1

“In the Same Boat”: British and American Visual Culture During the Second World War On December 8, 1941, immediately following the declaration of the American entry into World War II, President Roosevelt telegraphed Prime Minister Churchill, “Today all of us are in the same boat with you and the people of the empire and it is a ship which will not and cannot be sunk.” This two-day conference in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, held on the seventieth anniversary of VE-day, investigated the textured relationship between war-time visual cultures of America and Britain. The papers considered the cultural origins of the postwar political and economic bond which came to be called the “special relationship,” and explored the various political and social pressures that shaped image-making in the two countries. This conference focused on the visual cultural exchange between the two countries, identifying parallels between the way images and culture were politically mobilized and influenced by the social impacts of war itself. This conference was made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. It was also generously sponsored by the Yale University Department of the History of Art, the Yale Center for British Art, the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.