?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 700 - $ 1,000
RON L. HAEBERLE & PETER BRANDT Q: AND BABIES? 1970. 24x38 inches. Art Workers Coalition. Condition B+: minor tears, creases and staining in margins. Paper. One of the most poignant, effective and striking of the Vietnam-era protest posters, relating to the horrific massacre at My Lai, on March 16, 1968. The photograph was taken by Ronald Haeberle, who had been assigned to Charlie Company. When his photographs came to public attention the following year (they were published in Life magazine), the outcry was worldwide. This protest poster was designed by members of the Art Workers' Coalition, a New York based art group. The text was taken from an interview on CBS television between Mike Wallace and a soldier who had been present in the Vietnamese village. Originally, the Museum of Modern Art was supposed to help publish the poster, but the Museum's president withdrew support at the last moment, no doubt worried that political backlash might follow the distribution of such an inflammatory subject. The Art Workers' Coalition was able to raise enough money to print 50,000 posters on their own. These posters were distributed around the world and were carried in anti-war protest marches. The few copies that have survived have become quite rare. In a further protest, copies of this poster were carried by members of the AWC into the Museum of Modern Art and unfurled in front of Picasso's Guernica which was on loan to the museum at that time. An extraordinary document from an extraordinary time in American history documenting an extraordinary event. Poster American Style 79, Images of an Era 134, Power of the Poster 125.
