WE FRENCH WORKERS WARN YOU. 1942. 39 3/4x28 1/4 inches. U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C. Condition B+: sharp vertical and horizontal folds; light staining at edges. Paper. Workers in white and black jackets, with their hands in the air are being rounded up in front of a brick wall bearing a red, official decree from the Vichy government. This, the first of Shahn's war posters, was a message to the working men of America to keep up the fight and to avoid the fate of their French counterparts. It was designed in accordance with Shahn's convictions on the nature of a war poster: "It must be neither tricky nor smart . . . the objective is too serious for smartness. It has to have dignity, grimness, urgency . . . It has to be unblinkingly serious." (Prescott p. 122). Prescott 143, Weill 504.
