David Lubin's Grand Illusions makes a timely, sweeping, and persuasive argument that World War I had a deep and unrecognized impact on American art and visual culture. Exactly one hundred years ago, the US was a late entrant in the European war that had been raging since 1914. Attacks by German submarines and other factors led the US to renounce its isolationism and join the Allied side. Within a year, the US had modernized its army, ultimately mobilizing four million men and sending a full half of them across the Atlantic. The American economy was transformed; civilians joined the war effort by buying war bonds, planting gardens, and conserving food, and especially through their consumption of massive amounts of information and propaganda. The visual arts were not merely impacted; rather, they were instrumental in these effects. Yet because of its late entry, its distance from the theatre of war, and the many ways in which it was overshadowed by World War II, the American experience of World War I – artistic or otherwise – has been largely forgotten. Grand Illusions, along with the major exhibition co-curated by its author (World War I and American Art), seeks to remedy that with its wide array of visual evidence, from high art and modernist sculpture to war posters, movies, and advertisements. This book changes the way we think about a crucial period in American art, and for that reason alone is worth reading. But its breadth of scope, its unflagging curiosity, its willingness to speculate even when it cannot prove, make it a tour de force.

What does Marcel Duchamp's readymade Fountain have to do with modern war? Ostensibly, and in conventional art-historical accounts, nothing. But put in its historical context, Fountain emerges in Lubin's account as an antiwar statement, as an object that “blew apart [the] coarse and simplistic thinking” (133) that Duchamps witnessed in the era of total war. Though the “original store-bought urinal” (129) Duchamps proposed to the Society of Independent Artists has long gone missing, it has become a mythic touchstone in the story of modern art. How fascinating, then, to find it recontextualized in ways that make its meaning newly legible and political. Lubin's daring account meditates on Fountain’s various resonances (waste, pissing, public hygiene, public urinals as places of homoerotic encounter, its mongrel status as a readymade signed by “R. Mutt,” to name a few). The book's thoroughness and erudition are matched by an evocative playfulness that makes it very enjoyable to read.

Some of the book's most interesting findings involve the links between art, propaganda, advertising; between war and the culture at large. The war's most famous recruiting poster, featuring the face of the British general Lord Kitchner, became the model for the famous Uncle Sam “I Want You” image, but also led to the wide-scale use of celebrity endorsements in advertising. The war's many facial injuries led to developments in plastic surgery, the manufacture of prosthetic masks, and an obsession with beauty. Civilian anxiety about returning veterans – a feeling painfully resonant with our own cultural moment – fuelled the production and popularity of monster movies, one of Hollywood's most popular genres in the postwar period.

Grand Illusions recasts the canon of American art at this period, with reconsiderations of Childe Hassam, George Bellows, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Edward Steichen, John Singer Sargent, Marcel Duchamp (as already mentioned), and many others, by considering them in their historical moment and within a wider visual culture. Even more interesting is Lubin's inclusion, with ten color plates and a detailed discussion, of the little-known but stunning painter Claggett Wilson. Wilson, a soldier–artist who fought in the Meuse–Argonne and painted his memories, found little market for his work in the 1920s and 1930s, and has received little or no attention since. But Wilson's work, perhaps better than that of any other American artist, illustrates “the no man's land” between “the ‘real’ and the grotesque” (191), conjuring for its viewer what industrial warfare did to men's bodies and minds.

As we mark the centenary of World War I, we are fortunate to have this well-written, well-researched book to fill the large hole in our understanding of how that war looked in and influenced American art and visual culture.