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Illustrating the American Dream: Postwar Idealism and Cold War Anxiety. The last in a series of slide presentations on the history of American commercial illustration by art department professors Dennis Dittrich and Dennis Raverty will take place on Wednesday, April 22. It will also be a celebration of the retirement of illustration professor Dittrich after more than a quarter century of service to the university. Refreshments will be served.

In the years after 1945, the United States experienced an unprecedented prosperity that contrasted sharply with the period of the war and the Depression that preceded it. Worries about the spread of communism and nuclear annihilation caused anxiety and a widespread sense of dread. Yet advertising illustration of the era ignored these ominous undercurrents and represented instead a cheery, carefree world of things, an ideal that homogenized the diversity of life as actually lived into a representation of the American Dream.