Royal and Imperial War Press Headquarters

The Royal and Imperial War Press Headquarters (German - kaiserlich und königliche Kriegspressequartier or KPQ) was a department of the Austro-Hungarian Army's high command, formed on 28 July 1914 under Generalmajor (previously Oberst) Maximilian Ritter von Hoen.

The artists produced massive numbers of sculptures, paintings, drawings, watercolours, illustrations, posters and postcards for the KPQ on the all fronts of the war and less often in the safe area behind the lines.

In the words of the regulations for pictorial reporting in war,[4] they were tasked with "producing propaganda at home and abroad that is effective for the present in order to show the Wehrmacht's achievements in the right light, and to procure material for the future that historiography and the subsequent glorification of military exploits through art urgently need to supplement the written record".

They wore black and yellow armbands printed with the words "Kunst" (Art) or "Kriegspressequartier" (War Press Headquarters) and received corresponding credentials.

Landscape painters were to be "encouraged" to draw positions and battlefields, whilst "figural talents" suited to painting battle scenes were to be given the chance to observe combat where possible, preferably with the artillery to keep danger to a mimimum.

[5] A large number of artists applied to join the KPQ, both highly and lesser qualified ones, as well as those who tried to use the art group to avoid full military service.

The eldest such woman was the painter Friederike („Fritzi“) Ulreich (1865–1936), an officer's daughter, went to Belgrade on the south-east front in 1914, painting destroyed fortifications, military cemeteries and individual graves.

Helene Arnau (1870–1958), daughter of a court actor and a sculpture student at the Wiener Akademie in her youth, painted on the Carinthian front from February to May 1917.