While war art in ancient times was used as a propaganda tool to celebrate victories in battle and glorify kings and pharaohs, in the modern age it has frequently been employed to draw attention to the horrors of war as the ultimate manifestation of Man’s inhumanity to Man.

As artists became more independent of rulers and able to express inner concerns and beliefs, so they became more critical of the governments who bore the responsibility for warfare between nations. Mostly this resulted in criticism of other countries’ governments, but a tradition of criticising the artists’ own government – sometimes in the face of extreme official and public disapproval – also evolved.

Francisco Goya produced his “Disasters of War” aquatints (Figures 1 and 2) in 1810 to protest the atrocities perpetrated during the invasion of Spain by the French forces of Napoleon I. They were not published until some 35 years after his death: only then was it considered safe to publish them as they severely criticised the French government for the atrocities committed against the people of Spain. And yet, other than a few details of uniforms, the nationalities of the individuals depicted in these images of sadistic brutality are indistinguishable and all but irrelevant. Goya is emphasising the point that war is cruel and grotesque irrespective of who wears the uniforms.

In 1814, after the French were expelled from Spain, Goya approached the provisional Spanish government with a request to create a painting which would “perpetuate by means of his brush the most notable and heroic actions of our glorious insurrection against the Tyrant of Europe”. The resulting painting, “The Third of May 1808”, was his depiction of the massacre of Spanish rebels by French soldiers in Madrid on that day (Figure 3).

That Goya went through a process of seeking approval from the new Spanish government marked a reversal of the traditional process by which a head of state or his representatives sought out an artist and commissioned him to produce a commemorative work to glorify a victory in battle.

Although Goya had enjoyed the ongoing patronage of the Spanish royal family and had been made court painter by Charles IV in 1789, it was unusual for an artist to produce a concept and then seek the approval and patronage of the ruler to create it. The subject matter of Goya’s proposal was not a Spanish victory over opposing forces but quite the opposite: the merciless slaughtering of Spanish captives by the invading French army.

In the words of art historian Kenneth Clark, “The Third of May 1808” is “the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention”. In its explicit realism it has been described as the first painting of the modern age.

The horror and futility of warfare in more recent times was expressed by many British painters in World War I. The trenches of the Western Front were responsible for the degradation and wastage of life on an industrial scale never seen before in the history of warfare. The British government commissioned a number of official artists to record the progress of the war.

Many painters were to show the utter dehumanisation of the combatants as well as the rape of the landscape created by the new twentieth century war technologies including bombardment by thousands of massive artillery pieces, machine guns, aerial bombing, and gas attacks.

The depiction of the ruined landscape, wrecked military equipment and the dismembered and decaying bodies of soldiers took on an unreal, nightmarish and otherworldly appearance in artworks that, in keeping with the horrific events of the times, had few parallels in previously painted representations of war.

The two artists who produced the most important art of The Great War were Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer.

Paul Nash had joined up reluctantly with the Artists’ Rifles, a volunteer unit originally formed in 1859 by a group of artists, musicians, actors and architects in response to the perceived threat of a French invasion of Britain. He was invalided out of the army after falling into a trench and breaking a rib. While recovering, he worked up a series of drawings he had made while on active service and held an exhibition. As a result of this successful exhibition Nash was appointed as an official war artist and returned to the trenches in 1917. His drawings resulted in his first oil paintings, in which he brought home the full horrors of the war in the trenches.

Nash used dramatic symbolism to represent the wastage and futility of war. The sun comes up over a ravaged landscape of blackened, blasted trees entitled with bitter irony “We Are Making A New World” (Figure 4).

A theme which is repeated in his work is the appearance of the war zone at night: he appears to have been fascinated by the otherworldly effects of flares (Figure 5), searchlights, and muzzle-flashes (Figure 6) lighting up the ruined landscape.

He wrote to his wife: “I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”

Stanley Spencer grew up in the rural village of Cookham near London at the beginning of the twentieth century. His early work was based on the rural village and showed his love of the simple pastoral lifestyle it embodied. When he later studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London he was given the nickname “Cookham” because he insisted on taking the train back to the village at the end of each day.

Spencer volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps and was initially sent to Macedonia and then to the Front Line in France in 1917. The war had a profound effect on Spencer and affected his approach to painting. When he returned to Cookham after the war he said that he had lost the “early morning feeling” which had inspired his early works.

Spencer painted the war from the soldiers’ perspective in a distinctive naive style which owed much to the light-infused paintings of Italian Renaissance artists such as Giotto and Piero della Francesca, and reflects his strong Christian faith. He avoids the nightmarish depictions of destruction and killing which characterised Nash’s work.

In 1919 he completed “Travoys Arriving at the Dressing Station, Smol, Macedonia 1916” (Figure 7) which, painted from a disconnected high viewpoint, shows wounded being brought from the battlefield on mule borne stretchers (travoys is from the Canadian French travois, a frame for restraining horses. A travois is a frame structure that was used by indigenous peoples, notably the Plains Aboriginals of North America, to drag loads over land.). “One would have thought that the scene was a sordid one, a terrible scene … but I felt there was a grandeur … all those wounded men were calm and at peace with everything so that pain seemed a small thing with them. I felt there was a spiritual ascendancy over everything.”

Another important work by Spencer is his painting “Resurrection of the Soldiers” (Figure 8), one of a group of works in the Sandham Memorial Chapel (1926-32) in Burghclere, Hampshire. Inspired by Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua Italy, the paintings in the chapel depict Spencer’s everyday experiences in the army at the Western Front. They are dominated by the 6 x 5 metres “Resurrection of the Soldiers”, which hangs behind the altar.

The painting shows resurrected soldiers climbing out of their graves, casting aside their crosses, which they no longer need, and shaking hands with their comrades. “The picture is a reminder of the relationship between war, death and Christianity, not merely a convenient and familiar religious image behind the altar.” – Duncan Robinson.

In spite of the horrors that he must have witnessed during his time on the European battlefield, there is a sense of detachment and quietness in Spencer’s war paintings. There is no blood or death, no wasted landscapes or destruction in his paintings. “Map Reading” (Figure 9), also in the Sandham Chapel, shows an officer checking his location on a map spread out before him while his men sleep on the ground or gather flowers. Spencer has deliberately chosen not to depict the ugly realities of war: rather there is a detached, abstracted, dispassionate representation accentuated by his characteristic high viewpoint.

Probably the single most famous anti-war painting in the history of art is Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” of 1937 (Figure 10). This large mural was produced as Picasso’s outraged response to the bombing of the village of Guernica in the Basque region of northern Spain during the Spanish Civil War. In stark contrast to Spencer’s dispassionate, even decorative style, Picasso’s expressionistic approach convey’s his revulsion and outrage at the horrors of war and the wanton massacre of innocent humans and animals.

The town of Guernica was a centre of the Republican resistance movement, who were fighting the fascist Nationalist Party of General Francisco Franco. The Nationalists were attempting to overthrow the elected left-wing government of President Manuel Azara. General Franco had called on the fascist governments of Germany and Italy for assistance. These countries responded by supplying aircraft for the attack on Guernica. For the Germans, this provided a testing-ground for equipment and tactics that were to become the blitzkrieg (lightning war) of World War II. The bombing of Guernica marked the first time that civilians became targets. They were pawns in a much larger game involving the emerging Fascist governments of Italy and Germany.

In the painting, Picasso expresses his abhorrence of war and particularly the horrific effects war often has on those not directly involved in the fighting. Bodies of people and animals are torn apart and strewn across the composition. Picasso deliberately used a narrow palette of nearly monochromatic colours in matte household paint to give the work the graphic immediacy of a newspaper photograph. The huge painting, which was completed in 35 days, and has become a universally recognised symbol of the anti-war movement, went on a short international tour soon after it was completed and helped to bring the Spanish Civil War to the world’s attention.

Picasso painted “Guernica” in Paris and after it had been toured it was placed in the care of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Following Picasso’s expressed wishes, it was given to Spain in 1981 following Franco’s death in 1975 and the country was returned to democracy. Picasso died in 1973 and did not live to see Spain’s return to democracy.  Following the death of Franco in November 1975 Spring began a transition to democracy. Picasso’s painting was returned to Spain in September 1981. It is now on permanent display at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Picasso maintained his anti-war ideology throughout his career. A less well known work is “Massacre in Korea”, painted in 1951 (Figure 11), which was a response to the American killing of anti-Communist forces in the Korean War in the province of Sinchon in 1950. The painting is clearly based on Goya’s “Third of May” (Figure 3) in its compositional division into two main sections with the soldiers on the right and victims on the left of the frame.

Picasso’s revulsion toward conflict also extended to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1969 he donated a pen and ink drawing, originally made to protest the Korean War, to the organisers of a huge anti-war march in Washington to be used for promotional purposes). The drawing depicts an “engine of war”, featuring a tank-like mutant machine/creature, bearing a stylised death-head image, breathing fire and destruction (Figure 12).

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