War and Peace in the Arts - The Military Leader, The Heroic Soldier, Civilian Casualties In War, The World Wars In Film
human
Depictions of violence have been part of human culture for millennia. What began as an effort of early humans to come to terms with the awe-inspiring power of weapons to kill their prey, and thus sustain human life, or ward off danger (for example, the cave paintings of Altamira, Spain) has evolved into a complex social code to help us try to make sense of total war, which industrialization and the modern nation-state made possible during the twentieth century.
Additional Topics
The second most commonly depicted individual in war art is the heroic soldier. In the Western world the characteristics of the archetypal hero were defined in Homer's ninth-century epic poems about the Trojan War, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Homeric hero, as personified by Achilles, was courageous in battle, loyal to his friends and comrades, and quick to anger. He suffered grievous loss…
Jacques Callot's series of etchings The Miseries of War (mid-seventeenth century) was the first attempt to depict the impact of war on civilians. Callot's finely detailed etchings of war-ravaged Lorraine during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) show pillaged farm houses, burning churches, and the raping and killing of peasants by marauding soldiers and deserters. But th…
From the earliest years of moving pictures the topic of war provided exciting and attractive material. At first, directors "restaged" current events such as the Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion in China, or the Boer War in South Africa in order to entertain and "inform" movie-goers. During World War I all sides rushed propaganda movies into production in order …
Like civilians, the ordinary soldier was largely invisible in war art until the nineteenth century. Only when mass conscript armies of citizens took to the field after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had revolutionized the nature of warfare did artists and photographers begin to take notice. The emergence of mass circulation newspapers, the technology to cheaply reproduce sketches an…
The formal ending of a state of war is commonly achieved by means of a surrender, armistice, or peace treaty. For the losing party there is no pleasant way to accept defeat. For the victor, there is an opportunity for propaganda, as a number of works of art demonstrate. The seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Velasquez was commissioned by the Spanish court to contribute to a series of victor…
Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Bohm-Duchen, Monica ed. After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art. Sunderland: Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, 1995. Chipp, Herschel B. Picasso's Guernica: History, Transformations, Meaning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Cochrane, Pete…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments