War is one of the distinguishing characteristics of humanity. Art is another of these attributes, unique to the species Homo sapiens. Consequently, it is no surprise that these two pursuits should become intimately melded throughout the course of history. The term "war-art" often conjures images of propaganda, the American war posters of the First and Second World Wars, the iconographic art created in support of the French Revolution, and even the ancient Roman Augustus of Primaporta. Yet propaganda-based art is limited, a narrow utilization of the art medium in order to support the ideas and purposes of others. This is opposed to an expression which the artist creates in order to address an issue, rather than to serve a partisan in a conflict. This is not to say that propaganda art is without merit, instead it is an acknowledgement of the limitations inherent in art created in order to serve the purposes of one other than the artist.

With the dawn twentieth-century, war-art has been taken to planes previously unimaginable. The First and Second World Wars, the thousands of post-colonial conflicts, and the "hot flash" conflicts through which the United States and Soviet Union waged their Cold War with puppet nations, as well as a plethora of other wars and battles have left an indelible mark on humanity's collective psyche. Warfare has become a constant and total threat to the very existence of every human being in existence. Advancements in technology have increased the geopolitical scope of warfare. Modern technological advancements have also increased the destructive capability of military confrontation. Furthermore, communication capabilities have rapidly advanced, a development that has led to better force coordination of military forces, as well allowing media ever greater coverage of such conflicts. The sum total of these developments is that not only has the number of combatants and front-line participants increased dramatically, but warfare has become ever more integrated into the everyday reality of the general populace, the masses of civilians who themselves may never take up arms. Thus warfare has become ever more constant in our modern world, not just to a particular warrior-class, or even warrior-civilizations, but to humanity as a whole. The reality of this situation has been reflected in the world's cultures, cultures in turn which reflect the intellectual and emotional sentiments of their constituent members. Art has reacted, has grown and evolved in the midst of this increaseingly draconian world-view, recording the experiences as well as the perceptions of both the participants and observers of modern war. To understand war-art of the twentieth century we must examine the work of artists who have addressed war in the contemporary context of regional/global technology-heavy, total war. Both Pablo Picasso, a Modernist who's work Guernica may be one of the greatest pieces of war-art ever created, as well as Anselm Kiefer, a German post-Modernist whose art addresses German culture in a critical moralistic fashion, including the reality of German war-culture through the Second World War may serve as prime examples of modern war-art trends.

"Terrified outcry and bitter accusation: Guernica." ⁽¹⁾ From Krause's The Story of Painting

On the twenty-sixth of April, 1937, in the small town of Guernica, a center of Basque culture and tradition, people were walking and talking, shopping for food and goods. The populace of both the town and the countryside filled the streets, it being the busiest part of the day . On the twenty-sixth of April, 1937, the German Air Force, under command of General Franco, flew over that same town of Guernica with Junker and Heinkel bombers. On the twenty-sixth of April, 1937, these bombers, in an act of wanton and meaningless destruction, utterly obliterated the town of Guernica and its inhabitants, totally decimating a city altogether without military or strategic importance as a means for Franco to test the effects of full-scaled carpet- or saturation- bombing on an undefended populace. Pablo Picasso, a stolid believer in republican democracy who had been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion of the International Exhibition in Paris, a project which he had been putting off for months, was immediately outraged. Within ten days he had designed a piece titled Guernica and had begun painting the mural, a piece so large (25 feet long by 11 feet tall) that Picasso had to rent another studio to hold it. Picasso himself delineates the purpose of the piece in a statement he made in May of 1937:

The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the
people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been
nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and
the death of art. . . . In the panel on which I am working which
I will call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly
express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain
in an ocean of pain and death. . . .⁽²⁾

As he spoke these words, Picasso was creating a piece in which he sought to address the cold realities of warfare, the evil of a military regime which has not been content with murdering other warriors, but has somehow found it necessary to carry out an act of symbolic destruction which killed thousands of women, children, elderly, and noncombatant men.⁽³⁾

Perhaps the most instantly striking aspect of Guernica is its color, or rather the lack thereof. The piece is painted entirely in black, white, and tones of gray, a far cry from Picasso's usual array of bright and piercing coloration. These pigments give the composition a morbid and morose character, dark and forbidding. It seems not simply a painting, but a sort of incredible photograph, unrealistic yet completely believable, the black, white, and gray giving the painting the qualities of an actual scene of the destruction, pulled from the front page of a journal or the texts of a history book. The lack of color lends the work an atmosphere which truly divulges the grim reality of war.

Picasso also utilizes Cubism in this work, the style for which he is best known. The Cubist qualities are quite appropriate for this in that they precede to distort the subject within, manipulating it and disfiguring the already anguished faces of the victims. The Cubist motif is lending a degree of almost surreal passion, emoting in way which is physiologically impossible. Under the Cubist reality the mourning mother is portrayed in a physically impossible expression of pain and lamentation. She is a metaphor in the physical realm for the emotions felt in the inner mind and soul. The horse, his eyes wide in a geometric countenance of pure emotion would not hold such power as it does were it confined to the restrictions of reality. In other words, Picasso has utilized Cubism in such a fashion as to take the very real emotions expressed by the victims and magnify them, empower the physical world with the abstracting potency of Cubism to make the human emotions superhuman, a true realization of the emotions rather than one limited by the laws of biology and physics.

The figures themselves (including the bull and horse) further allow Picasso to express the evils of the bombing. The bull, representing darkness and power, stands like proud gargoyle, surveying the chaos of the scene in a chilling manner.⁽⁴⁾ The horse, disemboweled and pierced with a spear, its head reared back in a tortured pose of pain and horror, represents the people of Spain (and Guernica in particular), the victims of the onslaught who without purpose or reason have been utterly ravaged.⁽⁵⁾ The fallen soldier lies crushed under the horse who, we suppose, he himself has slain, his broken body and sword representing the end of traditional warfare and the dawn of modern mechanized, dehumanized warfare. The mourning mother clutches her dead child in her arms, her head flailed back in what may be a terrible screaming prayer to an unhearing God. A woman cries out in pain as she falls into a burning pit while other women join in the mourning, disfigured in their own pain and terror.

Picasso has thus sought to continue a movement which may have begun with Goya, a movement away from portraying the Glory of War and towards representing the strife of war, as well as the suffering and torment which is inherent in all military conflict, but which is particularly prolific in modern, dehumanized, technology ridden warfare.

The art student who began his career two decades
ago by having himself photographed giving the Nazi salute
in various European locales was a sort of prankster, though
serious as well as a staggeringly audacious one- getting at
something that needed to be gotten at, the repressed emotions
of the Third Reich, as a means to the end of a comprehensive,
untrammeled art. "How could it happen?" he was asking, partly
as a young German disgusted with the evasiveness of his
elders but most pointedly as an ambitious, rebellious artist,
defiantly asserting, right from the start, an absolute license for
his imagination.⁽⁶⁾

The previous quote, taken from a piece by critic P. Schjeldahl, attempts to capture the essence of Anselm Kiefer's work. Kiefer, a postmodernist German expressionist, is historical artist, yet not in the traditional sense. While most historical artists tend to illustrate actual scenes or episodes from history, criticing the individual moments, Kiefer examines history as a whole, as a single living entity which is very much a part of today. While he does seek to push certain moralistic viewpoints, making judgements and questioning the ethics of his historical predecessors, this is not his primary goal. Rather Kiefer is trying to come to terms with the past. He seeks to reconcile the reality of the present with the reality of previous years. Kiefer understands that one cannot disconnect one's self from the history which has led to one's very being, and that this principle is applicable to cultures as well. Thus Kiefer has created a most worthy challenge for himself: Kiefer seeks to address German history that culminates in the Third Reich and the Holocaust in such a way that it becomes a permanent and powerful aspect of the German conscious psyche, rather than simply a residual motivator operating totally in the cultural subconscious.

Kiefer's work derives its potency from two prime sources, intricately intertwined, including his iconography, including his use of non-traditional materials, and his coloration. Beginning with his iconography, we immediately see that Kiefer utilizes an almost unparalleled number of resources in order to achieve his purposes. For instance, Kiefer utilizes Classical Roman, Greek, Jewish, Christian and Egyptian mythology, taking traditional images and completely reinventing their meanings. An example of this would be his use of Icarus, shown as a palette with wings in order to show how art, idealistic and free is in fact not true reality, often shown in contrast with landscapes devastated by warfare, which is pessimistic and real.⁽⁷⁾ Another source for Kiefer's symbolism is alchemy. He will utilize often utilize such materials as hay, hair, lead, tar, sand, and others in order to create underlying metaphors for the compositions themselves, as in his work The Book. In this work he creates a lead book, no doubt a symbol for knowledge, truth, morality and a plethora of other things. Yet the book is not a real book, but rather one constructed of lead and zinc, metals often utilized by alchemists in an attempt to create gold. In this work, in which the book floats above a German landscape, Kiefer is showing how the German reality has taken the wisdom and knowledge of the German past and altered it, as so the book is not of gold, a symbol for true knowledge and wisdom, but rather a false testament, utilized by the Nazis to create destruction and violence, thus leaving us with the ruined landscape.⁽⁸⁾ Kiefer also utilizes the name as a symbol, as in his work Varus. In this piece Kiefer has created a scene from the Black Forest, configured in such a manner as to simultaneously echo the traditional Gothic cathedral, filled with the names of individuals whose writings, whether intentionally or not, helped in the development of National Socialism. These writers, the piece is indicating, are responsible for their creations, creations which have led to untold sorrows and horrors, particularly in the Second World War. Yet the cumulative effect of their work is the true sin, the collectiveness that requires cultural acceptance and unity of interpretation in order to instill the demonic effects which they would eventually lead to. The name thus becomes a wholesale critique of modern German society, questioning that self-same society's intellectual and spiritual roots.⁽⁹⁾ Finally, Kiefer uses German tradition, legend, geography, and history as the most striking source of meaning. The symbols, such as German geography, the Black Forest, the Teutonic legends, and Nazi architecture, are made into unmistakingly German icons. ⁽¹⁰⁾

Kiefer's coloration also requires note. His works are almost always filled with dark colors, browns, greys, as well as dark greens and blues juxtaposed with smaller areas of intense colors, for instance scarlet, white, and bright gold. This creates a kind of natural tension, the darker tones setting the scene as a morbid one, condemning rather than commending, while the brighter, eye-catching colors create a tension, always forcing the eye to dart about the work in a futile attempt to take in the piece as a whole. This can be somewhat unsettling, yet at the same time the tension of the colors prevent the eye from wandering from the painting, always forcing the viewer to return again and again to the disturbing scenes of metaphor which are simultaneously instilling their message of historical truth, forcing present reconciliation.

Picasso and Kiefer are both artists of the twentieth century, their work addressing similar subjects through complex levels of metaphor and meaning. Rather than ignoring the realities of the human condition, the realities of warfare, and the plagues it brings down on both its willing participants and those drawn in through no wish of their own, these two have addressed the issues before them. They have sought to illustrate the meaninglessness of human military conflict, to question the moral rationality of war as a whole, and to emote the deeper, almost spiritual connotations that war elicits from the human being, the emotions which humanity has as of yet been unable to conceive adaquate words for. They are social critics, and yes, perhaps to a point they may be called a kind of propagandist. Yet at the same time they are following suit with the children of any war-torn nation who take their pencils and crayons and draw what they feel about war, rather simply than what they think. They are not tradtional war-artists because war of our century is not traditional war. War of the twentieth century is dehumanized and mechanized. It is genocide and nuclear holocaust, smart bombs and biological warfare. The rational and mathematical warfare of the modern era is, these artists are saying, a calculated method of wholesale murder and destruction, crimes which these individuals have had the audacity to confront, and have done so with resounding success.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine.
It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the
shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for more
blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is Hell.⁽¹¹⁾

General William T. Sherman