SURREAL VISIONS OF WAR

Art has chronicled wars about as long as they have been fought. Usually created by the winners, war art generally focused on the genius of the country’s military leaders or the heroism of its fighting men. Accuracy in depicting the experience of war has tended to take second place to propaganda inspiring the masses; but by the 1800s a degree of authenticity in uniforms, weaponry and mise-en-scène became the preferred norm.

The horrific battlefield reality of World War I changed that. As individual valor became a struggle for survival under a deluge of industrialized mass destruction, the twentieth century’s surrealism cultural movement in art, literature and other media—an attempt to portray reality via the unconscious mind’s “super-truth” () using bizarre, fantastic and grotesque dreamlike or nightmarish images—became just as relevant and acceptable a means of capturing war’s true nature as the best researched and most meticulously “realistic” artwork, Pablo Picasso’s cubist-influenced summation-in-metaphor of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Yet another example of art capturing a surreal vision of war is the prodigious body of work chronicling two world wars by the English artistic polymath Paul Nash.