The Art Of War

What images come to mind with the word “war?” For much of human history, artists working for pharaohs, emperors, kings, queens, sultans, and tsars portrayed war, especially victorious battles, as glorious moments in history.

However, much of how war has been portrayed changed with the advent of photography. Even when viewed today, early wartime photography from our nation’s Civil War can shock us with the brutality of battle. Those of my generation will remember how photos from the Vietnam War sickened viewers and bolstered those opposing the war. I’ve yet to see a romantic wartime photo from Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.Despite being realistic, photography is still not always objective. Someone, perhaps a military leader or a newspaper executive, decides what should be photographed and what should not. In addition, a surfeit of photographs from warzones can numb us to the reality of war. We can see so much of a war that we’re no longer disturbed by those images.This is where a piece of art can more effectively convey the realities of war than the most realistic photographs. These are pieces of art that force viewers to see and to feel. A painting that has this power for many is Picasso’s Guernica.Guernica is actually a huge mural, being eleven feet by twenty-five feet, and to see it in person must be overwhelming. But it’s not the work’s massive size but rather its subject matter that stops us, forcing us to feel what war, real war, is like.Picasso’s mural depicts the aerial attack by Nazi forces, at the behest of General Francisco Franco, on a small town in Spain in 1937. But as with all great art, the message of Guernica is not limited to a moment in the past.Guernica is so compelling because it doesn’t depict the result of battle, corpses strewn across bombed-out settings, but rather the moments when living human beings stare into the face of death. Every figure’s mouth in Guernica, whether the mouth of a human being or an animal, is open, caught in a scream.To see Guernica is to grasp what Kristallnacht felt like to German Jews in 1938, what Lakota Sioux experienced at Wounded Knee, what Londoners felt in the first moments of the Blitz, what Japanese civilians felt in the second the A-Bomb fell on Hiroshima, what Tutsis in Rwanda experienced when Hutu forces broke into their homes, and what New Yorkers in the Twin Towers experienced when the planes hit on 9/11.To stand before Guernica is to hear the screams of Ukrainians when Russian missiles hit apartment buildings; it is to hear the terror of Israeli children when Hamas broke through the kibbutz’s defenses; it is to hear the cries and prayers in a hospital in Gaza as Israeli bombs destroy all hope.Guernica is too human a painting to be dismissed as political. Picasso’s Guernica is not a window showing scenes from places far away. Instead, Guernica is a mirror in which we see what we do as human beings to one another—over and over again.