Capturing conflict through art

People across the globe have long sought to establish control over their own lives and to assert their power over the lives of others. Visual art in particular has played an important role in documenting these conflicts—just think of the many scenes of battle and conquest that line the walls of major museums, or even the grand old statues of military heroes or victors on horseback that occupy public squares in cities all over the world. These are all works of art that are responding to a need for documenting and making visible the outcomes of conflict.

But what about art that goes beyond documentation? With its power to convey ideas and emotions more strongly than words alone, art inherently has the power to change the ways people think and express dissent. What happens when art becomes a tool for challenging the status quo, a voice for thoughts on politics, war, social inequities, and the human condition? And what can an artist accomplish by making conflict an internal quality of their work, bringing tension and irony into the gallery?

As with every other aspect of human life, conflict has served as inspiration for art across cultures and eras. Artwork documenting war had been popular for centuries, but in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, artists were becoming more willing to incorporate very recent events into major paintings. Take a look at the painting by American painter John Singleton Copley above, which shows the British defending the island of Jersey from a French invasion in 1781 and was painted only two years later. In its centre, a young Major named Francis Peirson tumbles dramatically as he is shot by a sniper. While the battle serves as the subject of the painting, its focal point is the death of the young hero–what kind of emotion do you think this painting was trying to evoke in its viewers? Is Peirson’s death just a tragedy, or a tragic victory? After it was first displayed, the painting garnered rave reviews from its British audience, who hailed it as an image of heroic patriotism.

Looking at paintings like Copley’s, you might wonder where authenticity and realism come in. As artists in the West continued to create images of war, heroic or tragic, realistic or glorified, the need became clear for some kind of official artistic documentation of conflict. As the First and Second World Wars rolled through Europe, official schemes were established in which artists were commissioned by the British government to capture, document, and memorialise the war efforts. Some artists took this as an invitation to photograph and document, while others like the painter Paul Nash found it impossible to witness the increasingly mechanised destruction of the wars without using his work to comment upon it.

Even photographs, which often capture reality in a way that is very close to how we see it, seem unable to simply document without making statements on their subjects. Don McCullin’s photograph of the battlefields of the Somme—where over one million men were wounded and killed, making it one of the bloodiest battles not only of World War I, but in all of human history—was taken over seventy years after the battle. And yet the image is far from quiet and neutral, imbued with the knowledge of what took place there.

Do you think art can capture and convey things beyond what we can see? What about emotions, sensations, and stories?