Bombs to Brushstrokes

Written April, 2025 for Cross Currents in Global Art, History 1011 at The University of Winnipeg.

The harms of war experienced first hand by artists on the battlefield created a collective solemnity and challenge to authority in the early 20th century. While some artists captured the reality of war, others were enlisted to create works which created a positive sentiment among citizens of nations involved in the world wars.

Both wars inspired works protesting the conflicts, pro-war propaganda and later memorialisation. Some who created anti-war work intentionally remained anonymous for fear of the repercussions. Some such art was state sponsored and captured nationalist attitudes of victory and perseverance through the hardship of war. While others, those who were creating works on the front lines had a much more raw, unfiltered perception of war. Prior to the World Wars, a battle had never been so thoroughly documented from so many perspectives. Each war allowed for hundreds of firsthand accounts which were served to an awe-struck public through postcards, newspapers, photographs and paintings.[1]

Frederick Varley was enlisted to paint the war and relied on photography and sketches of real events from the war. Photography was valuable to paint artists as it could capture a moment which could later be reproduced through painting. At the start of WWI Canadian soldiers were allowed to carry cameras during active duty. This was later banned and in 1916 official war photographers were appointed. There were restrictions as to where they could work, limiting their potential to fully capture the war. These limitations allowed the Canadian government to publish a curated interpretation of the war as bloodless and under control in the eye of the public through newspapers and exhibitions.[2]

Artists were commissioned by the Canadian government during the first world war as an effort of boosting morale among Canadians by depicting the reality of the war, showing the brutality, the Canadian soldiers faced.[3] Four of the individuals who were selected to create commissioned work for Canada: A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley, future members of the Group of Seven, a major influential Canadian art movement, the first uniquely Canadian art movement.

Varley was given temporary commission as a captain with the Canadian military, allowing him to move freely compared to other artists assigned to capture the war in sketches and paintings. He travelled on the frontlines from August 1918 until the war ended November 11 that same year. It is not clear whether he based his piece For What?[4] on a photograph. The piece itself hides none of the brutality of The Great War and its title challenges what any of these lost souls had been fighting for. Many of his pieces were created from photos but also used his sketches and memories of such vivid and desolate moments. Whether this was something he witnessed or was an accumulation of events and photographs is unclear, but the piece captures the harshness he witnessed.

The photos Varley based some of his work on were not directly associated with his works until historians and archivists began finding the original photos in the 1950s.[5] During the war many photos were censored or unreleased by the Canadian government. To publish the brutality of war to the Canadian public would have risked worsening enthusiasm among citizens of Canada’s involvement. Varley was able to capture what Canadians did were not allowed to see. In a letter he wrote to his wife he said no one in Canada can understand the actuality of the war. “You must hear the screeching shells and have the shrapnel fall around you, whistling by you- seen the results of it, seen scores of horses, bits of horses lying around, in the open… until you’ve lived this…you cannot know.”

In the first world war many artists, similar to their countrymen, were intrigued by the war for the potential for adventure and feats of bravery it presented. It was thought that the Great War would create a more peaceful world. Otto Dix was among the soldiers with an artistic talent who was not drafted into the war, rather he voluntarily enlisted in 1915.[6]

Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix

His war art is autobiographical and depicts the perspective of the purpose and brutality of the war from the perspective of a veteran. His work shows the war as having been destructive and depressing. Dix created works showing absolute brutality. Similar to Varley his work questioned what any of the fighting was worth, a sentiment shared by all sides at the end of a war which ultimately changed little. Capturing the death he witnessed and potentially took part in bringing to others, Dix’s art is inherently anti-war, showing it as a purposeless mess of mud, blood and firepower.[7]

His piece Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas[8] shows masked soldiers with truncheons seemingly attacking the viewer. They have no personal identity, only their gasmasks. One character on the right side of the piece is scowling, marching angrily forward toward barbed wire. The piece is black, grey and white, lifeless colours under a dark lifeless sky. The characters have no emotion beyond anger and destruction. This is what Otto Dix saw in the war. While a self portrait of Dix as a soldier shows a strong, powerful man with a firearm and a scowl, his interpretation in Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas, the title describing the horrible mustard gas used in the Great War, creates an image of faceless killers destroying in a place meant only for death and destruction.

What Otto Dix painted was based on his real wartime experiences.[9] The soldiers Dix painted were not heroes, as they were captured in pro-war propagandist works. Those who created pro-war works were not on the front line witnessing the true cost of the war as Dix had. The soldiers in the paintings Dix made were lifeless, dead, or committing acts of treacherous violence in bleak settings.

German born, Dix had seen and experienced the suppression of the reign Adolf Hitler had on the artistic sphere in Germany. Hitler felt that modern art was not complimentary to the cultural achievements of Germany. Though Dix remained in Germany through the Nazi regime many German artists fled into exile for fear of consequences of not feeding the national propaganda machine. Artists in Hitler’s Germany were not creatively free, rather, if they hoped to prosper, they were to abide by the rules of creating pro-German propaganda.[10] In Mein Kampf, Hitler described modern art as a “swindle foisted off on the German people by Jewish art dealers,” calling Dada and cubism as “artistic Bolshevism”, “morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men,” and indications of “cultural decay.”[11]

There were many lasting consequences of the world wars. One such massive consequence was a resistance to the norms of the time among European artists. At the start of the first world war, many young artists were forced into the war where they faced endless death and violence. What these artists experienced disturbed their impression of the status quo. What had been the standard way of life had allowed the fermentation of the two world wars which cost millions of lives across Europe. This instability and ever-present violence instigated a new school of artistic thought called Dada. Dada was a rejection of social and artistic norms. Dada took what had been celebrated by the artistic zeitgeist and dismantled it. In 1919 Marcel Duchamp released a print of the Mona Lisa with a moustache drawn on her reflecting the rejection of the status quo reducing the great work of Da Vinci to a comical figure to a mockery. From Dada came the roots of Surrealism, a further reinterpretation of what was creatively possible.[12]

Among the most famous creators of nationalist propaganda in the United States as Norman Rockwell who in 1943 had Four Freedoms published in four separate issues of the Saturday Evening Post. The Freedoms captured by Rockwell were described in a 1941 state of the union address by Franklin Roosevelt prior to the United States entering the Second World War. The values FDR outlined and Rockwell painted were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Each value had its own piece and each piece had a full page in the Saturday Evening Post accompanied by an essay which described what Rockwell’s work represented.[13]

Artists who witnessed war, whether as soldiers or as commissioned artists, captured what they saw and brought it home. It was like nothing anyone had seen and created a greater understanding of the actual destruction of war. While violence, death, the destruction of cities, communities and families was broadly captured during the war, at its conclusion artists began releasing work celebrating the Armistice, as well as hundreds of memorials for those who died in battle.[14]

Despite the horror of war, artists continued to create throughout. Whether they read about the war or witnessed it’s catastrophic potential first hand. From the First World War onward the work of artists became crucial instruments for creating signs and symbols to muster patriotism. During World War II artists who partook in creating propaganda for their countries had their work produced and published en masse on posters and post cards. Eventually, by the end of the second world war the distinction between art created as commentary on the war and art created as propaganda had become nearly indistinguishable.[15]

[1] Laura Brandon, Art & War (London I.B. Tauris, 2009).

[2] Laura Brandon, “Double Exposure: Photography and the Great War Paintings of Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley,” RACAR : Revue d’Art Canadienne 39, no. 2 (December 9, 2014): 14–28, https://doi.org/10.7202/1027746ar.

[3] Laura Brandon, Art & War (London I.B. Tauris, 2009).

[4] Figure 1.

[5] Laura Brandon, Double Exposure.

[6] Jennifer Farrell, “Art as Influence and Response: A First Look at World War I and the Visual Arts - the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metmuseum.org, October 16, 2017, https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/world-war-i-and-the-visual-arts-introduction.

[7] Paul Fox, “Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (June 1, 2006): 247–67, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcl006.

[8] Figure 2.

[9] Laura Brandon, Art & War (London I.B. Tauris, 2009).

[10] Barbara McCloskey, Artists of World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005).

[11] Barbara McCloskey, Artists of World War II.

[12] Brodskai︠a︡N. V., Surrealism : Genesis of a Revolution (New York: Parkstone International, 2012).

[13] Megan Smith, “Norman Rockwell’s ‘Four Freedoms,’” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, December 16, 2019, https://www.mfah.org/blogs/inside-mfah/norman-rockwells-four-freedoms.

[14] “World War I and American Art,” PAFA - Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, November 3, 2014, https://www.pafa.org/museum/exhibitions/world-war-i-american-art.

[15] Barbara Mccloskey, Artists of World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005).

Image Bibliography

Figure 1. Frederick Varley. For What? 1918. Oil on canvas. 147.4 x 180.6 cm. Canadian War Museum. Accessed March 9th, 2025

Figure 2. Otto Dix. Shock Troops Advance Under Gas From the War. 1924. Aquatint and drypoints. 19.3 x 28.8 cm. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. German Expressionism Digital Archive, Accessed March 9th, 2025.

Bibliography

Brandon, Laura. Art & War. London I.B. Tauris, 2009.

Brandon, Laura. “Double Exposure: Photography and the Great War Paintings of Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley.” RACAR : Revue d’Art Canadienne 39, no. 2 (December 9, 2014): 14–28. https://doi.org/10.7202/1027746ar.

Brodskai︠a︡N. V. Surrealism : Genesis of a Revolution. New York: Parkstone International, 2012.

Farrell, Jennifer. “Art as Influence and Response: A First Look at World War I and the Visual Arts - the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Metmuseum.org, October 16, 2017. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/world-war-i-and-the-visual-arts-introduction.

Fox, Paul. “Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix.” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (June 1, 2006): 247–67. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcl006.

Mccloskey, Barbara. Artists of World War II. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

National WWI Museum and Memorial. “Religious Icons in Art and War,” n.d. https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/religious-icons-art-and-war.

PAFA - Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. “World War I and American Art,” November 3, 2014. https://www.pafa.org/museum/exhibitions/world-war-i-american-art.

Smith, Megan. “Norman Rockwell’s ‘Four Freedoms.’” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, December 16, 2019. https://www.mfah.org/blogs/inside-mfah/norman-rockwells-four-freedoms.