We Honour Remembrance Day 2019 with War Artists

On Remembrance Day we respectfully pause to reflect on the sacrifice of the military, their families, the victims, casualties and society as a whole make during War.

Many artists have responded to the horrors, injustice and violence of war through art. Picasso's famous La Guernica was his response to the Spanish Civil War and the bombing of a Basque town. Many other artists, including Canadians, have also officially and unofficially produced art that has illuminated war and their responses to it.

Related Reading

Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica and the Masterpiece that Changed the World

On April 26, 1937, the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain was bombed by Hitler's Luftwaffe in the midst of a bloody civil war on behalf of Francisco Franco's rebel forces. Twenty-four hours later, the village lay in ruins, its population decimated. This act of terror and unspeakable cruelty – the first large-scale attack against civilians in modern warfare –outraged the world, and one man in particular. Pablo Picasso, an expatriate living in Paris, responded to the devastation in his homeland by beginning work on Guernica, a painting that many today consider the greatest artwork of the twentieth century. See also Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon.

The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500-1825

"From 1500 to 1825, Europe remained in an almost perpetual state of war. Religion, politics, economics, and dynastic ambition all played a role in the turmoil that spread across the continent. War-related printed images also proliferated during this time, serving a variety of functions--commemorative, propagandistic, iconic, narrative, eulogistic, critical, or instructional."

War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict

"In times of crisis, we often turn to artists for truth-telling and memory-keeping. There is no greater crisis than war, and in this sumptuously illustrated volume, we find a comprehensive visual, cultural, and historical account of the ways in which armed conflict has been represented by artists. Covering the last two centuries, from the Crimean War to the present day, the book shows how the artistic portrayal of war has changed, from a celebration of heroic exploits to a more modern, troubled, and perhaps truthful depiction of warfare and its consequences."

The Civil War and American Art

"This important book looks at the range of artwork created before, during, and following the war, in the years between 1859 and 1876. Author Eleanor Jones Harvey examines the implications of the war on landscape and genre painting, history painting, and photography, as represented in some of the greatest masterpieces of 19th-century American art." See also Civil War Sketch Book: Drawings From The Battlefront.

Käthe Kollwitz and the Women of War: Femininity, Identity, and Art in Germany during World Wars I and II

"Kollwitz imbued her prints, drawings, and sculpture with eloquent and often painful commentary on the human condition, especially the horrors of war. This insightful book, the first English-language catalogue on Kollwitz in more than two decades, offers the singular opportunity to examine her work against the tumultuous backdrop of World Wars I and II. The societal cost of war became an enduring subject for Kollwitz after her youngest son died on the battlefield in Flanders in 1914. She dedicated much of the remainder of her career to creating images that questioned the efficacy of war, exposed its devastation, and promoted peace."

Shooting Range: Photography & the Great War

Witness: Canadian Art of the First World War

"From the massive canvases painted by official war artists to the tiniest of personal sketches by amateur soldiers, Witness: Canadian Art of the First World War examines how Canadians captured their First World War experiences, both at home and overseas, in a variety of different ways."

Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art, and the Great War

"The Canadian War Memorials Exhibition opened in the galleries of the Royal Academy in Burlington House in January 1919. Featuring four hundred paintings and sculptures depicting the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War, the exhibition became the gala event of the London art season."

No Man's Land: The Life and Art of Mary Riter Hamilton

"What force of will and circumstance drove a woman with a burgeoning art career following years of study in European art schools from a comfortable life to one of hardship and loneliness in the battle zones of France and Belgium following the Great War? For western Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton (1868 1954), art was her life's passion. Her tale is one of tragedy and adventure, from homestead beginnings, to genteel drawing rooms in Winnipeg, Victoria, and Vancouver, to Berlin and Parisian art schools, to Vimy and Ypres, and finally to illness and poverty in old age."

Art for War and Peace: How a Great Public Art Project Helped Canada Discover Itself

"The idea that launched the Sampson - Matthews project was simple: get Canada's best painters to contribute to the war effort by creating new works in conjunction with the Canadian National gallery. Launched at the start of the second world war, the project ended up running for 22 years, costing 10 million dollars and containing work from all of Canada's great artists. Containing full colour reproduction of 112 silkscreens by eminent Canadian artists such as David Milne, Emily Carr and B.C.Binning." See also Canadian Artists and Airmen, 1940-45: A Wartime Memoir.

"During the First and Second World Wars some of Canada's finest artists were commissioned to capture history in the making. This superb book weaves 110 full-colour, seldom-seen images, works produced on the battlefield, with archival photographs and an evocative text."

"Art or Memorial? seeks to illuminate Canadian war art's sometimes-hidden presence in the nation's memory and to show, through both its presence and its absence, how it helped to shape, and will continue to influence, how we remember as a nation."

A Brush With War: Military Art from Korea to Afghanistan: A Canadian War Museum Exhibition Guide "Offering a glimpse into the richness and diversity of Canada's post-Second World War military art, A Brush with War features 30 extraordinary paintings from the Canadian War Museum and other collections. An introduction and four historic overviews covering the period 1946-2008."

Monsters and Myths: Surrealism & War in the 1930s and 1940s

"During the pivotal decades leading up to World War II and throughout the war, important Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, Wolfgang Paalen, and Yves Tanguy--some of whom had served as soldiers in World War I--responded through their works to the repression and violence attending the rise of Hitler and the spread of Fascism in Europe. In this engrossing volume, essays by experts in the field and more than 130 color images showcase the experimental and international extent of Surrealist art during these years." See also Farewell to the Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism.

Wyndham Lewis: Art and War

Modern Art, Britain, and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony, and Remembrance

"The First World War had a great impact on British modernism and twentieth-century art. This book examines how the British state recruited some of its most controversial artists to produce official art as part of propaganda and how their work gave witnessed testimony to the trauma of a war that later generations would redeem in acts of remembrance."

Beyond theBattlefield: Women Artists of the Two World Wars

"World Wars I and II changed the globe on a scale never seen before or since, and from these terrible conflicts came an abundance of photographs, drawings, and other artworks attempting to make sense of the turbulent era. In this generously illustrated book, Catherine Speck provides a fascinating account of women artists during wartime in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and their visual responses to war, both at the front lines and on the home front."

Art and the Second World War

"Art and the Second World War is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive and detailed international overview of the complex and often disturbing relationship between war and the fine arts during this crucial period of modern history. This generously illustrated volume starts by examining the art produced in reaction to the Spanish Civil War (often viewed as "the first battle of World War II"), and then looks at painting, sculpture, prints, and drawing in each of the major combatant nations, including Japan and China."

Arthur Szyk: Soldier in Art

"Explores the activism of the Polish-born artist through 38 politically incisive works that underscore Szyk's role as a kind of 'one man army' fighting odious policies and protagonists and advocating civil and human rights."

A Soldier's Sketchbook: From the Front Lines of World War II

"New Yorker cartoonist and painter Joseph Farris chronicles his experience in World War II through letters and sketches that he wrote at the time." See also The Two Thousand Yard Stare: Tom Lea’s World War II.

War Imagery in Women's Textiles: An International Study of Weaving, Knitting, Sewing, Quilting, Rug Making and other Fabric Arts

"Through the centuries, women have used textiles to express their ideas and political opinions, creating items of utility that also function as works of art. In each case traditional women's work served to document the upheaval in their lives. By creating textiles that responded to the chaos of war, women created a vehicle to express their feelings."

Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975

"By the late 1960s, the United States was in a pitched conflict in Vietnam, against a foreign enemy, and at home--between Americans for and against the war and the status quo. This powerful book showcases how American artists responded to the war, spanning the period from Lyndon B. Johnson's fateful decision to deploy US Marines to South Vietnam in 1965 to the fall of Saigon ten years later." See also Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975.