Ars vs Bellum

Natalia GONCHAROVA. Doomed City. 1914. Sheet from the album “Mystical Images of War”
Lithograph. 32.3 × 24.5 cm. © Tretyakov Gallery

War in any form brings home to humanity a sense of its vulnerability, of the closeness of mortality; the accompanying hardship and the immediacy of death exacerbate and heighten our perception of being. The Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (1907-1977) articulated the sense of breakdown of a wider morality in the world that was felt in the years after 1918: “The First World War gave rise to a number of explanations that reflected people’s desire to understand the monstrosity of that event, one that, although initiated by the human race, nevertheless appeared beyond the horizon of understanding of man, whether as an individual or as a larger unit; in itself war became, in a certain sense, a phenomenon that had come from beyond the boundaries of the planet itself.”[1]

Kuzma PETROV-VODKIN. In the Line of Fire (Attack). 1916
Oil on canvas. 196 × 275 cm. © Russian Museum

Men of letters - writers, playwrights and poets - as well as artists and sculptors, composers, filmmakers and philosophers from both sides of the conflict would reconsider, each in their own way, the dramatic and existential experience of war, in prose and poetry, painting and sculpture, music and cinema.

1. Patocka, Jan. “Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History". Minsk, 2008. P. 148.

World War I. 1914-1918.
The Metronome of Memory

The Spanish Civil War:
Prelude to World War II

Art in War: War in Art.
The Great Patriotic War in Russian Сulture

Monuments of the Great Patriotic War.
“NO ONE IS FORGOTTEN, NOTHING IS FORGOTTEN”