Where’s Our War Art?

“War has generated some of the strangest, as well as some of the greatest and oldest, images in art. Neolithic cave paintings show swarming battles of stick figures armed with bows and arrows. Assyrian palaces were decorated with epic scenes of siege warfare. And so it goes, through the conquests represented on Trajan’s Column in Rome to the Battle of Hastings on the Bayeux Tapestry to … well, as it happens, not quite through to today. We have been at war for most of this century, but this global and unprecedented conflict has not yet inspired much art.”