The Creative Process: The Arts of War (Spring 2017)

The Creative Process
When Francisco Goya rendered his heart-wrenching series The
Disasters of War, and Jacques Callot created The Miseries of War, little
did they know the impact their recognition of the hardships that
civilians and soldiers face in war alike. A significant part of previous
artwork served to glorify the idea of war, and to euphemise the
horrors of it. War is no a gentleman’s game, rather, a game of life
and death. Art was an important part of the Napoleonic propaganda
machine, where the neoclassical tradition of history and battle
painting was adapted to represent contemporary events and present
a version of ‘truth’ that suited narratives that the Empire intended
to promote.
Moving eastwards from the western tradition, we come across
remarkable works of art in India that talk about war. Indian literary
and artistic history has constantly featured the theme of conflict in
a prominent manner. Like the Iliad and the Aeneid, the two most
renowned Indian epics talk about different types of war. The
Ramayana’s rising action arises from a war that Rama wages to save
his wife from the abductor, the King of Lanka, Ravana. The
Mahabharata, the largest epic ever written, focuses on fratricide and
war between the Kaurava and Pandava brothers. It is no coincidence
that two of Hinduism’s most prominent epics talk of injustice and
war.
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