1. 1. ‘The Third of May 1808’, perhaps the first unflinchingly anti-war painting in Western Art, is Goya’s response to a tragedy in which Spanish civilians were deliberately killed by Napoleon’s troops. <

2. 2. Albin Egger-Linz’s ‘Those Who Have Lost Their Names, 1914’, shows that war condemns each man to the anonymity of a shared and invisible death. The faces are expressionless or turned towards the ground. The postures are identical. The nameless men have lost all individuality, and sink together in step into the pockmarked earth in which they are to be buried. <

3. 3. John Singer Sergeant’s ‘Gassed’ shows the aftermath of a mustard gas attack on the Western Front during World War One. The sun is setting on a society that allows its youth to be wasted in a cruel war. <graphics.jsonline.com/graphics/owlive/img/apr03/gassed041303_big.jpg>

4. 4. Early Dadaist works were random images and textual fragments, but John Heartfield exploited its political possibilities and in 1924 produced ‘After ten years: fathers and sons’ showing General Von Hindenburg, a key figure of the First World War and soon to be President of the German Republic, standing in front of a series of skeletons, who are above a marching group of infantry. <

5. 5. In 1942, the year her grandson was killed in action, Kathë Kollwitz created Seed Corn Must Not Be Ground, her last lithograph. She died in 1945, shortly before the signing of the armistice. <

6. 8. Fritz Eichenberg, who volunteered illustrations for Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, was a German-born artist, printmaker, teacher, Quaker, author, and social activist. This woodcut is ‘Child Care Center’ (1980) <

7. 6. In Paul Nash’s ‘We are Making a New World’ the rising sun breaks into No Man’s Land on the Western Front. This landscape, constantly reshaped and redrawn by bombardment and attacks is un-mappable, people are excluded, it is ownerless, dead and polluted. The sun will continue to rise each and every day to expose and judge the desecration. <artyzm.com/obrazy/nash_we.jpg>

8. 7. Frans Masereel’s ‘Dawn’ (1920) reflects fears that a civil war might flare up in the big cities of Germany in the aftermath of World War One. <

9. 9. Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ was painted for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition in reaction to the Nazi German bombing of civilians in Guernica, Spain during the Spanish Civil War. <