In Flames: War Through the Lens of Art
In this post, my first post, I explore the theme of war through the lens of art. I'm an interested in how artists interpret, represent, and emotionally process conflict through their creative work. To examine this idea more closely, I will focus on the distinct perspectives presented in three different artistic projects by Werner Herzog, Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, and Leon Golub.
1 - Lessons of Darkness
Werner Herzog, Lessons of Darkness, 1992, 16mm film, 54 min., 1992
Lessons of Darkness (1992) is a 50 minute documentary by German director Werner Herzog. This film does not function as a conventional informational documentary, rather it presents a poetic and philosophical meditation on the aftermath of the Gulf War in Kuwait. Herzog avoids journalistic explanation, historical context, or political commentary. Instead, he creates a cinematic exploration of devastated landscapes.
Werner Herzog, Lessons of Darkness, 1992, 16mm film, 54 min., 1992
The camera's eye is primarily focused on aerial shots of scorched oil fields and barren terrain. Fire is one of the biggest, brightest natural elements at sight. Flames erupt endlessly from oil wells, smoke fills the sky, and the earth seems to be transformed into a blackened wasteland. Only two interviews are conducted in the film. The firefighters shown throughout, covered in protective gear, appear almost inhuman. This catastrophic, post-war, portrait has been criticized for showing beauty in a place of pain and absolute destruction, almost as if the intention of the director was to ignore the reality of this space. Rather than focusing on victims or survivors, Herzog transforms the landscape into something mythic and otherworldly.
The imagery makes me feel as if I was alongside Dante, descending into the Inferno, particularly navigating the Seventh Circle of Hell (violence against God, art, and nature). In this sense, Herzog frames the Gulf War as a timeless vision of apocalypse rather than a specific historical event.
2 - The Hiroshima Pannels
Ghosts, 1950 Sumi ink, charcoal or conté on paper, 180 × 720 cm
The Hiroshima Panels are a series of fifteen large, foldable paintings begun in 1948 by Japanese artists Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, three years after the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unlike Herzog's distant, landscape-focused perspective, the Marukis center their work on human suffering.
Fire, 1950 Sumi ink, pigment, glue, charcoal or conté on paper 180 × 720 cm
The panels depict the immediate and long-term devastation caused by the atomic bomb: civilians burned alive, bodies disfigured, families in shock, and scenes of chaos and despair. The atmosphere is one of grief, suffering, and profound sorrow. Fire appears again as a dominant element, but here it is directly tied to the human body: burned skin, figures collapsing, and death.
The artists sought to represent as many victims as possible, but they ultimately acknowledge the impossibility of fully capturing such destruction. The scale of the tragedy, thousands killed in seconds, exceeds the artistic representation. Their work becomes both an act of remembrance and a testament to the limits of art in the face of mass death.
3 - Leon Golub: Vietnam works
Leon Golub, Vietnamese Head, 1970. Acrylic on linen, 24 × 18 in. (61 × 45.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Dan Miller, in loving memory of the artist, 2016. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Leon Golub has many fascinating artworks, but for the purpose of this post I will focus on his "Vietnam" works, which harshly criticizes the Vietnam War. These works confront violence in a direct manner. Unlike Herzog's distant views, or the Marukis' collective scenes of suffering, Golub focuses on individual bodies engaged in acts of aggression, torture, or interrogation.
His large-scale canvases often depict soldiers and victims in stark, flat spaces, and minimal background details. The figures appear raw and exposed, sometimes scraped into the canvas surface itself. Golub's style is harsh and physical, emphasizing power dynamics, brutality, and the human capacity for cruelty. The violence is not mythologized, or poeticized, it is immediate and political.
Golub forces the viewer into confrontation. There is no protective distance. His works implicate systems of authority and question the structures that produce such violence.
While all three artists address war and destruction, they approach it from radically different angles. Herzog presents war as apocalyptic landscape, mythic, sublime, and ambiguous. The Marukis paint it as a collective human tragedy, intimate, mournful, and commemorative. And Golub, presents war as a system of power enacted on the body, it's political, aggressive, and accusatory. Together, these works demonstrate how art can respond to violence in fundamentally different ways: through poetic distance, memorial testimony, or direct confrontation.
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