The 10 best British artworks about war

Jeremy Deller with his work 'Baghdad, 5 March 2007', a car salvaged from a Baghdad market bombing. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features


Broadcaster Jon Snow picks his favourite artistic interpretations of war

Share33 Jon Snow The Observer, Sunday 31 October 2010 Article history

1 Jeremy Deller It Is What It Is (2009)

Deller towed this Baghdad taxi round America, provoking debate wherever he went. It was blown up on a Baghdad street dominated by bookshops and it was no accident that the car bombers chose that particular street; they devastated what the insurgents regarded as a hub of decadent western culture. Deller spent six months, accompanied by an Iraqi refugee and a GI, stopping in towns and cities across the US, connecting Americans with the Iraq war. Having starred in the Contemporary Art Museum in Chicago, the taxi has finally arrived in pole position at London's Imperial War Museum.

2 John Piper Interior of Coventry Cathedral (1940)

Piper concentrated on this emblematic casualty of the second world war. The scene he paints in savage technicolour "the morning after the Blitz" stands almost unaltered today. Coventry took the full impact of the German reprisal for the allied bombing of Germany. Along with the loss of life, this was the overnight destruction of a religious icon, a cathedral that had survived the elements for more than half a millennium. Piper was young enough to play a role in the decoration of the Basil Spence building that rose from the ashes.

3 Percy Wyndham Lewis A Battery Shelled (1919)

Only by executing this painting after the first world war's end did Wyndham Lewis get away with it. Richard Nevinson had already been censored for his attempt to depict the true human cost of war by showing two dead Tommies lying unburied above a trench. Lewis deploys the remnants of both cubism and futurism in his portrayal of the devastation of targeted attack. He had served in the artillery in 1916 and so had first-hand knowledge of his subject matter. He shows a dead gunner being buried following an attack on an artillery battery.

4 Stanley Spencer Resurrection (1927)

This climactic piece sits above the altar at Sandham memorial chapel, Burghclere. It's a vast mural that ranges from reunited friends in heaven to the bodies of dead horses on a battlefield littered with crosses, and a tiny figure of Christ. Upon securing the commission Spencer cried: "What ho, Giotto!" He did not exaggerate. Had he painted this, and the other murals alongside, in a Wren church in the City, instead of in this remote Hampshire village, it might have become one of the most visited spots in Great Britain.

5 John Keane Mickey Mouse at the Front (1991)

Keane was the official British war artist on the front line in the Gulf war. Here, he paints the incongruities of war. He has something of Spencer's eye for detail – a shopping trolley full of rocket- propelled grenades, a bedraggled and brutally mangled palm tree and the bizarre appearance of Mickey Mouse. The awkward juxtaposition of American imagery (almost certainly carried to war as a mascot) imposed on a backdrop of a foreign land of which the invader probably knew little and cared less - it's perhaps one instance of war art as anti-war.

6 Steve McQueen Queen and Country (2007)

A completely brilliant three-dimensional tribute to the British soldiers who died in the Iraq war. It's an individual sheet of stamps intended for postal circulation (but poignantly refused by the Post Office) stored on individual, wooden- framed plates in an oak, coffin-shaped cabinet. To the naked eye, they appear like any other run of stamps, but down each side a short statement of age, rank and place of death sets them apart from the norm. One feels this piece will stand the test of time.

7 Henry Moore Tube Shelter Perspective (1941)

Moore spent many hours during the Blitz down in the Aldwych station on London's Piccadilly line. This was the sanctuary for hundreds of Londoners sheltering from the bombing above. Executed in pencil, ink wax and watercolour, this is an eerie work of ghostly pale shades. The sleeping bodies have the look of a regiment of corpses. It was exhibited above ground, along the road at the National Gallery, taking up space on walls vacated by the collection of old masters that had been carted off to Cheshire salt mines for safe keeping.

8 John Singer Sargent Gassed (1919)

One of the single most arresting images of the first world war. Blinded by gas, a column of soldiers stumbles across the battlefield. Yet in the far distance of this enormous canvas you can see other men playing football. It provides an intriguing insight into something Spencer worked on, the intermingling of the horror of war with the normality of life. Sargent went to France in the closing months of the war and was commissioned to paint this for a Hall of Remembrance. It hangs to this day on permanent display in a section of the Imperial War Museum set aside for that purpose.

9 Paul Nash We Are Making a New World (1918)

The fruitlessness and desolation of war is summed up in this painting. It remains one of the most important works of the first world war art. The portrayal of sheer havoc expressed through broken trees, devastated roadways, an absence of houses and all life. Nash was spared by falling into a trench and sustaining an ankle injury that necessitated his being invalided out. But not before writing, in letters home to his mother in England, harrowing accounts of what he had seen.

10 Richard Nevinson Column on the March (1915)

A sensational picture displaying the power of Nevinson's groundbreaking futurist commitment. He depicts a phalanx of French soldiers marching to war as one unbroken spiky metallic war machine. Utterly brilliant, but, poor man, he believed the first world war would be the making of futurism. He regarded it as potentially the greatest arena for the futurist movement until he ended up working the trenches for the ambulance brigade. He suffered a nervous breakdown and although he painted more wonderful stuff, his dream of futurism was significantly tempered and he with it.

Jon Snow's The Art of War is on Channel 4 on Wednesday (as part of The Genius of British Art series). An accompanying lecture is at the National Gallery on Friday at 6.30pm (nationalgallery.org.uk)