It may seem that war paintings and historical themes are self-evident and the artistic style cannot make a difference. And yet… Let’s take a minute to recall paintings rendering military actions. You can imagine a stately general – ahorse, no doubt, a fire-eyed history maker – and you get yourself a classicist battle painting…

And you should always note what battle is chosen for depiction – if you see actions with heroic, patriotic, national liberation context, you are most definitely looking at a romanticist painting. If there is no clear subject or place – just symbols and emotional images of the tragedy scattered on the canvas in a chaotic and painful manner (like wide-wild-open eyes, hands held up to the heaven, faces and bodies cut up like on Picasso’s “Guernica”) you must be dealing with cubism. And yet another way to convey the war is to depict it as seen by a soldier. The pain, the fear, the weariness and the heroism of a common person, no time for pathos – just the way things truly are. Believe it or not, it was the new thing realism introduced into depicting battle scenes. Remember Vereshchagin’s “Apotheosis of War”? There you go. These canvases give more meaning to the landscapes, they are focused on the actions and emotions of soldiers rather than commanders. And you can always spot the realist composition: no pathos or artificial placement of figures and objects. The layout is not deliberately spontaneous, it is somewhat muted and low-key, totally true-to-life. And yet it bears no resemblance to the real life military scenes. How so? The matter is that the realistic principles call for neglecting anything individual, chaotic and spontaneous, leaving only the objects, landscapes and figures that render the TYPE. The artists selected the most common and the most expressly demonstrated features of soldiers, battles and objects, and so each detail in a realist painting contributes to the story and the composition. The battle piece of a realist evokes the emotions you feel in connection with the TYPE of event, not with a specific historical moment.