There once was a weekly, cultural radio show in France, where people talked endlessly about art. The interviewer had one gimmick. At the end of each interview he would ask that week’s guest what piece of art he or she would rescue from the Louvre, if the guest happened to be there when a fire broke out.

One day a guest answered:
“The painting closest to the exit door.”

It was no doubt the most sensible answer ever given to this question. Art may be important, a fit subject matter for cultural talk shows but you wouldn’t wish to burn alive, trying to save any one particular painting.

Art is, on the other hand, demonstratively important to humanity: it has been with us almost from the moment we became human. The earliest cave paintings are often in celebration of another human invention: the weaponry that made it possible to hunt large animals efficiently. Art, like the human brain, has evolved since the days we drew paintings on the walls of caves. Likewise, of course, our weaponry.

The human brain seems to be obsessed with these two, on a superficial level irreconcilable opponents: beauty and destruction. The two do meet, however. There are the many, often grotesquely large canvases that in great detail show the crucifixion of Christ and the sheer endless varieties on another Christian theme: the gruesome deaths of the saints.

War, as a more formal expression of violence, has also been a subject matter painters have explored and glorified throughout the ages. It is probably not true that for every soldier who died during the retreat from Russia, there is a painting of the Emperor Napoleon, overseeing one battlefield or the other but there are probably more paintings dealing with the Napoleonic wars than all the other European wars combined.

Artists, their patrons and the public at large have always been fascinated with this and other wars. The nature of this type of art has changed though. War is no longer glorified in art. Our views of war and the way artists depict it changed irrevocably during the First World War.

The First World War was the first large conflict, that truly benefited from the technical know-how, developed during the Industrial Revolution. The weaponry was more efficient than ever and could be produced and transported more rapidly than ever before. Trains transported the cannon, the rifles, the ammunition as well as the human fodder. War had never been more efficient.

There was another benefit that arose from the experience of the Industrial Revolution: people had been led from the countryside to the cities, to work in what one writer called the Satanic mills. Now these people were, with the same ease and efficiency, being led to the various battlefields. War was no longer the business of professional soldiers; war had become universal, everybody’s business.

From cities and villages and isolated hamlets people were forced to participate and around the second year of the war, with still no end in sight, the full horror of it was revealed. Until that moment, no other war in human history had killed so many common people of so many countries. We can still see the signs of this in many European countries, where each small village has a war monument. Everyone in Europe knew someone who had died in that war.

It was the sheer scale of this horror that changed the way art dealt with the depiction of war. It was no longer possible to glorify the experience. The millions of graves, the war memorials, the dead voices of soldier poets and the depleted villages all over Europe would not have allowed glorification. The First World War forced humanity to evolve its levels of sensitivity. It had not been, as so many people had fervently hoped and prayed for, the war to end all wars but it did change humankind’s perception of war. It also saw the birth of what one could call realistic-compassionate art.

There had always been sentimental art, of course. Mothers holding chubby-armed, dead babies, their cheeks still rosy – these painted babies more alive than any real corpse could ever hope to be. There had been religious art, painstakingly depicting the suffering of saints and sinners but this had always been a formal expression of the religious status quo and only served to underline the eternal truths the Mother Church claimed to be the sole possessor of.

Now though, art had changed, had evolved; the best example of this probably being the depiction of the massacre at Guernica by Pablo Picasso. Despite its abstract form, it shows the horror more clearly than any beheaded John the Baptist, painted by the old masters did. More importantly though, it shows a fierce compassion for the victims of that German air assault.

Paradoxically, the First World War made it possible for human sensibility and thus art to evolve into something new. Art no longer merely depicts what happens on the battlefields. Born from pure horror it has developed its terrible beauty and its compassionate vocabulary, as humankind developed the need to make sense of the horror by turning it into art. In that sense, maybe, art has become more important to humanity than it has ever been before.