Combat Battery (World War I)

The Imperial War Museum, London (the UK).

The five-meter epic canvas depicts officers standing in the left corner of the composition in the foreground near the ammunition boxes. Each of them has a distracted look; at the same time, everyone looks in a different direction but not at the soldiers working in the battery and not at the viewer. It seems that they do not want to see either splintered houses, or broken trees on blown up land, or twisted metal. The figures of the soldiers look like puppets, which someone makes swarm under the stylized gray smoke obscuring not only the sun but also the sky itself. This painting is a part of a series of thematic works about the war, in which the artist took part.