Failed Totalitarian Art: English Military Painting of the First World War

The subject of this article is subjects on the military theme in the paintings of European artists of the first half of the twentieth century.The object of the study is the stylistic and artistic features of painting by British military artists and painters of totalitarian states of the first half of the twentieth century. For the first time in domestic practice, the author offers to consider the unique phenomenon of British military painting of the First World War. She compares Italian aerofuturism, a style adopted by the fascist regime during the Second World War, which is close to her in spirit and connected with her modernist roots. The research was based on the provisions of the domestic author Igor Golomstock, who took the principle of the megamachine of the American historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford as a criterion for determining totalitarian art. The main conclusions of this study are the confirmation of the effectiveness of the Mumford formula in determining the criteria for the belonging of paintings to totalitarian art. At the same time, the considered example of English military painting, created in a democratic state, but bearing obvious features of totalitarian art, raises the question of the unambiguity of the correlation of the latter with the authoritarian form of government. The novelty of this work is the very possibility of familiarizing the domestic reader with the most interesting artistic and spiritual phenomenon - English military painting, closely related to Vorticism, the national trend of modernism, also insufficiently familiar to our public In addition, a wide range of issues related to the art history problem of identifying criteria for totalitarian art is considered