The British landscape painter presents an aerial view of the Belgian city of Ypres after it was first bombed in 1915, employing the abstract motifs used by cubists and futurists. Nevinson, a devotee of Italian futurism, initially believed the conflict was a sign of progress in the machine age. But after serving as an official war artist in France, he became ardently anti-war.

This "machine-like robot, visored, menacing and carrying within itself its progeny" was initially a futurist symbol of progress, but Epstein decided to rework his sculpture after he became aware of the scale of death as the war unfolded. A drill was removed, and the figure was cut off at the waist, a symbol of modern man suddenly neutered and made impotent by a war that it also started.

Having served on the Western Front in France, the British surrealist artist extensively documented life and death amid the trenches in his paintings. As he wrote to his wife in 1917: "Imagine a wide landscape flat and scantily wooded and what trees remain blasted and torn, naked and scarred and riddled. The ground for miles around furrowed into trenches, pitted with yawning holes."

Part of the French artist's War series of Expressionist engravings, Arise, You Dead! appropriates the skeleton, a representation of death in medieval mythology, to reflect on the inevitable futility of battle on the front during the Great War. A Catholic who worked extensively with religious motifs, Rouault was perhaps also commenting on the essential immorality of war.

This oil painting epitomized Nevinson's hardening view of the ignominy of trench warfare with its portrayal of anonymous dead soldiers laying facedown in the dirt among endless barbed wire. His unwillingness to portray the glories of war meant the work was nearly censored, but before that happened he hung the painting in London and affixed a piece of paper over the bodies that read "Censored."

Hannah Höch was a pioneer of the photomontage technique that became synonymous with dada, a highly political art that mocked the elites who had plunged the world into war. The kaleidoscope of images and newspaper headlines refers to "gigantic world folly" as epitomized by German leader Friedrich Ebert in bathers, while American President Woodrow Wilson hovers as a "peace angel" above.

After the war, German artists like Heartfield and Grosz commonly depicted broken bodies with prosthetic limbs, a feature of war survivors who brought home the physical and psychological scars of the "war to end all wars." As a dada sculptural montage, the work also parodies the arrogance of technology and militarism, the lost head simply replaced with a light bulb, a mark of bright ideas.

This etching was part of Otto Dix's war cycle created in the 1920s that imitated Francisco Goya's famous The Disasters of War prints from a century earlier. Like Goya, Dix, who also served on the front line on the losing side in World War I, darkly evoked the gruesome horror of war with a rotting skull infested with vermin and maggots. His series aimed to "exorcise the experience of war."

This controversial painting by the Irish war artist shows a soldier's coffin in a mausoleum draped in a British flag, an army helmet atop. It was modified in 1927 after initially showing two semi-nude soldiers guarding a tomb. One of three commissions to commemorate the Paris Peace Conference, Orpen portrayed "the ragged unemployed soldier and the dead" instead of politicians and diplomats.

The war was often fought primarily in places where there was still something to eat or pillage. Farmers were tortured to force them to reveal their hidden stockpiles of food. Swedish mercenaries terrorized the populace with the so-called "Swedish drink," a torture method in which a mixture of urine, excrement and dirty water was funneled into prisoners’ mouths.

Gustav II Adolf of Sweden entered the war in 1630 to save German Protestantism and expand his influence in Europe. He prevented the victory of the Catholic camp led by the Holy Roman Emperor, and was an active commander who personally led his troops in battle.

One of the biggest battles of the Thirty Years' War was fought on 16 November 1632 in Lützen, with huge losses but no discernable victor. The predominantly Swedish Protestant Army under King Gustav II Adolf — depicted praying here — fought against the Emperor’s troops led by Albrecht von Wallenstein. The Swedish king was killed in a cavalry charge, handing the Catholic forces a propaganda victory.

There were also war profiteers: commanders who recruited soldiers, organized professional armies and perfected the business of slaughter. The most successful was General Albrecht von Wallenstein on the side of the Emperor. He introduced a levy system whereby farmers, merchants and citizens were forced to supply food, and even soldiers' pay. Wallenstein’s motto was "War will feed itself."

Executions and tortures were a daily occurrence. The artist and contemporary witness Jacques Callot captured the horrors of the Thirty Years' War in his drawings. Callot depicted the population as both victims and perpetrators, with soldiers being lynched or ending up crippled beggars. His best-known work is the etching entitled "The Hanging" (1632/33).

Hardly anyone still believed it was possible, but at last it was achieved. After five years of preparations and negotiations in the Protestant city of Osnabrück and the Catholic city of Münster, all parties to the war signed peace treaties in Münster. The Peace of Westphalia is still seen as an inspiration for resolving conflicts today.