Art: La mitrailleuse en action

This is La mitrailleuse en action (The Machine Gun in Action) by French artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. This work clearly makes a statement about the changing ways in which battles were being fought. Now, wars were not only based on the numbers and skill of the soldiers that countries had, but the quality and quantity of the machinery that could be produced by the countries. One of these pieces of machinery that proved to be so important in the war was the machine gun. With countries producing more and more advanced technologies to fight wars, battles became not so much man fighting man as machine fighting machine. The man became less important as the machine he was operating became more important. The artist expresses this idea in his work by reducing the man in the painting to simple geometric shapes.