Landscapes of Battle

For the Major General Emmett. J. Bean Federal Center, artist Adam Cvijanovic created a series of paintings titled Landscapes of Battle. The artwork is installed throughout the federal center’s extensive corridors and relates to this site’s long-standing connections to the U.S. military.

The paintings depict recognizable scenery from around the world, including forests, deserts, fields, and shorelines. Rendered in exquisite detail, each image is a unique portrait of a time and place. Every landscape depicted has been the site of a major battle or operation involving American armed forces over the past two and a half centuries.

The artwork includes details relevant to the locations and events, such as the weather and time of day, that connect each landscape to a specific moment of a particular military action. While the paintings are representations of battlefields, the absence of any human presence instills each scene with a sense of timelessness. This open-ended quality creates space for personal reflections, interpretations, and meanings.

According to Cvijanovic: “These paintings are perhaps a portrayal of place before the battles, or perhaps they belong to some abstracted time after the fact. The artwork is meant to carry this ambiguity. It is meant to give the viewer what the viewer asks of it. One the one hand, providing an environment of beauty and calm for the hard-working people in this building and, on the other, marking and memorializing the sacrifices that American service members have made across the world over the span of our nation’s history.”