John Armstrong was born in 1893 in Hastings. He studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, 1912-13, and then at St. John’s Wood School of Art 1913-14. During the war he served in the Royal Field Artillery 1914-19, before briefly returning to St. John’s Wood School. He began his professional career as a theatre designer in London, gaining important patrons including Lillian and Samuel Courtauld, who commissioned Armstrong to decorate a room in their Portman Square home. His first solo exhibition was at the Leicester Galleries in 1928. In 1933 he joined Unit One alongside Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Henry Moore, Edward Wadsworth, John Bigge and Barbara Hepworth, with whom he exhibited at the Unit One exhibition. From the early 1930s onwards his work became Surrealist in style – uncanny, romantically dream-like and heavily imbued with symbolism. Armstrong died in 1973. His work is held in numerous international public collections including the Tate, the Imperial War Museum, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Whilst at the conclusion of the 1940s Armstrong was enjoying personal success, on a political front the peace promised by the conclusion of hostilities in 1945, descended rapidly into the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear destruction seemed entirely possible at the mere push of a button. Fear permeated the artistic world by 1949, the year Armstrong painted The Battle of Nothing, the first of his trio of battle paintings. George Orwell’s 1984 was published mere weeks before the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. An ardent nuclear disarmament supporter, Armstrong wrote an article in 1950 for the New Statesman, entitled “A Thought on Sodom”. It opens “Sodom was destroyed in the first air-raid because of the lack of ten righteous men. Is all life on this earth to be destroyed in the final one, because of the lack of a similar proportion of men?”

Intimately related to Armstrong’s preceding Harlequin works, Armstrong began a series of battle paintings, a small group of works emanating from a central trio, The Battle of Nothing followed by The Battle of Propaganda, 1953, and The Battle of Religion, 1953. Presented as monumental history paintings in an art historical tradition, these battles are fought by clowns with wooden swords and umbrellas against invisible enemies. As with The Iceberg [cat. 8], the influence of Paolo Uccello and his early Renaissance Florentine style looms large, in particular Uccello’s trio of martial masterpieces depicting The Battle of San Romano, of which Niccolò da Tolentino is in the National Gallery in London.

The message of the futility and idiocy of war is palpable and poignant in The Battle of Nothing. In ‘A Thought on Sodom’, Armstrong continues: “General Eisenhower was reported lately in The Times as having said: “Far better risk a war of possible annihilation than grasp a peace which would be the certain extinction of free man’s ideas and ideals.”” Armstrong’s choice of quotation, indicative of the atmosphere in which McCarthyism took hold, suggests that the battle is being waged against a non-existent enemy. It is a product of a paranoid imagination, a complex of persecution. In A Battle of Nothing, commedia dell’arte Pierrot clowns, in baggy pantaloons, pointed caps and drooping ruffs ill-suited as combat uniform, fight an invisible enemy with wooden swords. Caught in an elegant theatrical tableau, precariously positioned on a cliff top, they seem petrified, permanently engaged in curiously dance-like combat of and for nothing. The battle is rendered absurd by the Renaissance-like formal beauty - the harmony of the composition in which each constituent part relates to the whole, the delicate balance of red, black and white of the Pierrots’ costumes, the dusky pink aura-like lighting casting soft shadows, and the variety of graceful poses which animate the canvas.