Abstract: 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

Abstract: The 20th century marked a new age in the development of European civilization, which projected images begotten by the technological transformation of reality into an artistic space. The rapid growth of technologies and the industrialization of all spheres of life were reflected in artists' works in urbanized images of reality. One of these images was the machine as the embodiment of speed and technical progress. Being a central motif in Italian Futurism (the most dynamic branch of modernism), the image of the car penetrated all artistic spheres of the Italian art of the 1910s to the 1930s, most notably: literature (embodied, first of all, in the Futurists’ manifestos devoted to the Machine), music (the noise music by Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo), and art (machine painting). The interest in the avant-garde visual art of the 1920s to the 1930s, including Italian Futurism, has grown recently. Many scientific articles and monographs by foreign authors focus on the technical aspects of this ambiguous flamboyant direction: the images of electricity, urban architecture, machines, and mechanisms. But the Russian scientific literature lacks in-depth studies of these aspects of Futurism. This article aims to become the first step in studying the “machine” aspect of Futurism, i.e., its historical background, development, and the influence of the image that formed the basis for the main idea of the creator of the direction more than a century ago. The authors consider the use of the image of the machine in various artistic fields—literature, music, and art—and provide a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon.