The City Destroyed/Angels Dropping Stones over a City, from War: Mystical Images of War

In this work, the white angels are distinguished from the dark city below, a poetic dichotomy representing the sacred and profane, heaven and earth. The angular quality of the city landscape, smokestacks, windows, and rooftops epitomizes Natalia Goncharova’s Neo-primitivist style through bold, flat, crude shapes. Here angels participate as stealth warriors without any human soldiers visible. With new developments in aerial bombardment, it must have seemed to some that the heavens were unleashing an onslaught of destruction.