But the idea that a single object might stand for an entire conflict — even all wars throughout time — has been used to breathtaking effect by artists more widely. Jeremy Deller’s “Baghdad, 5 March 2007”, for instance — a rusting, crumpled car wrecked in a street bombing in Iraq, acquired by the artist and placed in the atrium of London’s Imperial War Museum in 2010, is as muscular a symbol of the wreckage caused by war as any, and Shomei Tomatsu’s photograph of a tiny wristwatch stopped at 11:02 on August 9 1945 conveys more about the devastating effect of the Nagasaki atomic bomb than a thousand pictures of the mushroom cloud.