Where there was war.

All over the world, the places where war has raged in recent decades have become melancholy landscapes--most of all for those who grew up there and remember how their world was before the destruction came. In the former Yugoslavia, which was repeatedly ravaged by human conflict during the twentieth century, artists like Ivan Generalic depicted their country with a kind of painting that is tiffed with both longing and foreboding.

As a child, Generalic liked to draw pictures in the sand, with a twig. His most celebrated painting, Deer Courting (above) was completed in...