These murals are two-stories high and are done with oil paint on six-sheet cedar plywood which are mounted on the east and west walls of the delegates’ lobby on the ground floor of the General Assembly building. The east wall as you enter represents war. The War mural is mostly painted in dark blue and has the motif of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In between there are women with their faces covered, pleading for the agony to end, and Pietà like figures carrying their dead children on their laps. 

The artist described the mural War and said, “War today is no longer a battlefield; it is suffering, torn fields, ruined cities, women and children sacrificed, the world shattered by cataclysms; its desolation is swept by the wind of insanity, of madness…”

In the early 1950s, Secretary-General Trygve Lie asked all Member states to present the United Nations with a work of art that represented their culture. Brazil commissioned Candido Portinari to make an artwork for the United Nations with the theme war and peace. Portinari (1903 – 1962) created two murals entitled War (east wall) and Peace (west wall) respectively.

The murals are placed outside the General Assembly Hall so that the delegates face War on their way into the building, and Peace as they leave, functioning as a visual framework for negotiations.
 
At the re-inauguration of the murals after their conservation in 2015, then Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said: “War and Peace are more than magnificent works of art – they are Portinari’s call to action. Thanks to him, all leaders who enter the United Nations see the terrible toll of war – and the universal dream for peace.”