Meaning of "while"

Does the highlighted "while" mean "although"?

Context:

Max Beckmann found nothing redemptive in war. Resurrection (1918), a vast canvas intersected by groups of people in various stages of despair, is a bleak and complex meditation on the unattainability of salvation. War achieves nothing but death, it argues. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a central figure in the German expressionist group Die Brücke (‘the Bridge’), would have agreed: war service brought about his complete breakdown, from which he never entirely recovered. Erich Heckel, another group member, might have begged to differ. While his work as a medical orderly put him face to face with numerous men who had suffered terribly, he was able to portray
sympathetically what he witnessed.