In December 1937, the
Republican forces attacked the Nationalists along the latter's eastern
front in an effort to seize the town of Teruel. This attack met
with an immediate Nationalist counteroffensive, in which the Republican
army, lacking war material and debilitated after its efforts at
Teruel, was pushed back toward the Mediterranean coast. Despite
the many arbitrary executions carried out by their officers, most
of the Republican divisions fell into chaotic retreat. As one soldier
put it: "Terror from enemy attacks from the air was greater
than that imposed by the pistols of our own officers." By April
18, 1938, Franco's forces held a forty-mile band of coastline to
the south of Barcelona, cutting off Catalonia from the rest of Republican
Spain.
Although this poster
is undated, the territory it depicts being defended indicates that
it was produced during the Nationalist counteroffensive or in its
immediate aftermath, in the spring or summer of 1938. In the picture,
the Republican soldiers stand in readiness behind a trench, awaiting
the enemy's attack. The ominous smoke in the immediate background
creates the impression of imminent danger, an impression reinforced
by the map emerging from the smoke, showing the Republic's retreating
lines of defense. The caption is a call by the Spanish Communist
Party PCE (Partido Comunista de España) for the Republican
troops to dig in and prevent what was fast becoming a complete rout.
The artist, José
Bardasano (1910-1979), was the child of Madrid working-class parents.
A largely self-taught artist, the young Bardasano was working as
an artistic director in an advertising agency when war broke out
in 1936. Already a member of the communist-controlled JSU (Juventudes
Socialistas Unidas), Bardasano immediately established a workshop
with two colleagues and produced numerous propaganda prints and
posters for the Communist Party. In 1937, Bardasano and his wife,
the artist, Juana Francisca, moved to Valencia, where they continued
to produce propaganda posters. At the end of the war, Bardasano
and Francisca spent some time in a French concentration camp, after
which they took exile in Mexico. Here Bardasano formed the Mexican
Fine Arts Circle with a number of other Civil War exiles and Mexican
nationals. In 1960, he returned to Madrid.
Unlike the Anarchists,
whose propaganda emphasized the revolutionary aspect of their struggle,
the Communists pushed only one message: victory in war, a victory
that could only be achieved through subordinating idividualism to
group discipline. For this reason, the soldier in the majority of
communist posters is a rigid, angular figure-a sterile symbol of
strength. In contrast, Bardasano's figures are often realistic and
vulnerable.
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