Art: War & Art

In London’s tiny Mayor Gallery, fortnight ago, there opened an exhibition of paintings by a shaggy-haired, beer-loving Englishman who immediately, without fuss or feathers, assumed significance in modern art. He was 37-year-old William Hayter, a onetime teacher of engraving in Paris. His distinction: that of being the first Surrealist painter of the Paris school to visit the fighting zone in Spain. Much has been written by Andre Breton and other Surrealists on their profound affinity with the antiFascists. So far as is known, William Hayter beat them all to Madrid.

This has additional interest because:

1) Surrealism is partly Spanish in origin and its distinguished leaders include Parisian Spaniards like Joán Miró and Salvador Dali; 2) Artist Hayter went to Spain last year not on his own but at the invitation of the Leftist director general of Fine Arts, José Renau, who encouraged him to paint a score of flaming canvases with such titles as Man-eating Landscape.

The fact that Englishman Hayter was in Spain while Spaniard Dali was getting up a show of dream-constructed knickknacks in Paris (TIME, Feb. 7) remained a paradox last week. There was no mystery, however, about Madrid’s hospitality to Artist Hayter.

Leftist Propaganda. Since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the Leftist Government has made it a point to defend, honor and employ the arts. A plank in any Socialist government’s platform, this was especially urgent in a government working for dear life to form an army, educate a public, enlist foreign sympathies. During the first year of siege the Fifth Regiment in Madrid had the duty of packing off to Valencia the art treasures of the capital (TIME, Feb. 1, 1937).* Public statues, including Madrid’s favorite, Cybele, the goddess with the civic crown who has long driven a marble chariot opposite the post office, were sealed in sandbag pyramids.

More important than these ostentatious good works, however, were the achievements of Leftist poster designers for the Ministry of Propaganda.

During the first months of the war, each union and political party had its own posters. The barbers printed one showing a bearded, long-haired comrade facing a white-aproned barber. Inscription: “Comrade, Be Clean for the Revolution.”

Soviet posters and pictures of Stalin were stuck up by the Communists. Under its architect-director, Manuel Sanchez Areas, the Propaganda Ministry proceeded to cry down these vagaries with official posters exhorting civilians to evacuate Madrid, to bring food to Madrid, to be vaccinated, to stop talking and get down to business. All in all, no less than 4,000,000 posters have been printed in the lithographers’ shops of Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona.

Purely on their artistic merits, Madrid’s war posters surpass those of the other Leftist cities and rank high in the development of modern poster art. Neither as sophisticated as the work of the famed French designer, Cassandre. nor as complex as that of London’s E. McKnight Kauffer, most of them were done in a hurry by obscure young commercial artists. But the best of them have economy, elegance, power and a mastery of abstract design. Many are funny. Most popular throughout Leftist Spain is Los Nadonales (see supplement), a fantasy turned out in the first weeks of the war by a husky, grey-eyed cartoonist named Juan Antonio Morales, 26, who has since joined the Leftist army and was last week engaged in the fighting at Teruel.

Rightist Propaganda. Bare are the streets of Salamanca and Burgos in comparison with the poster-plastered walls of Leftist cities. For a time there was a brisk rivalry in propaganda between the Requetés, or Catholic Royalists, and the Spanish Fascists of the Falange, during which each party made a practice of pasting over the posters of the other. Finally Generalissimo Franco issued an order giving both sides 48 hours to remove all posters except portraits of himself from public places. Up to then Rightist posters had been rattier than Madrid’s. There has been little improvement since. Official posters have appeared, however, picturing churches ablaze or Red militiamen wearing Russian caps and shaking whips at women and children.

The weakness of Rightist pictorial propaganda is illuminated by the plight of the several able photographers on the Rightist side. Not only do they find difficulty in getting transportation to and from the front, but they are under strict orders not to take scenes showing German equipment or Italian soldiers. This has been rather circumscribing. Rightist propaganda literature, on the other hand, both in and out of Spain, has shown forcible qualities.

Most widely distributed item is a special Army number of Vertice, a fat magazine which looks like FORTUNE crossed with Photo-History, Printed in it were several large water colors by a young illustrator, Carlos S. de Tejada, which have served as posters to art-loving Rightists (see supplement). Ably drawn, they are more reminiscent than anything else in Spain of the type of U. S. poster prevalent during the World War.

* Lona; uncertainty over the fate of El Greco’s great painting, The Burial of Count Orguz, in the Church of Santo Tome in Toledo, has lately been resolved. It is stowed safely in the basement of Toledo’s Cathedral.