Carles Fontsere; Spanish Civil War poster designer
Hyfler/Rosner
Spanish Civil War poster designer
Posters:
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/visfront/newadd26.html
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/visfront/newadd25.html
http://www.elconfidencial.com/noticias/noticia.asp?id=20408&edicion=05/01/2007&pass=
The Independent
08 January 2007
Elizabeth Nash
Carles Fontserè was 20 when the Spanish Civil War broke out,
and unfolded with particular ferocity in his native
Barcelona, and the Catalan artist responded with a fusillade
of brightly coloured, boldly drawn posters urging solidarity
with his libertarian ideals of freedom, revolutionary
socialism, peace and work.
One of his most striking images was that of the combative
peasant farmer brandishing a sickle under the slogan
"LLIBERTAT!" This was not the Communist sickle of Soviet
socialist realism - the scarlet and black anarchist flag
billows across Fontserè's poster - but a symbol of the
17th-century Catalan reapers who rose against Castilian
invaders. The reapers' revolt is immortalised in the Catalan
anthem "Els Segadors" ("The Reapers"), the singing of which
Francisco Franco made an imprisonable offence.
"I started drawing at 15, self-taught," the old
revolutionary told the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia in
2004:
I saw an advert in the press seeking a graphic artist, so I
started designing labels for products, logos for fashion
houses, signs for swimming pools and sports halls . . . and
classified ads in newspapers.
Like many defeated anti-Francoists of his generation,
Fontserè spent decades in exile in Paris, Mexico City and
New York, before returning home in 1973. In recent years he
campaigned for Catalan archives plundered during the war by
Franco's troops, including personal papers and posters
stolen from his own studio, to be released from military
archives in Salamanca and returned home. Despite his
prodigious output, the artist possessed only four original
works when he died, all of which had been donated by
collectors.
Fontserè produced posters for the socialist and anarchist
trades union federations, the Iberian Anarchists Federation
(FAI) and the revolutionary Marxist United Workers Party
(Poum), during the short-lived republic of the early
Thirties, and the three-year civil war.
He did not confine his militancy to pen and ink. He
co-founded the anarchist Barcelona Syndicate of Professional
Graphic Artists (Sindicat de Dibuixants Professionals de
Barcelona), enlisted in the International Brigades and
fought on the Ebro front.
The artist carefully distinguished those works produced in
the weeks immediately following Franco's military uprising
in July 1936, which were " a multicolour testimony of the
revolution in Catalonia", from those " more institutional,
let's say, commissioned by offices of propaganda" of the
beleaguered government of Catalonia after October of that
year.
Those defiant early works were "the immediate and
spontaneous works of those artists who from the first moment
wanted to participate with their work in the struggle
against reaction and armed Fascism", he said. Fontserè's
posters from that period caught the eye of international
observers of the time, and were praised by George Orwell.
After Franco's victory in 1939, Fontserè was imprisoned with
other vanquished, exiled Spanish republicans in French
concentration camps. But, even there, his skill and
enthusiasm for his craft produced an exhibition in Perpignan
of drawings depicting the cruelty of camp life. He spent the
Second World War in German-occupied Paris, where he scraped
a living drawing comic strips. But he also produced and
illustrated collectors' editions of Catalan literary
classics.
Later, in Mexico City, he became a stage-set designer,
collaborating with the Mexican film comic and showman Mario
Moreno ("Cantinflas"). They jointly produced a
Parisian-style musical comedy performed in the Mexican
capital in 1948. Fontserè was as adept at filling the stage
with bold designs executed with a gigantic brush as he had
been with posters.
He moved to New York in 1949, where he worked as a comic
strip artist, painter, poster designer, art editor of a
monthly magazine and - sporadically - full-time taxi-driver.
He also took up photography, collaborated with Salvador Dalí
and met his future wife, Terry Broch.
In 1973 he returned to settle in the Catalan village of
Porqueres, near Girona, and declared that the home and
studio he built there were his finest works of art. He
completed three volumes of memoirs, published in 1995 and
2004, that describe with the verve of a crime thriller the
unequal fight against Francoism, the miseries of exiled
republicans, and life in occupied France, and 10 chapters of
an unfinished fourth volume about life in New York.
"I never ran with the herd," Fontserè said in 2004: "I did
what I wanted, enjoying myself to the full. I was neither a
masochist nor a martyr. I tried to get on with things rather
than complain."
Elizabeth Nash
Carles Fontserè, graphic artist and poster designer: born
Barcelona 1916; married Terry Broch; died Girona, Spain 4
January 2007.