The Image of the Republican Woman

In view of the number of posters with a recognised authorship and designed by men during the Civil War, we find a meagre number made by women artists, while those produced from the Free Women organisation, with a markedly feminist conception, are also a minority.

Aurelio Pérez Rioja, male and female students at the School of Fine Arts in the workshop executing propaganda originals in defence of Spanish Art Treasures, 22 June 1936. Committee of Spanish Art Treasures Archive. Spanish Institute of Cultural Heritage

Nevertheless, today a broad number of these posters are identified as anonymous and it would not be beyond the bounds of possibility to think that women artists were behind their authorship. For instance, within the collectives fighting to defend artistic heritage during the conflict we find the committed endeavours of young women who belonged to the University School Federation (FUE) and female students from Fine Arts schools, collectives who worked to support the propaganda efforts of the Committee to Repossess, Protect and Safeguard Artistic Treasures, which, by producing multiple posters aimed at public opinion, sought to protect artworks and avoid their plundering and vandalization.

Among the few women poster artists we know of with any certainty during the war was Juana Francisca Rubio (Madrid, 1911–2008), who with her husband José Bardasano (Madrid, 1910–1979) signed posters such as 10*25 Novembre, tota la joventut per la campanya d’hivern and The Day of Alert, November, Valencia. In the latter we see the iconic image of the “new woman” from a Soviet conception: the manifestation of a sole image, a sign of emancipation and liberation from the burden of the past; the woman capable of transfiguring and modelling her body and mind through sport and culture. This new image would become more monumental on the posters of sports camps in the Madrid-based Union of Girls, in which a copybook female, indebted to the influences of the Soviet poster, and just like men, becomes part of sport’s physical activity. It is worth highlighting that these images, at the onset of war, worked to identify women with the image of the revolution.

In Catalonia, the figure of designer Carme Millà Tersol (Barcelona, 1907–1999) shone bright. In July 1936, she edited the Statutes of the New Unified School Council (CENU), and from May 1937 served as a professor of art with the Catalonia Autonomous Government. She is best known for the poster Escola nova, poble lliure (New School: Free People), designed for CENU, in which, through the gratifying representation of a boy and a girl reading together, it defended the Republican model of a secular and co-educational school. Moreover, Millá stood out in her political commitment as founder of Secció de Dibuixants, Pintors i Escultors del Sindicat Únic de Professions Liberals of CNT-AIT in Barcelona; yet, despite playing a key role in these groups of professional visual artists, the designs attributed to her in this period today are noticeably scant and raise multiple questions with respect to the limited graphic-art testimonies of these professional women during the conflict.       

Most notably, within the set of works made by women artists, theatre illustrations, fashion advertising and children’s illustrations were the reserved strongholds — mostly by obligation — of these talented female graphic designers. More specifically, during the war children’s illustrations were the sphere in which artists such as Lola Anglada i Sarriera (Barcelona, 1892 – Tiana, 1984) and Francis Bartolozzi (“Pitti”) (Madrid, 1908 – Pamplona, 2004) operated, producing, to promote the children’s weekly publication Sidrín, an eye-catching poster in the form of an auca (rhyming couplet).  

Notable from the same illustration context is Enlist in the Militias from Aragón, by Alma Tapia Bolívar (San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 1906 – Mexico, 1993). The poster depicts, in a way that is both kind and forceful, the emphatic and monumental anatomy of a militiawoman at ease: a hard-to-balance synthesis between socialist-style realism and the profession of a children’s illustrator. 

Among the narrow group of women graphic artists of which there is a record as poster artists, the youngest is Mariona Lluch (Barcelona, 1927), who aged just nine designed the posters Homenatge a la 43 divisió and Tovaris, Setmanari infantil, a glimpse into the attributes of a children’s illustrator she would develop over the rest of her career.   

Therefore, women’s presence in Republican poster art conclusively remains an open line of investigation. A vast number of anonymous posters may surprise us in the coming years and their study is a debt society owes to women’s visual-art contributions in this genre. A survey of the presence of women artist’s in the Museo Reina Sofía’s collection of Civil War posters underlines how of the 91 Republican posters conserved, only six are designed by women, while in 11 the image of women takes centre stage. As a result, the Museo is progressively attempting to redress this deficit, assembling rooms in the Collection like Front and Rearguard: Women in the Civil War.