The History of Spain through its posters, catchy slogans

• Collectibles The 9,000 old posters of the guardian of advertising in Spain

• Photomontage and poster designer Josep Renau, memory of the fragmented man

The parliamentary spokesman for the party in government goes up to the Congress rostrum and accuses the right of coup-mongering, mentioning robes and tricornes.

Incendiary message, immediate effect: noisy opposition protest and movement on social networks.

80 years ago, the basic and recognizable diatribe brandished on December 15 by the socialist Felipe Sicilia, a minimal propaganda unit that spread like wildfire in the form of

and

video

in an expressive and resounding poster with which to paper the streets.

«Made so that people see it even if they don't want to see it;

friend or enemy, there it is", as

put it, the poster was the form of social, cultural and commercial communication that, together with the mass press, dominated since the end of the 19th century and that hatched as a mobilization tool in the troubled interwar years.

Key to this was the talent of the illustrators who assimilated and applied the findings of the artistic avant-garde and created an aesthetic today inextricably linked to the political movements they served.

A recent book compiles and studies the rich poster heritage of Spanish political propaganda from

This economist and retired UNED professor became interested in the cartel through commercial advertising while preparing what would become his doctoral thesis on Franco's autarky.

His academic interest quickly mutated into a collecting passion, and what at first fit in a folder eventually required several filing cabinets that caused a worrying crack in the wall of his house with his weight.

Francoist poster made during the final phase of World War II, when the conflict began to shift to the allied side and the Regime sought to distance itself from its original Germanophilia. CARLOS VELASCO COLLECTION

Today, Velasco treasures, in his own words, "the best studied and systematized private collection of posters in Spain", with

and around it a small group of researchers headed by the historian Ángela Suau has created La Retrografía , an initiative for the dissemination and training of the Spanish cartel.

«Our main objective is to claim the poster as a historical source, not simply as a piece of art.

allows us to obtain valuable political and social information from the time to which it belongs”, explains Suau.

From

they organize exhibitions and make books such as

edited by Susaeta.

The work covers a wide period, almost a century that coincides with the golden years of the modern poster, before radio and television, and physical formats designed to capture the attention of motorists such as large billboards, relegated it to a role subsidiary.

It will remain as a crutch for audiovisual campaigns and will gain new meaning as a decorative element, no longer in the streets but in the privacy of the home.

Today, barely the festive and musical poster makes its way into the few available spaces that are left in a city where the proverbial

it's not even necessary anymore.

And the political poster only returns to the streets in a testimonial way during the electoral processes, partly because the law establishes it, and in an anodyne and American-style format dominated by the photo of the candidate of the day.

Campaign against blasphemy, 1940s. CARLOS VELASCO COLLECTION

In the early days of poster culture, as in so many other aspects of turn-of-the-century culture, France set the tone.

There its free fixation was legalized in 1881, there the technical innovations that made it possible took place and there the aesthetic and iconographic formulas that were to be imposed in the rest of Europe were coined.

In Spain, where there was a poster design as poor as the country, apart from the autochthonous tradition of the bullfighting poster, the novelties arrived through Barcelona, ​​where artists as brilliant as

did not hesitate to take advantage of the diffusion and visibility of this new ephemeral mural. and popular.

"To understand this

, you have to imagine what those full-color images meant in a country where many people couldn't read," says Suau.

In Spain, at the beginning of the 20th century, close to half of the population was illiterate, a rate that in 1930 was still around 30 percent.

«In that Spain in black and white, going out into the street and seeing an advertisement for chocolate or a bicycle, or a full color tile of

, was like seeing another world, there was nothing like it.

A calendar could hang thirty years on a wall because for many it was the only element of joy in their home”, Carlos Velasco abounds to explain the scope, due to the scarcity, that the visuality of color and illustration had at that time.

Republican poster dedicated to the mental health of workers. CARLOS VELASCO COLLECTION

Integrated into everyday life, the poster will reflect the dizzying changes in industrial society, the boom in consumption and, of course, the political effervescence that was unleashed in Spain during the Second Republic and the Civil War.

The notable republican political poster art had a great projection throughout the world thanks to the international interest that the Spanish conflict aroused, and it has been studied in abundance since

dedicated an exhaustive and pioneering study to analyze its social political impact and its artistic value.

In Velasco y Suau's book there is no shortage of this type of document, but its main contribution lies in other types of propaganda, organized thematically around aspects such as the country's projection abroad, the culture of work, health or culture. popular.

Also religion, which in the post-war national-Catholic state was inevitably intertwined with the slogans of the political order of the dictatorship.

And so until the

campaign , the propaganda display organized by the Franco regime in 1964 to commemorate the end of the war, celebrate the international normalization of the Regime and exhibit the economic takeoff of the country.

A campaign that coincides with the swan song of poster design.

Illustrators give way to graphic designers, integrated into groups such as Grupo 13 in Madrid or FAD in Barcelona, ​​who already work with the criteria of foreign advertising agencies that have been settling in Spain.

The cartel will remain as a resource for clandestinity and the

, and will live a flowering during the Transition, as a graphic expression of the recovered political freedom and the illusion for the new democracy bastardized today.

But that is another story.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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