Room 205.05

Posters, newspapers and magazines were the most important medium of ideological dissemination during the Spanish Civil War. Serving a vast collective undertaking — defending the idea of nation — they were also objects of experimentation in the field of propaganda, where numerous visual artists, photographers, writers and designers engaged through their commitment to the cause.

During the years of conflict, posters took up a prime position as a mass communication tool. “The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud”, wrote George Orwell, recalling the streets of Barcelona in his novel Homage to Catalonia (1938). Their sheer number in the Republican zone, the multiplicity of messages and publishing organisations, and their accumulation on walls resignified urban space, turning streets and squares into a stage, a machine-speaker of unrest and propaganda in the theatre of war.

With similar tools, the large number of wartime newspapers and magazines appealed to readers from newsstands, the preferred spaces to exchange ideas on the street. Through striking images, headlines that jutted out, avant-garde designs, or mere serial accumulation, printed propaganda was essencial in the “war of ideas”. Combined with posters, the city, from its walls and newsstands, warned, alerted, reminded and amplified its message far and wide.