Spanish art on arms: Sim, an anarchist artist who drew the civil war from the front | Art

Pablo Picasso may be the artist best known for the Spanish Civil War, but like the guns that fired in revolutionary Catalonia, it was those on the front lines who seized the war. One of the most important was José Luis Rey Vila, whose paintings brought the life of the warrior to life in hard, closed lines with bright colors.

Full of speed and movement, many of his paintings document anarchist forces engaged in street warfare; some show the most horrific events after the war ended. In charcoal and water colors, Rey Vila created vivid portraits of volunteers with red helmets, nurses caring for the wounded, and the women of the group. militia raising their fists as they walk. His work moved away from exhibitions and into highly reproduced books, gaining worldwide attention before the Picasso tragedy that brought the destruction of Guernica to the world.

However, after the war, Rey Vila, who signed his pictures as Sim – named after his friend, philosopher-mystic Simone Weil – became known and, after being expelled from Paris in 1937, he died in 1983 in near-obscurity.

Eduard Vallès, director of collections at the Barcelona Museu Nacional d’art de Catalunya (MNAC) said: “He was very well-known during the war. “At the beginning of the conflict, in its first days, he was there.” Now, on the 90th anniversary of the conflict, the MNAC presents 40 recently discovered illustrations by Sim that tell the extraordinary story of the anarchist artist.

Born in the port of Cádiz, Sim studied art in Gibraltar before enlisting as a naval officer in the deadly Rif conflict in Morocco, the horrors of which made him a fighter. Sim settled in Barcelona but on 17 July 1936, just as his photographic career began, General Francisco Franco launched a military coup from North Africa.

When areas of the Popular Front fell to Franco’s rebels, some workers expected Barcelona to be easily defeated. But on a hot night before the insurgents attacked, they stormed a weapons depot, disarmed snipers, and loaded guns into armored vehicles in haste in preparation for the attack.

A gun woke Rey Vila early on 19 July 1936. He grabbed his sketchbook and ran into the streets, where he saw the first conflict between the fascists and the republicans.

After workers blocked the cavalry with large rolls of newspaper and threw homemade explosives from rooftops, Rey Vila roamed Barcelona’s squares and streets, sneaking around to photograph barricades, blood-spattered gangs of volunteer soldiers, and cars full of red gangs.

To everyone’s surprise, the Guardia Civil gendarmerie teamed up with the Republic and at the end of the day the Francoist forces were completely defeated, releasing the well of victory.

Sim immediately presented his paintings to the Sindicat de Dibuixos (SDP), a recently created guild of artisans, housed in a coveted palace and the center of government propaganda. Although the famous artist and SDP member Carles Fontserè found Sim inspiring – describing his work as “capturing the tragic events of an unforgettable day” – others rejected him for political reasons, hating his anarchist sympathies and accusing him of being a fascist spy.

Instead, Sim went to the anarchist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo/Federación Anarquista Ibérica), whose press office published his work in a book called Estampas de la Revolución Española 19 Julio de 1936. The following year, the government of Catalonia published 12 de la Revolución Española 19 Julio de 1936..

Distanced by the non-interventionist alliance of European powers, there was a great effort to ensure that everything, including art and propaganda, entered or left Spain, says Morris Brodie, historian at Aberystwyth University and author of Transatlantic Anarchism during the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, 1936-1939.

The border between France and Spain was closed, so propagandists had to smuggle art through illegal channels. What made things worse was the division between the rebels and the communists, who were fighting each other. “If there was an army officer on the border, he wouldn’t look kindly on communist party stamps, and vice versa,” says Brodie.

But Sim’s work reached abroad, with the Estampas de la Revolución Española appeared in the US and Canada. The protests raised money for basic necessities, and inspired citizens to campaign against the neutrality agreement. Copies appeared as far away as China, reproduced by the Chinese Esperanto speaker Ba Jin.

As soon as the war began, the international press poured into Spain. By the time Robert Capa took his famous painting Falling Soldier in September 1936, the fake war had begun.

In 1937, when the unrest was rising, Sim went to France to help with the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, where Guernica was exhibited for the first time outside of Spain, along with paintings by Joan Miró, Alexander Calder and Julio González. The demonstration helped push international opinion in favor of the Republic, but by then it was too late: the patriots were lucky and by 1939, they had won the conflict, and Franco continued to rule Spain for almost forty years.

While in exile, Sim painted Spanish paintings such as bulls and Don Quixote, but he did not return to Spain – although, surprisingly, many of the paintings of the Paris Exposition did, where for many years they were hidden from the Franco regime and the staff of the MNAC.

Rey Vila dropped his pseudonym but continued to portray the politics of the time. He was wounded by a bomb while filming the Nazi invasion of Paris, and showed the social problems of the city in May 1968. Although he exhibited in Paris and continued to work, his famous art of the civil war disappeared from public knowledge, including in Spain, where it was revived only thanks to the efforts of his family, historians, such as Carles Fontser, and MNAC photographers.

Decades after the war, the Communists have conquered the memory of the war, says Brodie, who is proud of his role in organizing international groups. But the result was that some opinions, such as those against the Catalan state and those who supported the Catalan state, were erased from the history books.

“Many photographers filmed the war afterwards, at home,” says Vallès. “Sim figurines were created during the war. He was not a soldier but in the mind, he was a soldier.”