Prelude : In the Beginning - A History of Writing

Table of Contents: History of Writing A history of the Latin Alphabet A history of the Arabic alphabet A history of the Chinese Scribe

History of Writing

Since the primordial time, spoken words and pictures have intermingled with each other as a means of communication. Human thought generally can be divided into two modes, the visual and the verbal.  People use words to paint pictures verbally, and inversely have painted pictures to communicate an idea.    A study published in the journal NeuroImage in 2017, by Elinor Amit, an affiliate of the Psychology  , and Evelina Fedorenko of Harvard Medical School, has found that even when they were prompted to use verbal thinking, people created visual images to accompany their inner speech, suggesting that visual thinking is deeply ingrained in the brain.  This is why writing and graphic design are intimately interrelated. Yet there is a more profound relationship between the two from an artistic perspective. 

Both words and pictures are used in the act of creation; that is art. If texts are not primarily for creation but for communication, then writings, with their prescribed functions of educating and instructing, would seem to be only a secondary art form. Yet calligraphy, throughout its history, has had a curious relationship with art. Besides communicating the socio-cultural and scientific ideas of various civilizations into conceptual ideas, the nature and limitations of writing have sometimes influenced the form and direction of abstract art.

The development of visual communication design, from the radical experimentation of the early prehistoric artists of Cro-Magnon period, to the emergence of a globalized graphic design discipline, and its  diverse manifestations of contemporary practice in various cultures starts with the history of writing, which is the most important aspect of visual information communication. Within a paradigmatic framework of design historiography, visual language and cultural theory, the history of writing must focus on the way designers have used image, text, print and symbol in response to changing paradigms of art and industry, new technologies, identity and politics of culture, to translate ideas into a visual communicative format.

A written message is presented within the boundary of  semantic standards which refer to the meaning of the particular symbols, message representation, its context and how it relates to other collective memories within the culture. In fact , immediately after an observer encounters a message; on a book cover, a poster, a website, and so on, a huge array of visual background information, from its font type, size, color, layout, and illustrations provide her with a road map, based on cultural semantic standards, as to how to interpret, and comprehend the message. 

The first written languages were inherently visual- developed in ancient Eastern ideogrammatic writing systems, where a single image represented a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of words) to the first pure alphabets (properly known as "abjad" and which represented consonants ) of ancient Egypt that mapped single symbols to single phonemes. 

Jiroft Civilization

In 2000, flash floods along the Halil River in southern Iran city of Jiroft swept the topsoil off thousands of previously unknown tombs. It has long been hypothesized that Jiroft is the legendary land of Aratta, a “lost” Bronze Age kingdom of renown, which reputedly exported its magnificent crafts to Mesopotamia.

According to texts dating from around 2100 BC. Aratta's artistic output was so highly regarded that around 2,500 BC, the Sumerian King Enmerkar sent a message to the ruler of Aratta requesting that artisans and architects be sent to his capital, Uruk,  to build a temple to honor Inanna, the goddess of fertility and war. Enmerkar addressed his letter to Inanna: “Oh my sister, make Aratta, for Uruk's sake, skillfully work gold and silver for me! (Have them cut for me) translucent lapis lazuli into  blocks, (Have them prepare for me) electrum and translucent lapis!" beseeched the Sumerian ruler.

"Jiroft leads me to imagine that Iran had a much greater influence on Mesopotamian culture than I previously thought," observes Jean Perrot, the grand  old man of Middle Eastern archeology in France. According to the French epigrapher François Vallat, who compares Jiroft to the Elamite kingdom of southwest Iran; when you consider that Uruk was the heart of the Sumerian civilization and its king asked another ruler about 2000 kilometers away to send his artisans to build his monuments for him, we realize that the quality of Jiroft's work  must have been extraordinary, and these craftsmen were to be renowned throughout the ancient world.

Yet even if it turns out that Jiroft is not Aratta, it is nonetheless an essential clue for a better understanding of the days when writing flourished and traders carried spices and grain, gold, lapis lazuli and ideas from the Nile to the Indus. 

Prior to the discovery of the Jiroft tablets, the oldest writing had been found at the Susa site, which remained from the period of reign of a monarch of Khutelutush-In-Shushinak and it dates back to 1200 BC era.   It has always been believed that the cuneiform was introduced by the Akadians to the Elamites around 2200 BC.  However,  with the discovery of  Jiroft's  tablets, its writing language is believed to have emerged around the same time Mesopotamia began to develop a writing system. According to the carbon-14 tests carried out on the layers in which the Jiroft inscription was discovered, this inscription was dated to 2500 BC. Although such tests have not yet been carried out on the Mesopotamia inscription.

These visual languages later inspired the Phoenicians and Greek alphabets, and eventually the Aramaic alphabet.

A Sumerian tablet with cylinder seal impression of a hunter with hunting dogs and boars. 3100-2900 BC. Uruk

A Sumerian Writing Tablet.

The Sumerian priesthood developed their writing system in about 3100 BC.  They  designed simplified images of their temple properties on chunks of wet clay and marked the number of the items on that clay. This was a reliable accounting report -- a message -- for keeping track of the changes in the wealth of a temple. After allowing the wet clay to bake hard in the sun, these tablets conveyed a recorded graphic message to various stakeholders. Examples of this early system represents some of the earliest texts found in the Sumerian cities of Uruk and Jamdat Nasr around 3300 BCE. These tablets were the first manifestation of graphic design as a mean to conveying a conceptual message in a fast, simple and economic way1 .

In Sumer, at first the pictures of things represented those very same things ( these are called pictographs). Then certain pictures represented some ideas and concepts (these are called ideographs) and finally they represented sounds. The writing characters of the Sumerians were adopted by the East Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia and Akkadian became the first Semitic writing system that would be used by the Babylonians and Assyrians.

Cuneiform System of Writing

The most ancient writing system that was evolved in Mesopotamia, is called cuneiform, an 18th century coinage from Latin and Middle French roots meaning “wedge-shaped”. This writing system using  a reed and applied on wet clay used between 600 and 1,000 characters that were  either words, parts of words or syllables and therefore they were not letters of an alphabet. The earliest  languages written in Cuneiform were Sumerian and  Akkadian. Sumerians developed a large  body of phonetic symbols and soon they needed to develop grammatical elements by phonetic complements to be added to their  logograms and ideograms. Moreover  since Sumerian had many identical sounding (homophonous) words, some logograms  yielded identical phonetic values, which are identified in modern transliteration. As well  a logogram  was polyphonic since represented a number associated phenomena such as "night", "stars", "moon", "dark", which had more than one phonetic value .

It is highly probable that the Egyptian hieroglyph is evolved from cuneiform  the-spot invention. Nevertheless, cuneiform continued to be used until the first century AD.

Early Writing Tablet recording the allocation of beer, 3100-3000 B.C.E, Late Prehistoric period, clay, probably from southern Iraq.

Egypt developed writing shortly after the Sumerians. Greeks called the Egyptian writing characters hieroglyphs in about 500 BC. The reason was that the Egyptian writing was mainly used for holy texts; hieros and glypho mean 'sacred' and 'engrave' in Greek. Egyptian legends attribute the invention of language to Taautos, from Byblos in Phoenicia, who was the father of tautology or imitation. He is also credited with the first written characters in two millennium BC .   

The Papyrus of Ani is a version of the Book of the Dead for the Scribe Ani. This vignette (small scene that illustrates the text) is Chapter for not letting Ani's heart create opposition against him in the God's Domain 2. (1240s BC)

Hieroglyphs. Stele of Minnakht, Chief of the Scribes (c. 1321 BC) 

Scribe's exercise tablet with hieratic text on wood, related to Dynasty XVIII, reign of Amenhotep I, c. 1514-1493 BC. Text is an excerpt from The Instructions of Amenemhat II (Dynasty XII), and reads: "Be on your guard against all who are subordinate to you ... Trust no brother, know no friend, make no intimates.

Merneptah Stele — also known as the Israel Stele or Victory Stele of Merneptah — is an inscription by the Ancient Egyptian king Merneptah (R;1213 to 1203 BC), which appears on the reverse side of a granite stele erected by the king Amenhotep III. It was discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1896 at Thebes.

Vignette from the 'Book of the Dead' of Queen Nodjmet. She was married to Hrihor, a High Priest of Amun who was the king of Upper Egypt circa 1080-1074 BCE during the late 20th Dynasty. This was a period of Egyptian decline and political instability.

Most of the treasure of the ancient literature is written in Akkadian, the most ancient of Semetic languages, which is written in a logosyllabic cuneiform writing system of Sumerian origin. There were many other Semitic languages such as Amorite, Ugaritic and that of the Canaanites of Phoenicia . Many of these alphabets were derived from the Phoenician linear quasi-alphabet of 22 signs, first attested at Byblos and externally similar to the Proto-Byblian script. The Phoenician was the origin of the European alphabets, whereas all the Asiatic alphabets are derived from the Aramaic variants of the Phoenician.In fact many of the existing scripts such as Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew among others are derived from Phoenician characters. Greece in the 8th century BC adopted the Phoenician alphabet with very little variation. According to Herodotus:

The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus - amongst whom were the Gephyraei - introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as time went on, and they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighborhood were Ionians; they were taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations, for their own use, continuing to refer to them as the Phoenician characters - as was only right, as the Phoenicians had introduced them. The Ionians also call paper 'skins' - a survival from antiquity when paper was hard to get, and they did actually use goat and sheep skins to write on.

  

Translation of the Phoenician text according to Sabatino Moscati:

To [our] Lady Ishtar. This is the holy place // which was made and donated // by TBRY WLNSH [= The faries Velianas] who reigns on // Caere [or: on the Caerites], during the month of the sacrifice // to the Sun, as a gift in the temple. He b//uilt an aedicula [?] because Ishtar gave in his hand [or: raised him with her hand] // to reign for three years in the m//onth of KRR [=Kerer], in the day of the burying // of the divinity. And the years of the statue of the divinity // in his temple [might be ? are ?] as many years as these stars.

Phoenician alphabet

A history of the Latin Alphabet

The Latin alphabet is originated from the Etruscan alphabet, in the 7th century BC. The Etruscans themselves derived their alphabet from the Greek colonists in Italy, more specifically from the Cumae alphabet. The Ancient Greek alphabet was in turn based upon the alphabet of Phoenicians who were living on the coastal area of Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. The earliest inscription in Latin characters, dating from the 7th century BC, was made on golden brooch known as Praeneste Fibula (preserved now in the Museo Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini in Rome). It is written from right to left and reads:

The Praeneste fibula at the Museo Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini in Rome. It reads:

MANIOS:MED:FHEFHAKED:NUMASIOI

(in Classical Latin: Manius me fecit Numerio)

Manius made me for Numerius.

Another inscription, dating from the end of the 7th or the beginning of the 6th century BC, was engraved on a small pillar (cippus) found in the Roman Forum. It is written vertically on the four faces of the pillar in bustrophedon style.

The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet.

 The Duenos inscription

Reflecting the obvious similarity between the Latin alphabet and the Chalcidian variety of the Western group of Greek scripts used at Cumae in Campania, Southern Italy, the earlier hypothesis suggested that Latin letters were derived directly from the Greek alphabet. However, this hypotheses is now rejected since: i. Latin letter names are of Etruscan origin, and ii. The sound of F, in most ancient documents, is represented by combination FH, which was peculiar to the Etruscan writing system.

According to a Roman legend, which credits introduction of alphabet into Latinium to Evander, son of the Cimmerian Sibyl. This was supposed to have happened 60 years before the Trojan war. However, there is no historically sound basis to this tale. This makes the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic alphabets emerging at the time.

 A latin inscription in Ephesus

The Romans further developed the alphabet by using 23 letters from the Etruscans. The Roman letters ABEZHIKMNOTXY was exactly the same as the Etruscans'. But the letters CDGLPRSV were redesigned. The Romans also added two Phoenicians letters, the F and Q, that were discarded by the Greeks. They placed Z at the end of the alphabet because for a while it appeared redundant. The U and W were slowly added and based on the letter V by the year 1000 and the J, which was based on the I was added by 1500.

Three important  innovations by  Romans were:  first, the introduction of serifs, which are the short finishing strokes at the end of letters, second, the graphic design of thick and thin strokes, and third lowercase letters. The most important of these was of course the lowercase letters which were developed because to copy a text scribes needed quicker and smaller versions of the letters. The first system of lowercase letterforms was known as the semi-uncial. Spacing between words was not generally adopted until the eleventh century. Punctuation marks developed in the 16th century when printing became prevalent.

A history of the Arabic alphabet

Although after the birth of Islam in 7th century AD, Arabic inscriptions became prevalent in  the western and central Asia,  the origin of the Arabic script also goes back to the Phoenician alphabet, which a branch of it evolved into Aramaic, which evolved into Modern Hebrew and Nabataean. The Nabataeans, which established the kingdom of Petra in what is modern-day Jordan from the 2nd century BC were of  Arabic origin. They wrote with a highly cursive Aramaic-derived alphabet that would eventually evolve into the today's alphabet. The Nabataeans endured until the year 106 AD, when they were conquered by the Romans, but Nabataean inscriptions continue to appear until the 4th century  AD, coinciding with the first inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet, found in Jordan.

The oldest piece of Phoenician writing that we've discovered was from the Phoenician city of Byblos (today in Lebanon) dating to the 11th century BCE. From there, however, Phoenician began to appear in more and more cities around the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians were a maritime people, who built up a society of traders who shipped products to and from the various cities along the Mediterranean coast. As they built up their trade networks, they established colonies across Northern Africa and the Middle East, and even some in Southern Europe.

Greek and Nabataean inscriptions at Petra.   It is estimated that Petra has been built in the sixth century BC by Nabataeans people, who created one of the greatest ancient civilizations in the Middle East, with its own alphabet, on the basis of which the conventional Arabic alphabet was formed.

Kufic Script,   Toledo, Spain, 11th century AD

After, the emergence of Islam, the Umayyad state chancery employed many skilled Persian scribes from the Iranian court. The administrative language of Umayyads officially changed from Middle Persian (Pahlavi) to Arabic during  Hajjaj ibn Yusuf governorship of Iraq. The records of administrative documents,  dīwān al-rasā’il (bureau of letters)  transferred from Pahlavi to Arabic. The early Arabic alphabet had 15 distinct letter-shapes for 28 sounds, but did not contain any dots, which were a later addition by the Persians scribes, who used them to differentiate between the different sounds. They also added the vowel marks and the Hamza  in the latter half of the seventh century.

Naskh script  at Ben Ali Youssef Medersa, Morocco,16th century AD

Generally speaking, there are two variants to the Arabic alphabet: Kufic and Naskh. The Kufic script is angular, which was most likely a product of inscribing on hard surfaces such as wood or stone, while the Naskh script is much more cursive. The Kufic script appears to be the older of the scripts, as it was common in the early history of Islam, and used for the earliest copies of the Qu'ran.

Atigh Jame' Mosque, Shiraz, 14th century AD.

A history of the Chinese Scribe

The earliest examples of Chinese writing date to the late Shang period (ca. 1200 BC). These are the so-called Oracle Bone Inscriptions (甲骨文--jiaguwen) which were found at the site of the last Shang capital near present-day Anyang in Henan province.Later on the bronze inscriptions (金文 --jinwen) which were texts casted or carved into the surface of vessels integrated the concept of aesthetics into the design during the Eastern Zhou dynasty (ca. 1150-771 BC). Nevertheless,the language and the calligraphic style were similar to those found on the oracle bones.

A bronze inscription (jinwen) casted into the surface of a vessel depicts a harmonious calligraphic composition.

The 'Lantingji Xu'', Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion 3 is the most famous work of Chinese calligrapher Wang Xizhi, created in year 353.

The so-called "classical Chinese" (文言 -- wenyan) which had remained more or less intact until the late 19th century was written on bamboo strips on ancient times. These were manuscripts, that recorded the Chinese philosophical texts, such as the Laozi, Liji, and Lunyu. They are dated from the early fifth century BC. The characters were written with a hard brush or a stick on a prepared surface of bamboos tied together with strings to form a roll. Beside bamboo, texts were also written on wooden tablets and silk cloth.

A Chinese traditional title epilogue written by Wen Zhengming in Ni Zan's portrait by Qiu Ying.(1470–1559)

Footnotes:

1. Algaze, Guillermo (2005) "The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization", (Second Edition, University of Chicago Press.
2. See : R.O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (revised ed C. A. R. Andrews), The British Museum Press , 1985, London. R.B. Parkinson and S.Quirke, Papyrus, Egyptian Bookshelf, The British Museum Press, London ,1995. S. Quirke and A.J. Spencer, The British Museum book of anc, The British Museum Press 
3. This calligraphy describes a gathering of 42 poets including Xie An and Sun Chuo at the Orchid Pavilion near Shaoxing, Zhejiang, during the Spring Purification Festival to compose poems and enjoy the wine. The poets had agreed to participate in a drinking contest. Wine cups were floated down a small winding creek as the men sat along its banks and whenever a cup stopped the man closest to the cup was required to drink it and write a poem. In the end, twenty-six of the participants composed thirty-seven poems.Richard Kurt Kraus, Brushes with Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 27.

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Chapter 70; Posters of the Spanish Civil War

Posters from the Spanish Civil War represent one of the most painful documents of this historical period. As many eyewitness accounts show, posters were an essential part of the visual landscape in which people experiencing the tragedy of war carried out their daily tasks of survival.

The British writer Christopher Caudwell wrote home from Barcelona in December of 1936:

"On almost every building there are party posters: posters against Fascism, posters about the defense of Madrid, posters appealing for recruits to the militia...and even posters for the emancipation of women and against venereal disease."

 Robert Merriman, an American volunteer fighting in Spain wrote from the same city in January of 1937: 

"Streets aflame with posters of all parties for all causes, some of them put out by combinations of parties."

 In Republican territory, when a house was destroyed by the enemy bombs, propaganda agencies would fix posters on the ruins in order to denounce the enemy, hoping to turn aggression into rage. In Madrid, the capital of the Republic, shop owners were exhorted to fill their store fronts with posters: "Every space must be used to incite the spirit in its fight against the enemy," stated an article in the newspaper ABC on October 30, 1936. 

In Seville, portraits of two of the leaders of the military rebellion that originated the war, Generals Queipo de Llano and Franco, were posted everywhere shortly after the city was taken. Further from the front, a different lifestyle was accompanied by the same backdrop of war posters. Arturo Barea, a patent officer who is the author of one of the most sensitive memoirs of the war, wrote about his experience in Valencia, where he had arrived from the front in Madrid: 

"I walked slowly through an outlandish world where the war existed only in the huge anti-fascist posters and in the uniforms of lounging militia men...a wealth of loose cash was spent in hectic gaiety. Legions of people had turned rich overnight, against the background of the giant posters which were calling for sacrifices in the name of Madrid."

Aidez Espagne (Help Spain) Joan Miró, 1937 

Miro in this poster, appeals to the international community to intervene and help the Spanish people. It reflects the themes and values of Modernism, such as experimentation, fragmentation, and disillusionment.

 It was created in 1937 to raise money and support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. The poster shows a Catalan peasant raising a clenched fist, a symbol of resistance and solidarity, against a bright yellow background. 

The poster also features the colors of the Catalan flag, red and yellow, and the slogan “Help Spain” in four languages: French, English, Catalan, and Basque. 

Miro was a Catalan artist who opposed Franco’s fascist regime and sympathized with the Republican side. He moved to Paris in 1936 to escape the violence and turmoil in Spain. He was influenced by Surrealism and developed his own style of abstract and symbolic imagery. His poster was one of the many artistic responses to the Spanish Civil War, along with Picasso’s Guernica and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

Grabad en vuestro pecho esta consigna atacar es vencer,

 Remember in your heart this watchword: To attack is to win
By Oliver

In the Spanish civil war Republicans were defending the legitimately elected Popular Front government against a coup staged by Generals Francisco Franco and Emilio Mola in July 1936. 

More often than not, the rebel military had the upper hand at the front. On the other hand, this poster sends the message that attacking the enemy is the way to win the war. The offensive message of this poster is reinforced by the image of two steel-like soldiers who tightly grip their rifles and hold them resolutely in the air, ready to advance against the nationalist forces. The red hearts on the soldiers' chests reflect the inner strength needed to fight the enemy. The repetition of the stylized soldiers contributes to the power of the image.

Despite encouragement from posters like this one, loyalist forces failed to launch offensives against the rebels throughout the war. In fact, they did not mount their first significant offensive, the Battle of Brunete, until a year into the war. The failure of this offensive and other loyalist offensives such as that organized in Asturias in August 1936 and the Battle of the Ebro in the summer of 1938 confirms the weakness of the Republican army and its inability to successfully lead an offensive against his enemy.

Little is known about Oliver, the artist who designed this poster, except that he worked Madrid for the Sindicato de Profesionales de las Bellas Artes and the Junta Delegada de Defensa. This poster dates between November 31, 1936 and April 21, 1937, dates of existence of the issuing entity, the Junta Delegada de Defensa de Madrid.

 

Josep Renau: 

Born in Valencia in 1907, Josep Renau was one of the artists most heavily involved in the Civil War. He was the director of the Republican government’s propaganda department and a member of the Communist Party. He created posters that used photomontage, surrealism, and social realism to promote the Republican cause and denounce fascism. He also designed the famous mural “The Spanish People Have a Path That Leads to a Star” for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair.

Hoy más que nunca, VICTORIA [Today more than ever, VICTORY]. Signed: Renau, 1938. 

 This poster is an homage to the Republican Air Force, which remained loyal to the government to a larger degree than other sections of the military after the rebellion of July 1936. In the image, the planes in the "V" formation display the flag of the Republic on their wings. This is different from the red-yellow-red flag of the Spanish monarchy, which was used before and after the Republic and remains the flag of Spain to this day. Because of its close relationship with the Soviet Union, which supplied it with planes and provided training throughout the war, the Republican Air Force had strong communist sympathies. 

Antoni Clavé:  

Antoni Clavé was born in Barcelona on 5 April 1913. He was a Catalan painter and sculptor who joined the Republican army as a volunteer. He created posters that used abstract and geometric forms, bright colors, and symbolic elements to convey messages of hope, resistance, and solidarity. He also collaborated with Pablo Picasso on the stage design for the ballet “Romeo and Juliet”. During the Spanish Civil War Clavé served as a draughtsman for the Republican government but at the end of the war he fled to France. After internment at Les Haras camp in Perpignan, Clavé settled in Paris in 1939, drawing comics and working as an illustrator. During the 1940s Clavé's painting showed the stylistic influence of Bonnard, Vuillard, Rouault and especially Picasso, with whom he became acquainted in 1944.

Carles Fontserè: 

He was a Catalan painter and illustrator who was influenced by Miró and Picasso. Influenced by the art of the Mexican and Russian revolutions, Fontserè led a life that reads like a picaresque novel. Self-taught, he started work at the age of 15 in a theatre design workshop, developing his skills with cinema posters, book covers and adverts. When the civil war broke out in 1936, he became active in the union of graphic artists. He created posters that used expressionist and cubist techniques, dynamic compositions, and vivid contrasts to depict the heroism and suffering of the Republican fighters and civilians. He also designed the poster for the film “Land Without Bread” by Luis Buñuel.

Helios Gómez: 

 Spanish-born Roma artist Helios Gómez (1905–1956) was a gypsy painter and activist who was a member of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT.

He was among the most prolific of the left wing anti-fascist political graphic artists from the country’s Republican period, before Franco’s Falange Party Fascists overtook the nation. Gómez was first published in the anarchist newspaper Páginas Libres, and he also illustrated books by Seville’s political authors. In 1927, political disputes forced his exile to Paris. According to the French writer, poet and museum director Jean Cassou, Gómez “was an artist because he was a revolutionary and a revolutionary because he was an artist.”

 He created posters that used woodcut, collage, and stencil methods, dark tones, and dramatic images to portray the brutality of war and the oppression of the working class. He also participated in the defense of Barcelona against the Nationalist troops.

Spanish civil wars and modernist movement in art

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the radical modernist movement emerged in art, literature and culture, aiming to challenge the traditions of the past. The Modernists were avant-garde artists, writers, musicians and architects who challenged the status-quo and sought to understand and analyse the human condition through their own unique interpretive style.

Inspired by the industrial revolution, urbanization, social changes and the tragic consequences of multiple wars, modernists experimented with new forms of expression, new materials and techniques to reflect modern life from a new perspective.

The Spanish Civil War was an international war amid tensions created under the influence of modern ideology. Across the world, from the Far East to Western Europe, dynasties, empires and aristocracies were collapsing. The paradigm proposed by socialism and Marxism promised to be the answer to eliminating vast inequalities and social injustices. It is therefore not surprising that many artists and writers have adopted their proposals.

Like their European counterparts, Spanish artists enthusiastically welcomed popular revolutionary ideas and the paradigm shift of the modern industrial world, and their art aimed to reflect these changes. But for conservatives, these rapid and radical changes were unfamiliar and threatening. Cinema, photography, the automobile, the telephone, the radio, the transformation of the family structure call into question the moral and ethical fiber of society, and at the same time, the excesses of pseudo-artists incapable of controlling their complexes, sometimes reflecting their repressed psychological emotions, added to social tensions and challenges.

The Spanish civil war of 1936-39 started with General Franco's coup against the democratically elected Republican government of Manuel Azaña, on July 17th 1936. Franco issued a manifesto announcing the military rebellion, which was broadcast from the Canary Islands. He ceased Morocco and took the full control of the protectorate and then landed in Spain, marching with his army toward Madrid. The cabinet resigned on the 18th and Borrios, a right wing republican, was made prime minister.

The Second Republic of Spain, that had came to power in 1931, was made up primarily of leftists and centrists. The king Alfonso XIII, a constitutional monarch, was forced to abdicate. Those victorious at the election then declared Spain a republic and monarchy was abolished. They enacted reforms to breakup the feudal system, and attempted to reduce the size of the military. As well, the republicans introduced a number of acts against the catholic church. State stopped paying priests' salaries, demanding that they should be paid by Roman Catholic Church’s funds. These reforms angered many privileged groups including the military, industrialists, land owners and the Roman Catholic clergy. They were supported by right wing countries in Europe that were fearful of Stalin’s Russia, in particular Italian fascists under Mussolini, and Nazi Germany after Hitler came to power in January 1933. The 1930’s Depression, weakened the government position further. Two powerful left wing political parties, the anarchists and syndicalists (powerful trade union groups), criticized Azana’s government for not paying attention to the plight of the unemployed workers and poor farmers who were devastated by the impact of the depression, and the extreme left organised strikes and riots in an effort to destabilize his government. Azana resigned as prime minister and elections were called for November 1933, in which the Nationalist won a majority of seats. The new government immediately nullified all the reforms.

A period of instability, strikes and riots ensued, and as result a general election was called for February 1936, in which Azana's Popular Front won and once again he became prime minister. However, the ongoing instability intensified. Franco's coup against Azana made some headway in parts of the country but in Catalonia, and especially Barcelona, the CNT (Anarcho-Syndicalist union) resisted fiercely. They declared a general strike and took to the streets looking for arms which the government refused to give them. In the end they stormed the barracks, and took what they needed. The Republicans were supported by the European left and the Soviet Union, while the Nationalists were armed and equipped by the Fascist governments of Germany and Italy.

The Spanish Civil War would prove not only both tragic and bloody, but also as David Sanders writes:

..retained an evocative quality which the other crises preceding World War II lack. Although its concrete result was a fascist triumph, it also offered international communism its greatest political opportunity since the Soviet revolution by converting the concept of a united front against fascism from a topic for discussion to battlefield reality. And, long before the surrender of of Madrid, it had inspired an impressive literature, even though party line reportage must be entered into the canon with Man's Hope and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The inescapable relationship between politics and writing in this war is, of course, the obscuring factor in judging the real worth of its literature . This problem of how far communist objectives came to be shared by noncommunist writers may be seen most clearly in the relevant works of Ernest Hemingway. No other writer, so involved , was more provably noncommunist than the author of Green Hills of Africa, yet none was to call more urgently for militant struggle against fascists. Twenty years later, Hemingway, of all American writers dealing with the struggle, has been most consistently faithful to his early convictions."

Studying the amazing works of the graphic artists who dealt with the Spanish civil war, and here we can see the works of artists both, the Nationalist and the Republican, sides, it would be very difficult to disagree with Hemingway's profound  judgement.

Spanish Falangists Posters;

At the same time, in Germany, Hitler was fighting against decadent art or “Entartete Kunst”. Two months after the opening of the Paris World's Fair, perhaps in response to the enthusiastic reception given to Spanish artists in that country's pavilion, Rudolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party organized an exhibition on "the degenerate art” in Munich from July 19 to November 30, 1937. 

740 modern works were exhibited in the Degenerate Art show in Munich in order to “educate” the public on the “art of decay.” The exhibition purported to demonstrate that modernist tendencies, such as abstraction, are the result of genetic inferiority and society’s moral decline. An explicit parallel, for example, was drawn between modernism and mental illness. Some of those works were later destroyed; others, officially declared “internationally marketable,” were sold through art dealers acting on behalf of the German government.

The Spanish nationalists'  Falangist posters, which emphasized national pride and patriotic slogans, were influenced by images similar to those of the fascists in Germany and Italy. On the other hand, the Republicans wanted to follow the Soviet revolutionary spirit and develop it. Therefor  their emphasis was on the peasant and patriotic style of the scythe and clenched fist and on the provocation of the oppressed worker in the design of their communication. Of course, Republican posters outnumbered nationalist posters, mainly because many Republican artists came from Barcelona and the largely anti-fascist cities, that monopolized the printing shops. They were the ones who sent out their bold, colorful and artistic posters with inspiring messages to the toiling masses.

The Falangists used unity as the main message of their communication. In their propaganda, they accused the Republicans of sowing chaos and disorder. In doing so, they fostered their loyalty to a strong and unifying leader, generalist Francisco Franco, who could lead them to resolve the country's problems and crisis.

“Jamás” (Never) is a Nationalist poster that depicts the communists as a gigantic, inhuman beast while the Nationalist soldier stands defiantly, protecting the Catholic families.

“Squeeze hard, comrade!!”  

“Communism destroys the family.” This Nationalist poster depicts the communist as a murderous brute. The father and husband lays dead while his wife wails, and his daughter is carried off

To arms: country, bread and justice, by Juan Cabanas

The heraldic image of a bundle of arrows, known as "el yugo y las flechas" was created for the Isabel and Ferdinand, who ruled in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Their marriage and the union of Castile and Aragon which gave birth to Spain is represented by the bundle of arrows. The F was the first letter of Fernand's name, and the Y the first letter of Isabella's, spelled in the older style of Ysabel. Franco's Falangists adopted the symbolism of monarchism and unity to fight for a divided Spain.

To speak of the Falange is to name Spain

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