Catalan Ink Against Hitler

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The exhibition Catalan ink against Hitler is the presentation in Barcelona of the discovery of the only Catalan and Spanish artist who worked massively for British and Allied propaganda during the Second World War. From 1941 to 1945, the Catalan Mario Armengol Torrella (Sant Joan de les Abadesses, 1909 - Nottingham, 1995) drew around two thousand cartoons or caricatures in the service of the British Ministry of Information against the Third Reich and the Axis to publish them in newspapers and magazines in London's allied and neutral countries, from New Zealand to Haiti.

The exhibition will present a selection of the originals preserved by the author and his family which, together with the publications in which many of those cartoons appeared, become one of the largest collections worldwide of political satire illustrations of the most terrible conflict in history.

This is a spectacular fresco, surprisingly unknown until now, since Armengol's illustrations are found alongside those of the greatest and most influential UK illustrators and cartoonists, such as David Low, Giles and Illingworth. In them, you can see caricatured almost all the war fronts and the most prominent figures of that brutal combat. All of this, moreover, is satirized in a style that draws on the intense tradition of Catalan cartoonists and satirical publications of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Armengol, this tradition is crystallized in a work of great artistic quality, versatile and modern, which surpasses the style of the time, pointing towards current comics and continues to pose questions about the limits of humor in dramatic and brutal contexts.

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