Collection of Civil War posters of Universitat de València

Vicente Vila Gimeno. Cultural Militias, Propaganda and Press, 1936- 1939. UV002120

Rafael Pérez Contel. International Red Aid (I.R.A.), 1937. UV002158

Promoted by different institutions and organisations, war posters served the propagandistic purposes of the Republican government, based in Valencia from 1936 to 1939. Formally, posters used different art languages: Art Decó, Constructivism, or (Russian and German) Photomontage with expressionist features, with a view  to emphasising direct and revolutionary messages sent through prototypes with an unquestionable social impact: the combatant, the hero. In other words, the anti-fascist revolutionary.

Coves. Partit Republicà d´Esquerra, 1936. UV002219

Enric Cluselles Albertí. Ministry of Public Instruction, 1937. UV002222

The exaltation of sports and machines (as elements for surpassing human limits) and culture (final symbol of social victory and human emancipation) are presented as essential defining features of the Republican man, who is summoned to take part in a common political-social project and who uses art as a means of expression. They ridicule the enemy or the new role of women, who are given a dual meaning: as a worker, mother or victim, or as the incarnation of evil, a prostitute carrying venereal diseases and symbolically associated to death. Children, workers, farmers or soldiers, economy and production forces were all part of the political discourse at the time.