Josep Bartoli i Guiu

Josep Bartolí i Guiu (1910), founder of the Cartoonist Union before the armed conflict, escaped the French concentration camps and the Gestapo to reach Latin America, where he became acquainted with the intellectual circle of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The life and work of Bartolí gained public attention thanks to the release of the film Josep (2020), based on his drawings of the concentration camp. Bartolí arrived in the United States in 1945 and illustrated the Holiday magazine. In 1950, he was part of the renowned group of artists 10th Street Group and designed sets for Hollywood sets until Joseph McCarthy pointed to him as a possible communist. In 1973 he won the Mark Rothko Award.

Ibérica and España Libre published hundreds of his editorial cartoons. Some of his cartoons in Ibérica occupied half a page. Compared to his drawings of concentration camps with multiple dark strokes, exile caricatures are minimalist, clear, and with elegant forms and continuous strokes. They are conceptual drawings that clearly express his authority as an editorial cartoonist.

Feu, “Aesthetically Resilient: Josep Bartolí Guiu’s Political Cartoons in España Libre (1939-1977 NYC), a Spanish Civil War Exile Newspaper,” Debra D. Andrist (ed). The Body, Subject & Subjected. The Representation of the Body Itself, Illness, Injury, Treatment & Death in Spain and Indigenous and Hispanic American Art & Literature. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2016. 73-90. [2016 South Central Modern Language Association Book Prize].

Bartolí dedicated several cartoons to the censorship of culture, science, education and the press in Fascist Spain. In them, we see the shadow of a civil guard who watches an empty stage, a woman dressed in black who trims cultural images, statues of the arts decapitated, literates enclosed in ivory towers, or a writer enclosed by his own books. His most brazen cartoons show the Spanish state personified as an orangutan watching over a writer’s shoulder; pedestals whose statues are a donkey, an orangutan and a pig, a foot soldier shooting feathers at an intellectual wearing a black shackle labeled “totalitarianism,” the humanities personified as a decapitated woman used by a civil guard to hang their tricorn, or an academic of the RAE on his knees cleaning the boots of a Falangist with his tongue.

The Arts

A lady with scissors symbolizes the censorship in Spain cutting up the arts

Chair and Guitar

A Civil War watches a stage with a chair and a guitar. The cartoon was reprinted on Dec. 12, 1960.

Censorship

One hand is writing and another hand stops it.

Painter

A painter is painting the Moroccan scenery. He has a Franco portrait on the wall. The caricature was reprinted on June 15, 1964