Edinburgh Companion to the Spanish Civil War and Visual Culture

Eugenia Afinoguénova is Association of Marquette University Women (AMUW) Professor of Spanish Language and Culture at Marquette University. Her most recent monograph is The Prado: Spanish Culture and Leisure, 1819–1939 (2018, winner of the 2019 Eleanor Tufts Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies). She also coedited, with Lara Anderson and Rebecca Ingram, Digestible Governance: Gastrocracy and Spanish Foodways (2024). Afinoguénova’s work has been featured in the catalogues of Milwaukee Art Museum, as well as the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Musée National Pablo Picasso in Paris. Robert Lubar Messeri is currently the Joan Miró Curator at the Museu Serralves, Porto, and a Trustee of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. He was a member of the faculty at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University from 1990 to 2025. His appointments also include Director of NYU Madrid (2014-2019) and visiting professorships at the Universitat de Girona and the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Premi Espais and a fellowship from the American Philosophical Society. A specialist in modern European art, with particular research interests in the Spanish, French and Catalan avant-gardes, he recently curated 'Painting/Poetry: Livres d'artiste by Joan Miró' for the Museu Serralves and is now preparing a major exhibition of Miró’s paintings on Masonite for the Museu Serralves and the Fundació Joan Miró. Silvina Schammah Gesser is a member of the Salti Institute of the Study of Ladino at Bar Ilan University and a researcher at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She specializes in early 20th-century Spanish history and culture, with a focus on the political discourse of the avant–garde, as well as the recovery of the cultural legacy of the Second Spanish Republic in democratic Spain. Her interests include memory, migration, and exile in Spain and Argentina, as well as the return of the Jewish presence in Iberia. Her publications include Jewish (In)Visibility in Iberia: A View from the Margins, in Contemporary Jewry (2021), her study on the Converso traits in Spanish Baroque and the figure of Teresa of Ávila appearing in Religions, and her articles published by Brill and Ladinar (2025) focusing on the work and trajectory of the Argentine Sephardic playwright, Ricardo Halac, on whom she is writing an intellectual biography. Her book, Madrid's Forgotten Avant–Garde: Between Essentialism and Modernity, published by Sussex Academic Press, is now being translated into Spanish.

This book offers an extraordinarily complex and critical view of the Spanish War, the first in which images, disseminated to every corner of the world through the most advanced mass media, became a decisive weapon. The essays within cover every conceivable field, from the history of art and popular media to anthropology, encompassing issues of memory, gender, colonialism, or race, among many others. And they cover not only the years of the war itself, but also its international reach and its enduring presence in exile, under Franco’s dictatorship, and during the democratic transition. Amidst the vast existing bibliography, this book asserts itself with its own unique and original voice, undoubtedly making it essential reading.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Visual Culture of the Spanish Civil WarEugenia Afinoguénova, Robert Lubar Messeri and Silvina Schammah GesserPart I. Aesthetics Under Pressure1. Print Culture and the (Political) Discourses of Design in Josep Renau’s Función Social del Cartel Publicitario (1937)Jordana Mendelson2. ‘Women’s Rightful Place’: Images, Magazines and Mobilisation During the Spanish Civil WarMichel Otayek3. ‘This is how we are’: Aesthetic Avant-Garde and Worker Ethics in Collectivised Spanish Cinema (1936–7)Dolors Marín Silvestre and Jorge Gaupp4. ‘Dalinian Difficulties’Robert Lubar Messeri5. Children’s Drawings in the Spanish Civil War: Exploring Child Agency Through Artwork from Propaganda to TherapySarah Wright6. ‘Colonising Ourselves’: The Redefinition of Racial Boundaries Around the Moroccan Soldier and the Worker in Spanish Civil War PropagandaElisabeth Bolorinos Allard7. ‘The sad fate of Abyssinia’: Internationalism, Race and Anti-colonialism in the Republican Military Press (1936–9)Henry BrownPart II. Looking for an International Audience8. Documenting Atrocity: The Italian Invasion of Ethiopia and Images of the Spanish Civil War in New Times and Ethiopia NewsNeelam Srivastava9. The Spanish Civil War in Soviet and Chinese cartoonsMariia Guleva10. Child Refugees and the Iconographies of the Future During the Spanish Civil WarEugenia Afinoguénova and Margarita Buitrago11. Women in the Visual Culture of International Red AidLaura Branciforte12. Female Icons: La Pasionaria, Santa Teresa and the Ambivalence of GenderMiren Llona13. The Rescue of the Prado: The International Effort to Protect Spain’s Historical and Artistic Heritage During the Civil WarArturo Colorado Castellary14. The Spanish Participation at the 1938 Venice BiennaleSantiago Olábarri OriolPart III. Exile and Echoes from Abroad15. Framing Transatlantic Exile: Proposing a New Perspective on Spanish Republican Women Artists Through the Work of Manuela BallesterCarmen Gaitán Salinas16. The Deep Imprint of Spanish Exile Artists in ChileMiguel Cabañas Bravo17. Moving Images: Spanish-American Families Forget the Spanish Civil WarJames D. Fernández18. From Guernica to Vietnam: The Spanish Civil War in American Art, 1939 to 1975Beatriz Cordero Martín19. Visual Culture of the Spanish Civil War in East and West GermanyTeresa Pinheiro20. ‘Spain inside us’: Echoes of the Civil War in an Always Changing Eastern EuropeMatei ChihaiaPart IV. The Civil War Under Dictatorship21. Staging the Reconquest: The 1940 'Exposición de la Hispanidad'Miriam M. Basilio Gaztambide22. The Hero in Spanish Post-War Comics: The Last KnightsAlmudena Izquierdo Andreu23. Starting Over: The Challenges of Recovering the Avant-garde in Post-war Catalonia and the Basque CountryIsmael Manterola Ispizua24. The ‘Recycling’ of Spanish Civil War Images in Political Art of the 1960s and 1970sNoemí de Haro García25. Memory Accomplices: Imaginaries (and Spectres) of the Spanish Civil War and Revolution emerging in Clandestine Cinema PracticesLidia Mateo Leivas26. Images of Violence and ‘Rebirth’: On Collective Crime in the Civil War and the ShoahMiguel Rivas VenegasPart V. Visualising the War in Democratic Spain27. Raising the Flag: Guernica’s Transfer to the Reina Sofía MuseumRocío Robles Tardío28. Autoethnography and Visual Archaeology in Spanish Historical ComicsSamuel Amago29. Memoryscapes of the Spanish Civil WarCarmen Ortiz30. The Cutting Room Floor of Spain’s DemocracyEmilio Silva31. Beyond Erasure: Forensic Vision, the Politics of (in)Visibility, and Image Ecologies in Spanish DocumentaryLee Douglas32. Gaze, Heritage and Tourism of the Spanish Civil War: The Economy Behind Destination Culture Silvina Schammah Gesser and Irene Rincón Narros33. Creating a New Memory? The Uneven Role of Public HistoryAntonio Cazorla-SánchezBibliographyNotes on ContributorsIndex