Arturo Reque Meruvia, war graphic correspondent. Drawing as a metaphor of reality

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) created a flood of images that established one of the largest visual depositories of this genre in the world. Although they were of all types, nature and techniques were mainly due to the legion of photographers, photomontage artists, and draftsmen while the volume of oil paintings and sculptures reached much lower figures.

By joining its intention of being at the same time, the testimony of reality and a transmitter of a strong ideological weight, it is unquestionable the importance of drawing as a privileged mean/s of creating a universe from a republican or rebel faction standpoint that filled thousands of pages of newspapers, magazines, brochures, and posters.

However, the image construction codes used show a wide range of options that go from a naturalistic description cartoon or a surrealist echo (in form and substance, focused on the brazen violence enforced over the human body) to epic representation and classist heritage.

This article presents for the first time, in a systematic way, the intense production of a Latin American artist who continues to be a great unknown in this tale: the Bolivian Arturo Reque Meruvia (1906-1996). Starting from a research process focused on Avila’s military archives from the bottom of the National Library of Spain and the ABC Museum, an analysis is made of his outstanding work as a war draftsman in various newspaper publications, most of them linked to the Falange.

Reque Meruvia then became one of the most notorious artists of those years in the rebel faction and was capable of creating a personal style in which he knew how to combine the description of scenarios and soldiers with an even more conceptual and metaphorical dimension of the conflict that shattered Spain in the late thirties.