Franco’s artist in Lisbon. Jorge Colaço and his cartoons about the war in Spain in the newspaper "A Voz": graphic humor and anticommunist propaganda (1936-1939)

Abstract

This work is an approach to the iconographic representation through humorous cartoons published by the Portuguese painter Jorge Colaço, former president of the National Society of Fine Arts of Portugal, in the newspaper A Voz during the Spanish Civil War. Through an essentially descriptive and qualitative analysis based on the critical observation of the drawings made by the Portuguese artist on different scenes of the battle, the main objective of the article is to highlight the importance of the artistic figure of Jorge Colaço in the context of the conflic, as well as describing the fundamental features of the expressive codes of a propagandistic nature used by the artist to represent war in the service of the rebel cause and against Spanish communism. Jorge Colaço’s vignettes, in addition of being a paradigmatic example of the use of art with persuasive political intentions, are a sample of creativity of great symbolic power whose significance goes beyond mere illustrative value, since his anti-communist visual rhetoric conveys a tone, some ideological values and an original artistic profile within the Iberian landscape.