Mark Perryman looks backwards, and forwards, from the day the Spanish Civil War broke out.

Ninety years ago, 17th July 1936, the mutinous General Franco launched his coup, backed by substantial numbers of the Spanish army he commanded, to overthrow the elected Spanish government. He was almost immediately back by his fascist co-thinkers, Hitler and Mussolini, with decisive military support to follow.

1936 was the height of a politics known as the ‘Popular Front’, uniting whoever was against fascism, all those involved willingly putting their own politics aside for the single cause of stopping the march to power of fascists right across Europe. The recruitment poster for the Ejercito Popular was emblematic of this. Ejercito Popular meant a “people’s army.” Todas las milicias fundidas en el Ejército Popular:“all militias merged into the people’s army.” 

This wasn’t simply a political unity: the Popular Front was deeply rooted in popular culture too. 1936 was also the year of the Berlin Olympics, the Nazi Olympics, presided over by Hitler, on the eve of the Holocaust, the International Olympic Movement in full collaborative mode. Meanwhile in Barcelona, the ‘ People’s Olympics’ was taking place. The Spanish Republican government had refused to send a team to the Berlin Olympics which they correctly surmised would be used to sanitise and propagandise the Nazi regime. Instead, they organised a ‘People’s Olympics’ in Barcelona which 6,000 athletes joined from across the world. The day before the opening ceremony, Franco launched his murderous attack on the Republic to start the Spanish Civil War. The Barcelona Games were cancelled; the athletes were forced to leave but some chose not to return home: instead they joined the International Brigades in their battle for Spain’s land and freedom – sport, popular culture, recognised and mobilised by the Popular Front as resistance. 

Within months, and without the communicative aid of television news, let alone the internet and social media, Spain became the global epicentre of the Popular Front. The Ejercito Popular were joined by the International Brigades, volunteers making their way from across Europe, America, Canada, Australasia. They were invaluable reinforcements yet, like the Spanish volunteers, mostly with little or no military experience. It is hard to imagine now the extraordinary act of courage involved in taking up arms to fight the trained army Franco had at his disposal. It was an act of bravery framed by political commitment, or desperation, or both.

Add to this the significant and sophisticated support for Franco provided by Hitler and Mussolini. Guernica 1937 was a bloodied dress rehearsal for the blitz the Luftwaffe would inflict on London and other English cities just three years later in 1940-41. Picasso’s painting of what Guernica suffered is the most powerful painting imaginable of the devastating consequences the inhabitants of this city suffered.  But for Picasso this wasn’t simply about ‘great art’ but framed by his own politics: “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” Art at war, with war. The Popular Front was a Cultural Front too, not as an added extra, but theorised and practised as a central part of ‘doing’ politics.

In this regard it is entirely fitting to mark the anniversary of the Spanish Civil War via an artful recruitment poster for the Ejercito Popular designed by Emeterio Melendreras, a Spanish graphic artist who produced posters for the Republican cause during the Civil War. Melendreras, like many artists, poets, musicians, writers and more, put his art at the disposal of the Popular Front, not in an instrumental way, but to add another dimension to the resistance. Ejercito Popular, his most famous work neatly comprises the breadth of the Popular Front, from Communists and Anarchists via Basque and Catalan separatists to Spanish republican nationalists – for once, together as one, on a helmet, worn to save lives whatever their differing beliefs. 

In later work during the civil war, Melendreras used his artistry to celebrate the Popular Front unity of nationalism and internationalism when in October 1936 the International Brigades were formed to join Spain’s battle to defeat Franco’s insurgency.  And again, the breadth of this resistance is reflected in his ¡Movilizacion!  Poster, beautifully capturing a desperate need to recruit women for a vital part of the resistance as farmers to grow and harvest the crops that would feed the Republic. It was a vital effort repeated just a few years later in Second World War-torn Britain with the Women’s Land Army.

Didactic, instrumentalist, purpose-driven, yes, such art was all of those things. But at one and the same time, it was of the highest imaginable quality, beautiful on its own terms, not anyone else’s: drawn, painted, produced for the cause yet in its own unique way, not simply to serve as a necessary add-on. Such a dialectic, for want of a better word, was all too rare in the political culture of then, and now. In a word, or three to be precise, it shouldn’t be. ¡Viva Emeterio Melendreras! ¡Viva Ejercito Popular!

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Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ AKA Philosophy Football