The covers of Novelas y Cuentos (Novels and Stories)
Behind the powerful personality of the Osborne Bull figure, designed by Manolo Prieto in 1956, was a striking body of work which was of particular relevance to graphic design in Spain: the covers which, for over 15 years, were produced for the weekly publication Novelas y Cuentos (Novels and Stories) between 1940 and 1957. The...
Partierra’s Book Covers
As I focused on the mysterious figure of Joaquín Pertierra I discovered the legacy of a restless graphic artist who, while faithful to his era, also looked towards the future and whose work brought more question marks to the surface as I uncovered it. An illustrator by profession and both elusive and sporadic, he developed...
Before Penguin
Edicions Proa, founded in 1928 in Badalona at a time of popular culture and athenaeums, is an exponent of the standard of Catalan publishing in the 1930s that came to the fore by way of an exhibition and the illustrated book: La propera festa del llibre serà de color taronja! Cinquanta anys del rellançament d’Edicions...
Jordi Blassi and the Cuenca Museum
In 1966 the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español (the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art) was opened in the Casas Colgadas (Hanging Houses), in Cuenca, exhibiting a collection of paintings and sculptures by Spanish artists associated with this movement that Fernando Zóbel had been amassing, by and large, in the preceding years. The museum opening represented...
Read the images of… Alberto Corazón
In 1973 the Alberto Corazón exhibition titled ” Read the image” took place at the College of Architects headquarters, Barcelona and in the Iolas Velasco Gallery, Madrid. Ferràn Cartes wrote in the college’s CAU magazine –one of the few examples of design and visual communication critique in Spanish publications (see previous post)– that “an image’s...
Kaleidoscope 4 Graphics
In 1965, Blume editions published a unique volume – a catalogue of an exhibition – bringing together the work of four “outstanding personalities of Spanish advertising graphic-art” of that time: Gervasio Gallardo, Ricard Giralt Miracle, Joan Pedragosa and Josep Pla-Narbona. With a foreword by Joan Teixidor, cover design and illustration by Pla-Narbona, and printing done...
We all wanted to be Diego Lara
Diego Lara was not strictly a Spanish graphic design pioneer although this definition could be attributed to him for many reasons. He is from a previous generation of designers to those who normally appear in this blog, Lara (Madrid, 1946-1990) employed his short but splendid repertoire of resources and good work in different areas that...
Riera Rojas pen and ink sketches
Given his range of exceptional skills and talents, it is perhaps ironic that nowadays Roc Riera Rojas is one of the least well-known of Spain’s graphic design pioneers, despite the fact that his work is familiar to several generations of Spaniards. As a graphic artist, illustrator and painter, or painter, illustrator and graphic artist, or...
“Cua de palla”: Jordi Fornas
From the Catalan expression ‘Qui té la cua de palla s’encén’ (roughly translated as ‘he who holds the end of the straw, burns’) comes the title of the noir crime series ‘La cua de palla’ (The end of the straw) from ‘Edicions 62’, one of the most striking examples of graphic modernism from the 1960’s...