"Now, more than ever, Victory!"
A flock of tiny green planes fly up in a V formation, bearing the red-yellow colors of the Republican Air Force on their wings. Superimposed over them is a begoggled pilot, drenched in matching red-yellow hues, his head thrown back in daring laughter. The words "Hoy mas que nunca" are written in a curvy red font in the upper right hand of the image across from him, leading into the contrastingly green and blocky declaration "Victoria", that word being capitalized by the formation of the planes themselves.
Such is the image depicted by Spanish artist Josep Renau in his 1938 propaganda poster Hoy Mas Que Nunca. Josep, who rose through the ranks of the Republican art scene even as it crumbled around him, was a life-long communist who described himself, in a wonderfully Marxist turn of phrase, not as a communist painter but "just a Communist that paints".
Hoy Mas Que Nunca is perhaps iconic of Renau's early work. It is clearly supportive of the Air Force, who had remained loyal to the Republican government following the rebellion of Francisco Franco in 1936 and throught the subsequent Spanish Civil War, probably because they were largely trained and supplied by the Soviet Union. The eyecatching aspects of the poster are strongly modernist in nature and reflect Renau's progressive (though always respectful) attitude towards art and graphic design, all of which was the guilty product of a youth spent designing award winning billboards in early 1930s. The careful composition of the poster also makes it a clear predecessor to Renau's later usage of photomontage, which he would use to create his absolutely searing Fata Morgana USA, a collection of surreal images which put the satirical screws to American culture in the 1970s.
Links:
-The Poster Itself
-Some Information About Renau