La Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR): Prints against Fascism, 1934–1938

Bay ByrneSim

A dead child, framed by an array of bombers, stares up from the March 1937 cover of Frente a Frente, the journal of Mexican artists’ collective Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, LEAR). “What Europe tolerates or protects is what your children can expect,” the caption threatens.1 The dark eyes, unruly curls, and small gleam of a milk tooth inspire pathos at once complicated and intensified by the anonymity of the numerical identificatory tag. 2 This small, anonymous victim of the Spanish Civil War bombings first confronted viewers as one of many murdered children in a poster produced in Valencia, then became the central figure in a pair of photomontage posters published for Englishand French-speaking audiences. 3 These posters explicate through montage: bombs killed this child. As the aggressive title of their magazine promises, the LEAR appropriated this photomontage to bring readers face to face with fascist violence.4

LEAR artists worked with gouges, scissors, and cameras to create and disseminate prints that localized anti-fascism. They fought fascism as part of a transnational leftist coalition. The 1934 manifesto appears under a section of news from around the world. 5 Members participated in international congresses, corresponded with other organizations, and distributed Frente a Frente abroad.6 LEAR’s artworks lambast not only local fascist organization Acción Revolucionaria Mexicanista (Revolutionary Mexicanist Action, ARM) but also Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in media ranging from photomontage to relief carvings. The majority of LEAR scholarship considers media separately. Woodcut is valorized as a direct, expressive medium, characterized as in conflict with photography and photomontage.7 Yet all were printed in the pages of Frente a Frente as relief prints: locked into the bed of the press, inked, and printed together.8 Considering the LEAR’s antifascist art as an oeuvre reveals a set of interdependent formal strategies of appropriation, composition, incision, indexicality, and reversals.

Como pretenden (As they pretend, p. 261), a broadsheet illustrated by Leopoldo Méndez, describes a fascist attack on protestors at the Santo Domingo Plaza on March 2, 1935.9 In the print, members of ARM attack two workers.10

The subheading prioritizes victims—“the working people”—over perpetrators. Méndez gives the majority of his print to the workers and their banner. He crowds the ARM vigilantes into the left corner and uses the edge of the plate to prune their weapons. The gun, though at the center of the image, is almost lost in the mob’s confused tangle. The fascists’ faces are hidden, indistinct, and exaggerated, while the bare heads of the workers accentuate stoic features. Méndez uses thin, scratched lines for the attackers and the background. The heroic protestors are modeled with clean, bold lines. Méndez carves a deep gouge around the standing worker’s head and fist to create a stark black-and-white contrast that draws attention to his humanity just as he is shot. In carved relief prints, the artist works the most on the areas that print as blanks. Negative space indexes labor. Through composition, line differentiation, and careful use of negative space, Méndez emphasizes the humanity of the victims, a set of aesthetic choices that would also impact the LEAR’s photomontages.

The May 1936 issue of Frente a Frente presents a photomontage in which Hitler, Mussolini, and former Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles loom over a worker.

LEAR member Manuel Álvarez

Bravo photographed the murdered man in 1934.11 In the montage, his body comes to represent victims of government-sponsored violence, just as the child’s body symbolized bombing fatalities. The white space of the page cradles the worker’s silhouetted profile, similar to Méndez’s strategy in Como pretenden. In contrast, the photographs of the leaders are irregularly cut: the image avoids contact with their faces, dividing them from one another, the worker, and the background. This distinct strategy of incision foregrounds the worker’s humanity. From carving tools to scissors, LEAR artists freighted their incisions with meaning. In the same issue, Méndez created a print to accompany a satirical account about ARM. Two workers, wielding a saber and a hammer, defend themselves against growling, snarling fascists. Méndez stacks the fascists along the edges and compresses their undefined bodies in a shallow space. The workers stand firm in a more illusionistic space. He offers a rebuttal to the cover—the workers loom over Hitler, ready to avenge their fallen comrade. The photograph of two ARM members in conversation, situated above a mocking caption, near a print that manifests ARM brutality, divorces the image from its intended purpose.12 Either man might open his mouth to reveal fangs.

The issue illustrates the fascist presence in Mexico City through photomontages that import Hitler to the Via Madero. Hitler salutes an ARM parade marching under a banner proclaiming their autarkic, xenophobic slogan “Mexico for the Mexicans.”13 Again, the paste-up-artist’s scissors avoid close contact with Hitler, emphasizing not his bodily presence in Mexico but ideological congruence and, perhaps, control. ARM’s Mexico would be Hitler’s Mexico. The issue’s center spread links German institutions in Mexico, antiSemitic propaganda, rival publications, riots between the ARM and leftist protestors, and other fascist infiltrations.14 This is a different type of photomontage—not illusionistic or surreal but diagrammatic. Assembled from newspaper clippings, photographs, and other papers, the collage was then photographed to be reproduced as a halftone relief print. Recent events and recognizable buildings are defamiliarized. The LEAR’s photomontages lay bare their constructed nature yet retain an aspect of photographic reportage to articulate previously invisible or unrealized relationships.

The LEAR’s appropriation practices often reveal their transnational commitments, as in the photomontage with which this essay began. The July 1936 issue brings together two appropriated photomontages. The montage on the lower left arrived in Mexico from Germany through Spain. In her work on Josep Renau, Cristina Cuevas-Wolf describes how the artist modified a montage created by German artist John Heartfield in 1932; Renau replaced the scrawled German with a Spanish caption (“Hitler: the new messiah of capitalism”) and added photographs of Hitler, corpses, and gas-masked soldiers, who aim a Gatling gun at the viewer.15 From one magazine page to another, this type of supplemental appropriation was common.16 On this cover, the LEAR adopted a different method, shrinking two photomontages in order to juxtapose them. A Gustav Klutsis poster (1931) challenges the Heartfield-Renau.17 The powerful, anti-racist Soviet worker defeats capitalist fascism. Historically, this gesture might have read as a recognition of genius—the transmission of images indexing the influence of European modernism on the Global South. But the LEAR transforms both scale and surroundings, fitting the montages into the LEAR’s matrix. This is not photomechanical reproduction. This is printerly appropriation. Each photographic image is locked into place, separated by the metal spacers that print as voids, preserving the distance between the visions of the violent present and idealistic future. In translucent red, “Frente a Frente ” hovers above the appropriated artworks, bridging the gap and bringing those two visions face to face. Marginalizing the group’s photomontages provincializes the LEAR’s politics— the group considered itself part of a transnational antifascist coalition.

The final issue of Frente a Frente defies the narrative that the defection of several printmakers, including Méndez, to form the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) in 1937 precipitated an abandonment of direct prints and a retreat to photography.18

For the cover, Lola Álvarez Bravo created a photomontage of a statue shattering a swastikamarked column. This is the only photomontage in Frente a Frente credited to a Mexican artist. Álvarez Bravo first published photomontages in a government-sponsored teaching magazine in 1935 while a staff photographer; unlike many photomonteurs, she primarily created montages from her own negatives.19 As in the photomontage with which this essay began, a figure rises against a clouded sky. The statue crushes the column, evoking Pere Català i Pic’s Aixafem el feixisme (Let’s crush fascism), but Bravo’s choice of a statue, rising on a modernist geometric pedestal above vertiginous modern skyscrapers, conjures a future in which this monument commemorates the defeat of Nazism—a distant dream in January 1938. 20 On the penultimate page, accompanying an article on global anti-fascism, a woodcut depicts protestors. The roughly carved workers jostle one another in the shallow space. Their raised fists echo the statue’s. Industrial architecture crowds both backgrounds. The woodcut and photomontage ground the central figure in illusionistic space, reduce enemies to symbols and the margins, and deploy a disjointed approach to composition.

LEAR artists worked to inspire workers to oppose local and global fascism. Their engagement with multiple media had a lasting influence on Mexican art. One of the TGP’s greatest works

El libro negro del terror nazi en Europa (The black book of Nazi terror in Europe), produced in 1943 when anti-fascism had become a national endeavor—mixed manual and photographic prints to document fascist atrocities. The LEAR’s rejection of a singular style or medium recalls the 1934 manifesto, in which the organization had only one membership requirement: to support and promote the proletarian struggle against capitalism and its inevitable consequences of fascism, imperialism, and war. 21 “Adelante,” the woodcut banner urges—go forth and fight.

1. “Lo que Europa tolera o protege lo que a vuestros hijos puede esperar.” LEAR, Frente a Frente: Órgano central de la Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios 2, no. 8 (March 1937): cover.

2. The child’s identity remains unknown. See Imogen Bloomfield, “Photographs of Child Victims in Propaganda Posters of the Spanish Civil War,” Modern Languages Open, no. 1 (2018): 9.

3. Rafael Pérez Contel and Aliança d’Intel·lectuals Antifeixistes per a la Defensa de la Cultura, ¡¡Asesinos!! ¿Quién al ver esto, no empuña un fusil para aplastar al fascismo destructor? (ca. 1936–1937), offset lithograph, 100 × 77 cm, Valencia: Gráficas Valencia, U.G.T.-C.N.T. See also Bloomfield, “Photographs of Child Victims,” 9–12.

4. “Frente a Frente” also evokes the ideology of “class against class” adopted at the 6th World Congress of the Comintern. LEAR, “Editorial,” Frente a Frente, no. 1 (November 1934): 5. See also Alicia Azuela, “El Machete and Frente a Frente: Art Committed to Social Justice in Mexico,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 86.

5. “Síntesis de los principios declarativos de la LEAR” and “EN EL MUNDO PASA ESTO,” Frente a Frente, no. 1 (November 1934): 3; Helga Prignitz, TGP, ein Grafiker-Kollektiv in Mexico von 1937–1977 (Berlin: R. Seitz, 1981), 38–41, 46–47; Deborah Caplow, Leopoldo Méndez: Revolutionary Art and the Mexican Print (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 107–8, 117–20; and Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas, “La Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios: Una producción artística comprometida” (PhD diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995), 62–76.

6. Fuentes Rojas, “La Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios,” 2–19,

62–76; Sureya Alejandra Hernández del Villar, “‘Frente a Frente’: La revista como herramienta de lucha,” Reflexiones marginales 41 (2017); John Lear, Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 183–84; and Stephanie J. Smith, The Power and Politics of Art in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 153–54.

7. All issues of Frente a Frente contain photographs. During the first epoch, the cover of the third issue (May 1935) was a photomontage. Azuela, “El Machete and Frente a Frente,” 86; Francisco Reyes Palma, “La LEAR y su revista de frente cultural,” in Frente a Frente, 1934–1938, Edición facsimilar (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios del Movimiento Obrero y Socialista, 1994), 16; and Carlos Alberto Sampaio Barbosa, “A revista mexicana Frente a Frente: Ambiguidades e tensões entre fotomontagens vanguardistas e gravuras,” Artelogie, no. 7 (2015): 14.

8. Frente a Frente demonstrates a variety of relief processes, from letterpress (type) to relief halftone (including photographs, photomontages, and prints captioned as “lithographs”), while the wood engravings, woodcuts, linocuts, and other line blocks appear to be printed directly from blocks.

9. Deborah Caplow, “Leopoldo Méndez: A Revolutionary Spirit in Art,” in El Taller de Gráfica Popular: Vida y arte (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2015), 107.

10. Reyes Palma, “La LEAR y su revista de frente cultural,” 5; Hugh G. Campbell, La derecha radical en México, 1929–1949, SepSetentas 276 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1976), 51; and John W. Sherman, The Mexican Right: The End of Revolutionary Reform, 1929–1940 (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997), 55–62.

11. Striking Worker Murdered (1934) was also printed in Frente a Frente 2, no. 2 (March 1936); Azuela, “El Machete and Frente a Frente,” 86; and Caplow, Leopoldo Méndez, 116.

12. “Nicolás Rodríguez y uno de sus mozos de estoques, cual Mussolini criollo, se retrata sobre la plaza de armas de México, proyectando la implantación del paraíso ‘dorado.’” (Nicolás Rodríguez, like a creole Mussolini, and one of his bullfighter’s assistants, is depicted on the Zócalo planning the implementation of the ‘Dorado’ [gold] paradise.) Members of ARM were also known as “Dorados” for their gold shirts, adopted in homage to Pancho Villa’s elite soldiers. See Campbell, La derecha radical en México, 51; and Sherman, The Mexican Right, 55–62.

13. Sherman, The Mexican Right, 55.

14. Reyes Palma, “La LEAR y su revista de frente cultural,” 11.

15. John Heartfield, “In diesem Zeichen will man euch verraten und verkaufen” [In this sign you will be betrayed and sold!], Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, July 3, 1932, 627; Josep Renau, [untitled photomontage], Orto, March 1933, facing page 16; and Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, “John Heartfield’s Thälmann Montages: The Politics behind Images of International Antifascism,” New German Critique 44, no. 2 (131) (2017): 199–200.

16. The LEAR also engaged in this type of appropriation: Frente a Frente 2, no. 7 (January 1937) reproduces Heartfield’s Madrid 1936: No Pasarán, Pasaremos, a photomontage published in Volks-Illustrierte 1, no. 15 (1936): 240.

17. John Lear, Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico,

1908–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 201.

18. Azuela, “El Machete and Frente a Frente,” 86; and Caplow, “Leopoldo Méndez: A Revolutionary Spirit in Art,” 116.

19. Her work for El maestro rural (The rural teacher) has not received extensive scholarship. See Deborah Dorotinsky, “El Maestro Rural and the Photographic Education of Mexicans,” in Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era, ed. James Oles (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2012), 144–45; and Johanna Spanke, “The Photomontages of Lola Álvarez Bravo,” in ibid., 138–39.

20. Cristóbal Andrés Jácome identifies the building as La Nacional (1932), a modernist skyscraper in Mexico City designed by Manuel Ortiz Monasterio. See Cristóbal Andrés Jácome, “Model Kit Architecture,” in Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era, 140. But the montage includes another building in the lower left corner: the Centro Escolar “Revolución,” a school Bravo photographed for the September 1936 issue of El maestro rural (9, no. 4), for which she also created a montaged cover with her photographs.

21. LEAR, “Síntesis de los principios declarativos de la LEAR,” Frente a Frente, no. 1 (November 1934): 3.