This is a research work on female iconography in Republican propaganda of civil war. In particular, he analyzes a graphic prototype, that of tragic motherhood, the victim of bombing.
The study is the result of two diverse interests, which, combined with, allow us to detect a historiographic emptiness. The first interest is the attraction for the graphic propaganda of the civil war. The second, the admiration for the work of Catalan authors in the historiographical denunciation of a topic buried by the Franco regime, the attacks of national aviation against the republican civilian population.
When these two issues converge in the republican agitation of denouncing the raids, we make a triple confirmation. First, different means of expression (not just posters, but also documentary and fiction films, stamps, postcards, paintings, graphic and photographic illustrations of periodicals, pamphlets and print collections , the exhibitions) coincide in showing the impact of aerial bombardments, through the tragic scene of a maternal group at risk. Second, the respective specialists (students of the bombings, art historians, cinema) do not detect the predominance of this dramatic picture in their area of study. And if they do, they do not consider it relevant, they deserve a specific analysis. Third, there is no general interpretation (causes, global effects, gender effects) of this predominant and ubiquitous presence (multisectoral) of the graphic prototype of pathetic maternity.
The first part of the work explains why this vacuum has occurred. We present two combined explanations. One regarding the enthusiastic recovery of posters in the last thirty years has been the result of a certain ornamental and hagiographic tone; You must add indifference to the rest of the graphic forms of the agitator; and the lack of interest in iconography. We offer as an alternative the need to analyze the graphic prototypes from a triple renovating perspective. First of all, a gender approach is necessary. If in the advertising and propagandistic language female prototypes are used intensively, in the subgenre of the agitator we have chosen, there is a dominant icon (the tragic motherhood) that needs this gender reading.
Second, publicity must be applied to the category of cultural representations, because it is an analytical methodology that seeks to capture the social impact of messages in the formation of identities and behaviors (the result of the tension between official discourse, attitude of the various receiving groups and historical context). It is a category that reminds us that the speech of power does not guarantee an automatic response from the public (more if it operates in a context of defeat and disenchantment). And that allows us to distinguish between the immediate social effectiveness of propaganda (which we consider to be fundamental) and the aesthetic and ethical legacy in the long term (which is what current historiography prioritizes, in our opinion with presentist anachronism).
Third, it is convenient to introduce an international comparative perspective.
