¡No pasarán! (They shall not pass)
The Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, put the Republican government (leftists, socialists, communists, and anarchist unions) against Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces. During the war, posters became a dominant form of communication as they were cheap, fast, and readable at a glance during times when literacy wasn’t standard for everyone. Specifically, the Republican side produced a large number of innovative posters, made by unions and political organizations to be plastered anonymously across the city. This is where “No pasaran” (They shall not pass) became the slogan of the defense of Madrid and was associated with the leader and founder of the Spanish communist party, Dolores Ibárruri, “La Pasionaria.” At first glance, these posters used bold, flat color (usually contrasting reds, blacks, and yellows), diagonal compositions, sans-serif lettering, and photomontage, techniques borrowed from Soviet designers, French posters, and even the German photomontagist John Heartfield.
“No pasaran!” collapses the distance between design and citizenship, as it isn’t design made for a client ot a general market; it’s instead made to address the public as a public and turn the walls of the city into an argument about who the nation should belong to. The poster then positions viewers as people who can be moved to act, which can be read as political, as it assumes the passerby's role as a participant in the war's outcome. When considering that these posters were produced in a moment where there was no single “Spain,” that instead there were two Spains at war over the definition of their identity as a nation, design was one of the main weapons that could be used to hold that ground. What counts as “Spanish design” here depended entirely on which side you stood on, which complicates the idea of there being a unified national Spanish identity. A Republican poster and a Nationalist poster are both “Spanish,” but they define being Spanish in entirely different ways.
