Jay Robert Raven with his son Michael, April 8, 1945, Union Square, New York. The photo appears on the website of Raven's son Michael: www.mikeraven.com/

In the 1930s, Margaret Palmer was an American expat living in Spain, and working as a local agent for the Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art.  She also was in charge of the Spanish section of the Carnegie’s annual International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting from 1923-38.

In the “Archives of American Art Journal” (26:2-3, 1986)*, Garett McCoy published a selection of letters written by Palmer to Homer Saint-Gaudens, the head of the Carnegie Museum.  One letter, from September 27, 1937,  contains the following passage:

I must tell you, by the way, about the detour we made between Valencia and Madrid, in order to visit a hospital of the American Medical Service.  I was asked if I would care to speak with two or three of the wounded who were American volunteers in the International Brigades.  The first man I spoke to was sitting up in bed, with his eyes gone, and his face badly riddled by a hand-grenade that had exploded in his hand.  When I took his hand and spoke to him, he asked if I had come to Spain as a nurse.  I told him “no,” that I had come to get pictures for the International Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute.  He said “At Pittsburgh?” and when I answered “yes” his remnant of a face lighted up.  ”I haven’t missed that Exhibition for six years.”  (If I’m not mistaken, he’s a Pittsburgh boy and went to the Tech.)  ”Last year,” he went on, “you had a room of Solanas.  I was much impressed by those serious, tragic faces and when I came to Spain, I was able to understand Solana.  I too know a little about painting and bought a box of paints in France so that I could do some painting in Spain.  ”But now” –he ended in a tone of quiet acceptance, and without complaint, “I shall have to dedicate myself to my music.”

In a footnote, McCoy identifies the hospital patient as Lincoln volunteer Robert Raven, who as a wounded soldier in Spain also received another distinguished visitor:  Ernest Hemingway.

*This issue of the “Journal of the Archives of American Art” can be found in the ALBA Vertical File for “Palmer, Margaret” in the ALBA collection at Tamiment Library, New York University.

The great Spanish poet and playwright, Federico García Lorca visited New York between June of 1929 and March of 1930, and was an eye-witness to the Wall Street crash in October of ’29. Lorca’s writings about his time in New York are somewhat schizophrenic.  In the difficult and dark book of poems titled Poet in New York, Lorca presents the city as a strange and almost post-apocalyptic landscape, in which the singular, lonely, and out-of-place “poet” of the title comes across like an Old-testament prophet, denouncing the violence and rootlessness of the fallen city.  But the letters he sent from New York to his family in Granada are often upbeat and occasionally even bubbly; he speaks of how the city and its people impress him, and of the many friends he is making here.   He exaggerates his progress in learning English, in promoting his plays in the US, and in completing 3 new books of poems. Learning English and “making it” in New York seem to have been the main objectives of the parentally-sponsored trip of this 31-year old to New York; a fact that helps explain the obedient, cheerful and optimistic tone of many of the letters.  Lorca’s biographers have also established that Lorca came to New York to get away from a series of personal crises.

“Wearing Lorca’s Bowtie” shuttles back and forth between 1929 and 2011, and between giddiness and despair, in a series of vignettes or numbers  –a structure reminiscent of the kinds of variety shows Lorca may well have seen when he was in New York.  By turns playful and gloomy, upbeat and troubling, the play links Lorca’s denunciations of Wall Street with the mic-checked testimonies of Zucotti Park, just as it connects the great poet’s reflections on family, belonging and desire with those of young creative Spaniards in New York today, like the remarkably talented ones who have produced and performed “Wearing Lorca’s Bowtie.”

In this piece, Lorca’s moebius strip-like bowtie becomes a kind of talisman, or magical garment.  The “pajarita”  (a bowtie is a “little bird” in Spanish) is what binds and conflates the two moments (then and now) and the two visions (dark and bright).  Like an artistic vocation, like the plight of all those who have left home, Lorca’s bowtie, the play suggests, is both a blessing and a curse for anyone who dares to don it:  both an adornment of performed sociability and, at the same time, a noose of creative solitude.

“Wearing Lorca’s Bowtie” runs through Saturday, December 17 at the Duke Theater on 42nd Street, 229 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; (646) 223-3010, new42.org.

Bombing victim in Lleida, November 1937. Spain, Ministry of Culture, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Archivo Centelle

Agustí Centelles (1909-1985) is one of the most important photojournalists of the Spanish Civil War, and his work should be studied alongside that of Robert Capa, David Seymour, Gerda Taro, Hans Namuth, and Georg Reisner. This much is clear in the wake of the successful exhibit Centelles in_edit_¡oh!, which has been on show at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center since October, and the symposium dedicated to Centelles’s work that was held at the same location this past November 30. The symposium, which gathered six experts in the Spanish Civil War and the history of photography and drew a full house, addressed the use of Centelles’s work in the Republican propaganda effort; the significance of Centelles’s heroic efforts to preserve his archive in exile; the powerful and exceptional nature of his concentration camp photographs; and the relationship between his work and that of Capa. (For more details, see the symposium program below.)

The Centelles exhibit, co-sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), was curated by Joaquín Gasca and NYU’s Michael Nash, director of the Tamiment Library, in collaboration with María José Turrión, former director of the Center for Historical Memory in Salamanca. It showcased forty prints, some of which had never been exhibited in the United States before, and was accompanied by a display at the Tamiment of journals and magazines in which Centelles’s photographs were published. The Tamiment Library is also home to the archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—one of the world’s largest collections related to the participation of foreign volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. The exhibit catalog has been edited by Joaquín Gasca.

The Centelles show (video) is the most recent of a long series of successful photography exhibits* hosted at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, including four exhibitions which resonate strongly with the Centelles show:  Walter Rosenblum’s Spanish Civil War refugee photographs; The Aura of the Cause: Photographs of the Spanish Civil War; Richard Bermack’s Frontlines of Social Change:  Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; and Ione Robinson’s La Retirada:  The Spanish Republican Diaspora, among others.  Although the KJC I of Spain Center is a university cultural center and not a gallery or museum, it was a particularly appropriate venue for the Centelles exhibition—not only because of these and other shows, but also because of the presence on the NYU campus of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive.

All of these exhibitions, like that of Centelles, have been accompanied by parallel pedagogical initiatives and public outreach programs at the university, which aim to “frame” photographs not only as autonomous aesthetic objects as many galleries and museums might do, but as images that circulated in a variety of ways, and as windows on to a wider history.  Because of the location of the exhibition—in the public atrium of NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center—Centelles’s work has been viewed and appreciated not only by the many visitors who came for the sole purpose of seeing it, but also by the hundreds of students, professors and members of the general public who came to the building for other reasons.  Several university classes incorporated the Centelles exhibition into their curricula; and a group of 80 New York City high school teachers were introduced to the work of Centelles during an ALBA workshop held at the Center.

*Other photography exhibitions held at the KJC I of Spain Center include:  José Antonio Robé’s Manhattan:  Cita con Lorca; Kike Calvo’s Habitat; Paula Allen’s  Flowers in the Desert: Women of Calama Searching for the Chilean Disappeared; Zoraida Díaz’s Los sitios de Colombia; Maya Goded’s Neighborhood of Solitude:  Prostitutes of Mexico City; Gilles Larrain’s Paisajes del alma flamenca; and La colonia:  A photo album of Spanish immigrants in New York, 1898 – 1945” curated by James D. Fernández.

The Spanish Civil War Photographs of Agustí Centelles

A Symposium

Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 6:00 p.m.

PROGRAM

Welcome

*

Jordana Mendelson (NYU)

“Visions de guerra i de reraguarda: Agustí Centelles and the Catalan Press during the Spanish Civil War”

*

Juan Salas (NYU)

“Hidden Photographs and the Weight of the Archive”

*

Sebastiaan Faber (Oberlin College, ALBA)

“What’s a Picture Worth?  Centelles vs. Capa”

*

José María Naharro-Calderón (Univ. of Maryland)

“Despite the Barbed Wires: Framing the Retirada”

*

Moderator: James D. Fernández (NYU, ALBA)

*

Respondent: Susie Linfield (NYU)

Agustí Centelles i Ossó (1909–1985) helped reinvent Spanish photojournalism in the 1930s. One of the first photographers to use the hand-held 35mm Leica, Centelles roamed Barcelona looking for unusual angles on unusual stories. By the time the Civil War broke out he was a sought-after graphic reporter whose work was published in major newspapers and magazines. After covering the first days of fighting in Barcelona as a freelancer, he was called up for the army, serving first as graphic war correspondent supplying the Catalan Comissariat de Propaganda and other government agencies, and later heading up the Photographic Cabinet of the Republican intelligence agency (SIM). In January 1939 he went into exile, carrying a suitcase holding thousands of negatives from his archive. He spent seven months in concentration camps at Argelès-sur-Mer and Bram, worked for the French Resistance, and returned to Spain in 1944, leaving behind his archive, which by now also contained hundreds of images from the camp. Barred by the Franco regime from journalism, Centelles worked as an industrial and advertising photographer until Franco’s death. After he was able to recuperatie his archive from France, his work began to be publicized and internationally recognized.

Jordana Mendelson is a an author and curator who serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature at New York University. Among her publications are Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929–1939 (2005) and Revistas y Guerra 1936-1939/Magazines and War 1936-1939 (2007).

Juan Salas is a scholar of visual studies and an independent curator of photography. In 2009, he discovered With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, a long-lost Spanish Civil War film by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline.

Sebastiaan Faber is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College and Chair of the Board of Governors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA). He is the author of Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939-1975 (2002) and Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War: Hispanophilia, Commitment, and Discipline (2008).

José María Naharro-Calderón is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, where he teaches Spanish contemporary literature, culture, exile studies, and film studies. He is the author of Entre el exilio y el interior. El “Entresiglo” y Juan Ramón Jiménez (1994) and has published editions of major works by Max Aub and Celso Amieva.

Susie Linfield is director of NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program and writes about culture and politics for a variety of publications. Her most recent book is The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (2010).

James D. Fernández is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature at New York University and Associate Chair of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. He is the author of Apology to Apostrophe: Autobiography and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation in Spain (1994) and co-curator of Facing Fascim: New York and the Spanish Civil War (2007).

The books have been published by the Biblioteca Afro Americana de Madrid (BAAM), a new initiative founded by the  writer and photographer, Mireía Sentís.  With the Yates and Hughes books, Sentís launches a project which plans to publish two books a year about Afro-American issues.  BAAM will also inaugurate a reference library on the subject in the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés, the emblem of  the remarkable racial, ethnic and cultural diversification which, over the last twenty years, has transformed Madrid and Spain.

Alfonso Domingo directed the documentary “Souls Without Borders:  The Abraham Lincoln Brigade” (with Tony Geist and Miguel Angel Nieto), and he is now working with Sentís on a feature length documentary about Jimmy Yates.  Stay tuned.

Though the article in the Independent was published before any response from the Partido Popular (which on 20 November 2011 was voted into power with an absolute majority in Parliament), the papers in Spain today are quoting PP spokesperson, González Pons as saying that the new government would “put the report aside” since the main problem Spain faces today “is unemployment, not Franco.”

Of particular interest is the short newsreel “Norteamérica en España,” titled in English “Congressmen in Spain.”

The footage can be browsed and viewed here.

These are the first thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the video of UC Davis police officer John Pike pepper-spraying a group of peaceful college students as if they were so many cockroaches.  These are the thoughts that returned as I heard the equivocating reactions of the Chancellor of UC Davis, and as I read many comments posted on the video and on news items about Pike’s brutality that actually defended his actions.   Is it fascism yet?

New Pellagra Cure to Madrid

Thirty-nine of America’s leading scientists, incuding three Nobel Laureates and thirteen members of the National Academy of Sciences, joined last week in sending to pellagra victims in Madrid a special gift of twenty-five pounds of nicotinic acid, the newly discovered cure for the dread disease.

Accompanying the gift, which is on board the American Relief Ship now at sea with food and relief supplies for Republican Spain, was a message from the donors addressed to Dr. Juan Negrín, the Spanish Prime Minister who is also Professor of Physiology at the University of Madrid.

“It is hoped that this small shipment of nicotinic acid will aid in curing the thousands of cases of pellagra in your country,” says the message of the donors, including Nobel laureates Dr. Albert Einstein, Dr. William Parry Murphy and Dr. Harold C. Urey.  ”Only very minute amounts of this chemical are required for the relief of this age-old disease.  In fact the 270,000 doses in this twenty-six pound shipment are worth only a few hundred dollars –less than the cost of a single bomb that falls on Madrid…”

ALBA, 282, Serials, Box 10, Folder 1.

To assuage my conscience, I’ve drawn up a list of reasons why all students of the Spanish Civil War and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade should watch and analyze the film.

*the film was shot in color; these are the only images in color I have ever seen of the war in Spain.

*Defenders of the Faith provides a unique perspective from which to view the repertoire of pro-Republican documentaries made during the war.  There are scenes (on blood transfusions, for example) that seem to be overt responses to –or copies of—similar scenes in films made by the other side.

*Defenders of the Faith is addressed, implicitly at least, to a US audience, and was apparently made to counter the pro-Republican propaganda that was circulating in the US at the time.  The film gives us insight into what pro-Republican information/propaganda was considered most worrisome by Franco’s supporters.  For example:

*on the question of Franco’s ideology:

the narrator likens the post-war ambitions of Franco to something akin to Roosevelt’s New Deal, but “without the class hatred.”  (I can’t cite verbatim the original narration, as the version I have on DVD was broadcast on Spanish television with the narration dubbed into Spanish.)

*on the question of foreign participation in the war:  At the beginning of a long sequence about Francoist aviation (which includes some incredible footage shot from a warplane), Palmer remarks, offhandedly, that because Spain does not have airplane factories, all planes in the Spanish Civil War are imported.  He then visits a detachment of Francoist airmen, affirming that all of the pilots and flight-crew the are “pure thoroughbred Spaniards.”  Elsewhere in the film, he explains that the “Foreign Legion” is made up of Spaniards –clarifying that they are known as “foreign” because they fight in foreign wars.  So the role of Germans and Italians on the Francoist side is minimized.  The film, nonetheless, does give considerable prominence to Franco’s “Moorish volunteers”; we see them marching and convalescing in a special hospital where, we are told, they can be treated according to their own customs; we learn that the ”moors” are remarkably efficient and reliable soldiers, and that they consider the pro-Republican forces as “infidels” because they desecrated Christian churches (¡!).

In one of the most chilling scenes of the documentary, the camera lingers over the racially and ethnically diverse faces of a group of captured American volunteers.  What I find most remarkable in this scene is how the narrator basically shuts up, allowing the images “to speak for themselves,” affirming, more or less  “These are the faces (predominantly faces with Black and Asian features) of the kinds of people that are currently in Spain fighting against Franco.”  No commentary is needed.  We know from their testimonies how many African-American volunteers saw the struggle in Spain as part-and-parcel of the fight against racism in the US; this quick scene in Palmer’s film gives us access to the despicable flip-side of this connection; it’s enough to see the faces of these men to know that they are on the wrong side…

My Dear Mr. Ureña:

I have written to you today a personal note requesting information confirming or correcting reports concerning the death of an American citizen serving with the Government forces.  I receive a fairly large number of letters from mothers and fathers inquiring about sons who are understood to be fighting in Spain, and as I have as a rule but the most meagre information on the subject, I usually am not able to make a suitable reply.

Would you therefore, when taking up with the Military authorities the specific case I have mentioned (that of Arthur John Lenthier) at the same time request them to furnish a list of Americans citizens whose deaths have been recorded?  I assume that for military reasons those authorities might not wish to furnish a list of the names of all Americans serving with the Government forces –but I assume that there would be no objection to furnishing the list I have requested.

Again assuring you of my great appreciation, I am, my dear Mr. Ureña, Cordially and sincerely yours,

Walter C. Thurston