A FAMED Catalan artist whose works mocked and satirised Hitler during the Second World War is having his finest illustrations go on display in Barcelona
The exhibition is a tribute to the cartoonist Mario Armengol, and details the illustrations he drew to ‘destroy Hitler graphically’, under instructions by the British Ministry of Information in 1940 as part of its propaganda war against the Third Reich and the Axis.
Entitled ‘Ink against Hitler’, the illustrations are on display at the Museu Nacional D’Art de Catalunya, and opened on October 8.
A very unknown figure up until now, Armengol was the only Catalan and Spanish artist known to collaborate massively in the propaganda of the Allies during the Second World War.
His drawings were widely distributed to help increase Allied morale and to minimise the Axis threat for civilians.
Up until the war’s end in 1945, Armengol drew around 2,000 cartoons against Hitler and his allies, which were published in newspapers around the world, from New Zealand to Chile. Some of his drawings were signed with his first name Mario, and others with his surname.
Armengol was the son of textile industrialists from Terrassa (Barcelona). In 1938, he enlisted in the French Legion and was sent to the Sahara and the Norwegian fjords of Narvik to limit German expansion towards the Atlantic.
In 1940, Churchill’s government hired him, despite the fact that he had never worked as a cartoonist until that point.
As a result he had to find his style quickly, and the Catalan graphic humour of other cartoon newspapers at the time such as En Patufet, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, Papitu and El Be Negre informed his work. Armengol died in Nottingham in 1995.
The exhibition was curated by Placid Garcia-Planas, the head of the International section of La Vanguardia, alongside Arnau Gonzalez i Vilalta, a historian who specialises in Catalan nationalism between 1931-1945 at the Universidad Autonoma Barcelona.
The exhibition will run until January 11, 2026.
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