Stylogeny combining Spanish Bullfight Poster × Spanish Civil War Poster

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Style combination · Contrasts

Spanish Bullfight Poster × Spanish Civil War Poster

Josep Renau learned lithography at Ortega's Valencia works while a student; his generation traded the cartel's naturalistic brushwork and long programme for flat, foreshortened figures, diagonal slogans and photomontage.

From the research on Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino)

Mix them and make something Spanish Bullfight Poster Spanish Civil War Poster

TOGETHERSpanish Bullfight × Spanish Civil1879 · 1936
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Spanish Bullfight Poster, their arrangement from Spanish Civil War Poster, the finish from Spanish Bullfight Poster. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino) Spanish Civil War Poster

Type from Spanish Bullfight Poster
Colour from Spanish Civil War Poster
Form from Spanish Bullfight Poster
Composition from Spanish Civil War Poster
Surface from Spanish Bullfight Poster

02

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Spanish Bullfight Poster

Together

Anton, standing in for Mecana (even-stroke slab serif) and heavy condensed grotesque capitals for the matadors' names, printed in black, red or blue

Text · Spanish Civil War Poster

The poster war waged by the Spanish Republic, its unions and its anarchist, communist and socialist parties against Franco's uprising. Unionised commercial artists painted gouache designs that lithographers split onto three or four zinc plates, so foreshortened militiamen, peasants and fists burst from flat red-and-black fields under stacked hand-lettered slogans and party acronyms. Renau's photomontage, Deco polish, caricature and Miró's stencil coexisted.

Oswald; Spanish Civil War Poster used Hand-drawn condensed grotesque capitals and Brush-painted slogan lettering in Castilian and Catalan

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Spanish Civil War Poster, with a counter-accent from Spanish Bullfight Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino) Spanish Civil War Poster

  • #efe3c6 ground · 36%
  • #141414 ink · 14%
  • #f1b52f accent · 18%
  • #d1281f accent · 14%
  • #5f2b6b accent · 10%
  • #8f8256 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe3c6;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #f1b52f;
  --accent-2: #d1281f;
  --accent-3: #5f2b6b;
  --accent-4: #8f8256;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Oswald", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino): Bullfighting is a living but contested practice, opposed by animal-welfare campaigners in Spain and abroad, so borrowing its imagery for unrelated products brings that dispute with it; the painted manolas also belong to a folkloric picture of Andalusia rather than a record of it. Ruano Llopis (d. 1950), Roberto Domingo (d. 1956) and Juan Reus (d. 2003) are still in copyright in Spain, so paint new pictures in the manner rather than reprinting their motifs.

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The two styles

An ornate Spanish bullfighting poster shows a matador sweeping a red cape beside a charging black bull in a crowded arena, with historic buildings and mountains behind them. Large red and blue lettering, floral borders, and a smaller scene of mounted riders herding bulls surround the central painting. 1879–present · Southern Europe Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino) The Spanish bullfight poster in its illustrated form, from Marcelino de Unceta's lithographs (from 1879) to the Valencian house of Ortega, which supplied rings across Spain. From the 1910s the tall sheet, at its largest over two metres, usually splits in two: a brushy, naturalistic painting of a matador's pass, a picador or manolas in Manila shawls above, often under the ring's name, and below it a centred programme of date, bull breeders and matadors in mixed faces between rules, the names in heavy capitals. The picture was often a stock print, its text added afterwards by another printer. A painted propaganda-style poster shows a woman in a red headscarf looking upward, with a large foreshortened hand gripping a rifle in the foreground. Behind her are a yellow sun and ranks of armed figures carrying red, yellow and purple flags, beneath the large red word “AVANZA.” 1936–1939 · Southern Europe Spanish Civil War Poster The poster war waged by the Spanish Republic, its unions and its anarchist, communist and socialist parties against Franco's uprising. Unionised commercial artists painted gouache designs that lithographers split onto three or four zinc plates, so foreshortened militiamen, peasants and fists burst from flat red-and-black fields under stacked hand-lettered slogans and party acronyms. Renau's photomontage, Deco polish, caricature and Miró's stencil coexisted.

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