Georges and Josep. Georges Bartolí Archive.

“If Spain became a Republic once again,

we’d have lost the war a little less.”
Georges Bartolí
Remembers His Uncle Josep

By Sebastiaan Faber

Among the hundreds of thousands of Spanish refugees who ended up in French concentration
camps was the graphic artist Josep Bartolí, who would later become a well-known artist in
Mexico and New York. His dramatic drawings of the Civil War and life in the camps are featured
in a new book by his nephew, the French photographer Georges Bartolí. A feature-length film
of Josep’s life will be premiered at Cannes this fall. An interview.

O
ne morning in 1971,
Georges Bartolí woke up more
excited than usual. The day
had finally come; he was going to meet
Josep, his legendary American uncle.
Georges, 14, lived with his parents, Cat-
alan Republican refugees, in Perpignan,
in the south of France. Josep Bartolí was
visiting them from New York, where
he had been a renowned illustrator and
painter for a quarter of a century.
“An uncle from America! I imagined
him in a Stetson hat, cowboy boots
and spurs,” Georges recalled when I
spoke with him this past July. Alas,
reality did not live up to the teenager’s
imagination. “He was a short man who
appeared to be in his early sixties—
which he was—and who looked like my
father’s brother—which he was, too.”
Still, despite the momentary disap-
pointment, uncle and nephew soon hit
it off: “I immediately took a liking to
his way of speaking. He was a man of
a pure and hard intelligence who spoke
with the same irony that he deployed
in his graphic work. It’s as if he were
always drawing, even when he talked.”
The reunion was an emotional one:
Georges’ father, Salvador, had not seen
his brother since 1939.
Josep Bartolí i Guiu was born in 1910
in Barcelona. He lost his mother young;
his father was a musician. The National-
ist coup of the summer of 1936 finds
Josep in the Catalan capital, working
as a newspaper illustrator. Although he
sympathizes with the POUM, which
leans Trotskyist, he helps found the
Professional Illustrators’ Union of Cata-

September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 7


lonia, which affiliates with the Socialist
UGT. He spends the three years of the
war working for the union, fighting at
the front—in Aragon, he serves along-
side Ramón Mercader in a unit of the
Catalan Communist Party (PSUC) led
by Ramón’s mother, Caridad—and in
the hospital, recovering from his front-
line injuries. In early 1939, together
with half a million Spanish refugees,
he crosses the French border and is
interned in a concentration camp. Be-
tween various arrests and escapes, Josep
passes through the camps of Argelès,
Saint Ciprien, Bram and Barcarès. The
Nazi invasion finds him living and hid-
ing in Paris. Miraculously, he manages
to arrange for boat passage that, via
Casablanca, takes him to Mexico.
In Mexico City, Josep joins the Republi-
can exile community—some 20,000—
picks up illustration gigs and is adopted
into the circle of Diego Rivera and Frida
Kahlo. In 1944, he publishes the scores
of heart-wrenching pen drawings he’d
made in the camps, in a book co-edited
with his friend Narcís Molins. Channel-
ing Dürer, Goya, and the avant-garde,
Bartolí resorts to caricature to capture
the tragedy, misery, and bitter irony
of the Republican defeat. His images
overflow with anger at the inhumane
treatment of Spanish refugees—skeletal
and saint-like—by fat, lascivious French
gendarmes.
Two years later, Bartolí moves to New
York City, where he joins a group of
abstract expressionists that includes
Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and
Willem De Kooning. For several years,
he carries on an intense love affair
with Frida Kahlo, whom he had met
in Mexico and who passes through
the city for her medical treatments.
(Twenty-five of Kahlo’s love letters to
Bartolí were sold at auction five years
ago.) While working on his painting,
he earns his living as a cartoonist and
designing sets for Hollywood—until
he ends up on the blacklist, a stigma he
shares with Lincoln vet Alvah Bessie. In
New York, he illustrates ads for luxury
products and works for magazines like
The Saturday Evening Post and Holiday, a
luxury travel monthly. In 1951, Holiday
8 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020
Josep Bartolí © Actes Sud (2009) - El Mono Libre (2020)
features four pages of his artistic impres-
sions of Franco’s Spain. “José Bartolí,
who has revisited his native country
with a notebook and pencil, captures its
tragic grace in street scenes and national
types,” an editorial note states. The im-
ages include a view of Barcelona, which,
according to the caption, has “repaired
its scars from the Civil War.”
In fact, Barcelona had not erased its
scars—nor had Josep set foot in Franco’s
Spain. He didn’t cross the border again
Josep Bartolí © Actes Sud (2009) - El Mono Libre (2020)
until 1977, two years after Franco’s
death, following another extended stay
with his brother’s family in Perpignan.
By then, Georges Bartolí had turned
20 and had embarked on what would
become his profession, photography.
(Today he is a well-known photojour-
nalist for L’Humanité and other venues).
“At that time, Josep was preparing an
exhibition,” Georges recalls. “He’d set
up a workshop of sorts next to my dark-
room. We lived together for more than
a year. We smoked and argued every
day. I was a member of the Communist
Party. My uncle, who like the rest of the
family was more of an anarchist, wasn’t
happy about that, to put it mildly.”
Josep never returned to Europe for
good; he died in New York in 1995. In
2009, Georges paid tribute to his uncle
with La Retirada: Exode et exil des répub-
licains, a book published in French that,
in addition to an anthology of drawings
of the war and the camps, included a
series of short memoirs by Georges. It
closed with a photographic record of
Georges’s retracing the route his parents
and uncles took 70 years earlier, from
the front to Barcelona, through Port-
Bou, to the beaches of Argelès-sur-Mer.
The updated Spanish translation La
Retirada was published this summer.
In France, meanwhile, the well-known
cartoonist Aurel has made a biographi-
cal feature film about Josep Bartolí that
will be part of the official selection at
the Cannes festival this fall.
Your uncle, a Catalan, was born Span-
ish, but became a Mexican and Ameri-
can citizen. As the son of refugees, how
do you deal with the issue of national
identity?
I’m French. My sisters and I were born
Spanish, but French law allowed us to
be nationalized. My dad didn’t want to;
he was convinced that we’d be going
back to Spain soon. At that point my
mother, who was smarter than him,
asked him: “So you want your son to
be drafted for Franco’s military?” That
convinced him.
Josep Bartolí © Actes Sud (2009) - El Mono Libre (2020)

September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 9

Do you feel French, Catalan, Spanish?
I feel many things, but they comple-
ment each other. I know I owe a lot to
France. No matter how badly it received
my parents, the country protected
us, educated us, made us who we are.
I wholly accept my French identity.
My passport is French. But I also feel
Catalan. Most of my Catalan fam-
ily is pro-independence. Of my three
identities, what I feel least strongly is
Spanish. Still, as the son and grandson
of Spaniards, I have the right to Spanish
nationality. If I applied for a passport,
they’d have to grant me it.
But you’ve never applied for one.
No, because even before being French,
Catalan or Spanish, I am a Republi-
can. And I will not apply for Spanish
nationality as long as Spain remains a
monarchy, heir to the Franco regime. I
refuse to be a subject to a king who was
placed on the throne by Franco.
And if Catalonia were to become inde-
pendent?
In that case, within 24 hours you’d see
me in the Catalan village closest to the
border to request a passport. (Laughs.)
About Spain, you write in the book: “If
the Republic returns one day, we will
have lost the war a little less.”
Today’s Spain is obviously not Franco’s
Spain. But I still see a lot of residual
Francoism: in the political world, the
armed forces, the judiciary, general
mentalities and, as I said, in the Mon-
archy. The famous Transition erased us
from history. My parents and all the
exiles—who never had a real existence,
by the way, because exile is the denial
of what you are—were sacrificed for the
sake of national reconciliation. The only
way to rehabilitate us a little would be if
the monarchy fell.
Your mother, who was a teenager when
she crossed the border, wanted to be a
medical doctor. “She was not destined to
be a housewife or a shopkeeper in Per-
pignan,” you write; “That is her broken
dream of the Republic. I am the child of
the broken dream.” Is the desire for re-
10 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020
habilitation primarily sentimental and
family related, or primarily political?
It’s one hundred percent political. If I
talk about my family it’s because that’s
what I know. But when I do, I’m refer-
ring to the half a million Spaniards who
were erased from history. I was simply
lucky enough to know my family, to
have my family assume their Republican
legacy, and to have an uncle who was
able to capture that history in his work.
Speaking of erasures, the French Repub-
lic has also had a hard time coming to
terms with the past. A lot was covered
up for a long time. I am referring not
only to the infamous collaboration of
Vichy, but also to the concentration
camps that your family lived through,
or the leading role played by the Spanish
Republicans in the resistance against the
Nazis. In France too, acknowledging
those chapters of the national past has
been a slow, partial and contradictory
process. As you write in the book, for
example, it was ironically a right-wing
president, Chirac, who in 1996 finally
granted the status of former combatant
to the French survivors of the Interna-
tional Brigades who participated in the
Resistance. France, too, has been fright-
fully forgetful.
Exactly. That’s why, when I wrote this
book in 2009, I did so primarily for a
French audience. Beyond the south,
many still don’t know the slightest thing
about the history of the concentra-
tion camps. The truth is that France
betrayed the Spanish Republicans
three times. The first was the so-called
“non-intervention” of 1936. The second
was in 1939, when the country treated
them as enemies. And the third was
when France, with the connivance of
the British, left Franco in power after
the Second World War after having
taken advantage of the Republicans’
help to defeat the Nazis. France broke
all the promises it made to the Spanish
Republicans, who not only sacrificed
themselves to free France but were often
among the most capable of the maquis.
That third betrayal was perhaps the
harshest one of all.
You explain in the book that the silence
extended beyond the official history.
There was also plenty that was left un-
said within your family.
That’s right. Don’t forget that our story
was one of humiliation. We’d been
defeated. We had lost the war—unfairly,
since Franco won it with the help of
Hitler and Mussolini. As often happens,
those stories were covered up. Until
very late in life, my father would barely
speak to me about the war and even less
about la Retirada, the Retreat. And I
understand that. It’s not easy for a father
to talk to his son about a defeat. That is
why I was able to talk much more about
it with my uncle, who had no children
and with whom I had a more po-
litical relationship, almost as an equal,
although of course we were far from
equals. He simply wasn’t my dad and
that made a world of difference. That’s
also when I realized that what my dad
couldn’t do—to tell the story of what
happened to him and his family—was
now my job. And I am lucky enough
to have my uncle’s work to help me do
that. Nothing explains that story better
than his drawings.
That means a lot, coming from a pho-
tographer!
I’m serious. The drawings are a truer,
more realistic record of the refugees’ ex-
perience than the photographs that exist
of the camps, most of which were taken
by outside photographers, for whom the
prisoners posed with their fists raised.
The drawings, on the other hand, show
life from the inside. They document the
suffering, the illnesses, the humiliations
the refugees endured at the hands of
the gendarmes and the colonial troops
that guarded the camps. I’ll tell you
an anecdote: my uncle had only one
copy left of the book on the camps he’d
published in Mexico in 1944. That copy
was used for an exhibition he had in
Terrassa in 1984. When the exhibition
ended, he gave it to me as a gift with the
following dedication: “For Georges, this
‘photographic’ testimony that perhaps
one day will manage to break the con-
spiracy of silence.”

Do you feel that you’ve followed in your
uncle’s footsteps?
I don’t have the slightest talent for draw-
ing. But if I chose photography as a
medium it’s because it, too, is political. I
have never believed in the supposed ob-
jectivity of photography. A photograph
is a composition as much as a drawing
is. And it’s true that the way I see pho-
tography owes a lot to the conversations
I’ve had with my uncle. I use the camera
in the same way he used the pencil: as
a weapon. A non-lethal weapon, to be
sure, but a weapon nonetheless. We’re
combatants.
Josep Bartolí briefly fought with lethal
weapons as well. On the Aragon front,
at the beginning of the Civil War, he
served alongside of Ramón Mercader,
in a communist militia, although your
uncle sympathized with the POUM,
which leaned more Trotskyist. He also
helped found a union that affiliated
with the Socialists. Four years later, that
same Ramón Mercader killed Trotsky
who, like your uncle would later, have
an intense love affair with Frida Kahlo.
How did Josep deal with all that politi-
cal and romantic intrigue?
After fighting in the ranks of the Fifth
Regiment, for all intents and purposes
he broke with the Communists. But
the truth is that he never was a card-
carrying member of any party. At heart,
he was a libertarian communist. He
was close to the anarchists, but their
dogmatism turned him off. And he felt
the same about the communists. The
fact that his union joined the UGT was
almost accidental. They could just as
easily have joined the Anarchist CNT.
And then there was his Catalanism,
which complicated everything, as it still
does today. In exile, he ended up asso-
ciating mainly with former members of
the POUM. How my uncle Josep dealt
with all that? By sticking to a simple
motto: Republic, socialism, humanism.
Once in New York, did he get involved
with the Spanish exile community?
Not really. Although he always knew he
was linked to the history of the war, at
Josep Bartolí © Actes Sud (2009) - El Mono Libre (2020)
a certain point—thanks in large part to
Frida Kahlo—he decided to switch from
black-and-white to color. In both art
and life. Frida told him: “You’ll never
win the civil war. Memory is one thing
and life is another. You must accept the
memory, but you can’t let it consume
your life. You’ve got to move on to
something else.” And that’s what he did.
Although he never lost sight of who he
was and where he came from.
It seems he also sympathized with the
US civil rights movement early on. I
came across a book of his on African
American history. In the text that opens
it, he calls Spain out for its complicity
in the history of American racism: “The
black American child is taught white
‘history’ and when he is told about Af-
rica, the story is limited to the image of
a vast jungle territory populated by apes
and European explorers, thus hiding or
distorting the truth about the purposes
of the atrocious hunt for humans that
the Arabs, Spaniards, Portuguese, Eng-
lish, Dutch and French carried out in
the African ‘wilderness.’”
Yes—that book, The Black Man in
America, came out in Mexico but was
designed as a project for a mural com-
missioned by an important New York
bank. But just like the famous mural
that Diego Rivera did for Rockefeller,
Josep’s was never executed because it
was considered too radical.
It is striking how little Josep Bartolí
has been recognized in Spain. Most his
work on the war and the camps is at the
municipal archive of Barcelona—but as
far as I know, the Reina Sofía Museum
in Madrid, for example, has not a single
piece of his in its collection. How is the
situation in France?
Better. In addition to Aurel’s film about
Josep that has just been selected for
the Cannes festival, there will be a big
exhibition of his work here in 2021. His
widow, who is still alive, has donated
her entire legacy to the Occitan region.
The exhibition will be held at the
Campo de Rivesaltes Memorial, which
was built about five years ago.
Does that mean that, in Perpignan at
least, the legacy of the camps is no longer
controversial?
Thanks in part to the Memorial, much
has been done in recent years to recover
the memory of the Retreat. We have
finally moved beyond the taboo phase.
You were raised within the refugee com-
munity. I understand you even ended up
marrying an exile’s daughter.
Well, yes, it’s true, but don’t forget that
here, in the Perpignan area, a third of
the population are descendants of Span-
ish refugees. That’s one in every three
women! (Laughs.) To be honest, I keep
my distance from the exile community,
which sometimes tends toward a too
victim-centered view of history that
I personally don’t agree with. Yes, we
were obviously victims—although that’s
less true for my generation than that of
our parents. But we have cried enough.
What I want is a combative memory
that’s not afraid to take on the world. I
like to say that our memory is a particu-
larly tough one: it does not let itself be
erased, but it also does not hide behind
tears. It’s time to stand up for what our
parents were and what we are as their
children -- proud of their legacy.
Sebastiaan Faber teaches at Oberlin Col-
lege. A version in Spanish of this interview
appeared in CTXT: Revista Contexto
in July.
September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 11