FROM THE AVANT-GARDE TO THE HUMANITARIAN: KATI HORNA’S PHOTOMONTAGES AND PHOTOGRAPHY (1937–1938) by ELIZABETH A. CLEARY A THESIS Presented to the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the Division of Graduate Studies of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts June 2023 THESIS APPROVAL PAGE Student: Elizabeth A. Cleary Title: Avant-Garde and Humanitarian: Kati Horna’s Photography and Photomontages This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture by: Joyce Cheng Chairperson Simone Ciglia Member Keith Eggener Member and Krista Chronister Vice Provost for Graduate Studies Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Division of Graduate Studies. Degree awarded June 2023. ii © 2023 Elizabeth A. Cleary This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs (United States) License. iii THESIS ABSTRACT Elizabeth A. Cleary Master of Arts Department of the History of Art and Architecture June 2023 Title: From the Avant-Garde to the Humanitarian: Kati Horna’s Photography and Photomontages The Mexican-Hungarian photographer Kati Horna (1912–2000) photographed the Spanish Civil War and created photomontages for the anarchist organization, the CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica/National Labor Confederation-Iberian Anarchist Federation) between 1937 and 1938. Scholarship to date has debated whether Horna’s political activism or her association with interwar avant-garde groups played a greater role in her work. In this thesis, I suggest that Horna’s political activism and her associations with Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism are inseparable aspects of her work by tracing Horna’s work from Hungarian Activism in the mid-1910s to what has been described as humanitarian photography in the 1930s. I argue that Horna’s work reveals the proximity of the avant-garde groups on the one hand and, on the other, the ambiguous relationship between art and politics during the European interwar years.1 1 Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography: a History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my sincere appreciation to Professor Joyce Cheng, whose expert guidance and constancy advanced this project and my own scholarship tremendously. In addition, special thanks to Professor Keith Eggener and Professor Simone Ciglia for their valuable contributions and expertise. This thesis received support from the Alice Wingwall Travel Award and the Department of the History of Art & Architecture to conduct research at the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica in Salamanca, Spain. I also thank the CDMH for their assistance in providing numerous research materials for this project, specifically the scans of the Spanish anarchist journal, Tierra y Libertad found in Appendix C. And finally, I wish to express my gratitude for the support from my friends and family; especially to my other half for his unwavering encouragement and kindness as I read sentence after sentence to him, asking, “does this make sense?” v TABLE OF CONTENTS Section Page I. BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION ..................................................................... 1 II. HORNA AND HUNGARIAN ACTIVISM: THE INFLUENCE OF LAJOS KASSÁK ............................................................ 4 III. BERLIN, PARIS, AND SPAIN: HORNA’S ARTISTIC AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT ............................................................................ 7 IV. CONSTRUCTIVIST OR SURREALIST? HORNA’S PHOTOMONTAGES DURING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR............................................................... 11 Moholy-Nagy’s Influence on Horna’s Spanish Civil War Oeuvre ........................ 11 Horna’s Surrealist Affiliations ............................................................................... 18 Horna’s Application of Ernst’s Surrealist Theory of Collage ............................... 20 The Uncanny as a Critique of Fascism .................................................................. 24 The Revolutionary Energy of the Démodé ............................................................ 26 V. HUMANITARIAN PHOTOGRAPHY .................................................................. 30 Humanitarian Impulses within Horna’s Spanish Civil War Oeuvre ...................... 34 Horna and her CNT Counterpart, Margaret Michaelis .......................................... 37 Photography’s Recontextualization of Reality ...................................................... 41 VI. THE IMAGE OF WOMEN IN SPANISH CIVIL WAR PROPAGANDA.......... 44 A Brief Description of Renau and Monleón’s Artistic Methods .......................... 45 Representations of Women During the Spanish Civil War ................................... 48 Horna’s Integration of the Female Form Within Propaganda ............................... 51 VII. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 56 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................. 65 vi A. FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 65 B. TIMELINE OF KATI HORNA’S YOUNG LIFE, MAJOR AVANT-GARDE MOVEMENT EVENTS, AND SIGNIFICANT POLITICAL EVENTS ........ 90 C. PHOTOMONTAGES AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATI AND JOSÉ HORNA PUBLISHED IN TIERRA Y LIBERTAD .......................................... 97 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 105 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Kati Horna, untitled (Carcel modelo de Barcelona), 1937, photograph on cellulose nitrate, 6 x 6 cm, #119 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ........... 65 2. László Moholy-Nagy, Bauhausbalkone in Dessau (Bauhaus Balconies), ca. 1926–28, gelatin silver print, 37.2 x 24.7 cm. Collection of the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin ....................................................................................................... 66 3. László Moholy-Nagy, 25 Pleitegeier (25 Bankruptcy Vultures), 1922–23, collage of printed paper with ink on paper, 30 x 23 cm. The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem................................................................................................................ 67 4. Lajos Kassák, Munka/Dokumentum (Work/Document), c. 1928, collage on paper, 21.9 x 17.8 cm, Petöfi Literary Museum, Budapest, Hungary ................................................................................................. 68 5. Kati Horna, Navidad en España (Christmas in Spain), 1938, photomontage, 15 x 24.5 cm, #183 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain. Published in Libre-Studio no. 8, January 1938 ....................................................................... 69 6. Francisco de Goya, Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, 1819, oil on panel, 47 x 35 cm, Escuelas Pías de San Antón, Madrid ................................................. 70 7. Kati Horna, L’enfance (Childhood), 1938, photomontage, 25.5 x 20.3 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, Mexico City, México........... 71 8. László Moholy-Nagy, Die Eigenbrötler II (The Mavericks II), 1927, photomontage (gelatin silver prints and ink), 22.4 x 15.7 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois...................................................... 72 9. Max Ernst, “Chaque émeute sanglante la fera pleine de grâce et de vérite,” (Each bloody riot will help her to live in grace and truth), in La femme 100 têtes, 1929. Private Collection........................................................ 73 10. Kati Horna, sin titulo (untitled), 1937, photomontage, 22.4 x 17 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, Mexico City, México ............................................................................................. 74 11. Kati and José Horna, sin titulo (untitled), 1938, photomontage, viii 8.3 x 5.2 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, Mexico City, México. Published in Tierra y Libertad, July 23, 1938. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain. .................................................................. 75 12. Kati and José Horna, Muñecas del miedo (Dolls of fear), 1939, photomontage, 25.4 x 20.5 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía Y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, Mexico City, México.............................................. 76 13. Hans Bellmer, La Poupée in Minotaure no. 6, December 1934. Museum of Modern Art, New York ....................................................................................................... 77 14. Kati Horna, Subida a la Cathedral (Ascent to the Cathedral), 1938, photomontage, 22.2 x 19.6 cm, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain. Published in Libre-Studio no. 9, March 1938 ................................................................................................. 78 15. Kati Horna, journal layout for “La maternidad bajo el signo de la revolución,” Umbral no. 12, October 1937. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ...................................... 79 16. Photographs of the Spanish Civil War, Life no.1, November 1936. Published by Time Inc., www.LIFE.com .................................................................................... 80 17. Kati Horna, sin titulo (Marina Street, March Bombings), 1938, photograph on cellulose nitrate, 6 x 6 cm, #148 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ................................................................................................... 81 18. Margaret Michaelis, untitled, October 1936, photograph on glossy paper, 14.4 x 11.9 cm, accession #86.1384.61, National Gallery of Australia ................. 82 19. Margaret Michaelis, untitled, 1936, photograph on glossy paper, 17.2 x 11.9 cm, accession #86.1384.63, National Gallery of Australia .......................................... 82 20. Kati Horna, sin tituo (Girls of Madrid), 1937, photograph on cellulose nitrate, 6 x 6 cm, #220 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ........... 83 21. Kati Horna, sin titulo (Campesinos en un vinedo en el camino de Madrid), 1937, photograph on cellulose nitrate, 6 x 6 cm, #89 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ...................................... 84 22. Josep Renau, photomural contrasting two types of women: the traditionally dressed “Albercana” and the “Miliciana,” Popular Arts Section, second ix Floor, Spanish Pavilion, 1937, Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la vie Moderne, Paris. Ministère de la Culture-France. Photograph by François Kollar .............................................................................. 85 23. Josep Renau, la primavera (the spring), collage. Archivo José Huguet, Valencia, Spain. Published in Estudios, January 1935 .......................................................... 85 24. Kati and José Horna, ¡Campesinos! La FAI está con vosotros (Farmers! The FAI is with you!), 1937, photomontage, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain. Published in Tierra y Libertad, June 18, 1938 ........................................... 86 25. Kati Horna, Carcel (Jail), 1937, photomontage. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain. Published in Umbral no. 20, December 4, 1937 ..... 87 26. Kati and José Horna, sin titulo (untitled), 1937, film projection glass, Ministerio de Educación, Cultural y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain .................................................................................. 88 27. Kati Horna, Bridget Tichenor, 1967, vintage gelatin silver print, 25 x 20 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, Mexico City, México ............................................................................................. 89 28. Front page of Tierra y Libertad on March 19, 1938 featuring Kati and José Horna’s untitled photomontage (1937). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ...................................... 97 29. Page four of Tierra y Libertad on April 16, 1938 featuring Kati Horna’s photograph, untitled (Miliciano de División Ascaso, #29 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH, 1937). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ................................................................... 98 30. Page four of Tierra y Libertad on May 21, 1938 featuring Horna’s photograph (#225 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH) from a meeting of the anarchist women’s organization and journal, Mujeres Libres (issue no. 11 can be seen in background of image). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ................................................................... 99 31. Page four of Tierra y Libertad on June 4, 1938 featuring an untitled and previously unidentified photomontage by Kati and José Horna. Although only José’s signature appears at the bottom of the photomontage, it uses Horna’s photograph of the División Ascaso (#28 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH, 1937). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ................................................................................................... 100 x 32. Front page of Tierra y Libertad on June 11, 1938 featuring an untitled and previously unidentified photomontage by Kati and José Horna. Although only José’s signature appears at the bottom of the photomontage, it uses Horna’s photographs of a campesino (farmer) in Monte Aragón (#22 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain .................................................................................. 101 33. Page two of Tierra y Libertad on June 11, 1938 featuring Horna’s photograph (#220 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH, 1937). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ........... 102 34. Page four of Tierra y Libertad on June 25, 1938 featuring photographs by Horna in a hospital in Barcelona (#138 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ................................................................................................... 103 35. Page two of Tierra y Libertad on July 23, 1938 featuring Kati and José Horna’s untitled photomontage (1938). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain ...................................... 104 xi I. Biographical Introduction The Mexican-Hungarian photographer, Kati Horna (née Katalin Deutsch Blau, Kathe Polgare, 1912–2000) considered herself Hungarian by origin, Spanish by marriage to graphic artist José Horna (1909–1963), and Mexican by adoption.1 She was born into a Jewish middle- class family in Szilasbalhás, a town outside of Budapest, Hungary, in 1912. As a precocious adolescent, she was a disciple of the artist and writer Lajos Kassák (1887–1967), founder of the Hungarian Activist movement, whom she met in the late 1920s. It was through Kassák’s network that she met her first husband, Hungarian Marxist intellectual Pal Partos (Paul in some sources, 1911–1964), likely around 1926.2 In 1930, an eighteen-year-old Horna left Budapest to study politics in Berlin but returned three years later when Hitler rose to power. She spent the summer of 1933 studying photography with the Hungarian pictorial photographer, József Pésci (1889–1956) and her childhood friend, photojournalist Robert Capa (née Endre Friedmann, 1913–1954). In autumn, Horna traveled to Paris, where she worked as a photojournalist and created her first two photo reportages, El Mercado de Pulgas (The Flea Market, 1933) and Cafés de Paris (Cafes of Paris, 1935). In July 1936, six months after the breakout of the Spanish Civil War, Horna and Partos secured positions within the CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica/National Labor Confederation-Iberian Anarchist Federation) through their mutual friend, Augustin Souchy, whom they met while in Berlin. In March 1937, Horna arrived in Madrid as the official photographer of the CNT-FAI. Between 1937 and 1938, she traveled to the Aragón front (near Zaragoza), Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, and Teruel to photograph anarchist military and collectivization efforts as well as everyday life. Horna and Partos eventually separated and in July 1937, she became the graphic editor of the anarchist journal Umbral, where she met José 1 Horna, whom she married in 1938.3 Later in the same year, as the fall of the Republic became imminent, José and Kati Horna fled Spain. Exiled from Franco’s new regime and facing the burgeoning threat of Hitler’s advancing army, Kati and José secured visas to move to Mexico, where they lived for the remainder of their lives. The considerable corpus of scholarship on Horna, notably by Spanish-language scholars such as Lisa Pelizzon, Almudena Rubio Pérez, and Alicia Sánchez-Mejorada, has thus far received scant attention from English-language scholars and commentators. One of the aims of my thesis is to introduce this valuable scholarship to English-language readers. In addition, literature about Horna’s work and life has thus far emphasized either her avant-garde affiliations or her political commitments. Sánchez- Mejorada, Garicía Krinsky, Jean-François Chevrier, and Estrella de Diego have emphasized Horna’s avant-garde productions, notably works that reflect surrealist influences, as well as her documentary photography as a photojournalist. By referencing Horna’s “libertarian beliefs” and role within the CNT-FAI only in passing, they relegate these connections to a minor role.4 In 2016, the edited volume, Told and Untold recentralized Horna’s commitments to radical left-wing politics, arguing that Horna was “hardly a restrained documentarian of the war.”5 While this groundbreaking publication opened new avenues for exploration into Horna’s political commitments during the Spanish Civil War, it muted her interactions with avant-garde figures and artistic methods. In undertaking the necessary task of adjusting existing narratives about Horna’s work to address her political contributions, Told and Untold may have allowed the pendulum between artistic and political affinities to swing too far away from her artistic ties. I seek to remedy the dichotomy between Horna’s political activism and her avant-garde associations with Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism by tracing her young artistic 2 development from Hungarian Activism to humanitarian photography, as defined by Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno.6 This trajectory suggests that the members and the ideologies of the avant-gardes were in close proximity to one another and that the boundaries between art and politics during the interwar years in Europe were permeable, albeit often ambiguous. There has not yet been a robust account of the relationship between her avant-garde work and her humanitarian-feminist work that emerged during the Spanish Civil War. Previous scholarship has debated whether Horna’s political activism or her avant-garde associations and techniques are more central to her narrative. However, I suggest that the combination of Horna’s activism with her avant-garde associations and techniques is most significant. This mutually influential relationship and its evolution of meaning are evident in Horna’s photomontages, layouts created for anarchist journals, and humanitarian photography of the Spanish Civil War. When discussing Horna in the context of the avant-garde, most scholars such as Sánchez- Mejorada, François-Chevrier, Pelizzon, and García Krinsky focus on the surrealist elements within Horna’s works. In my thesis, I demonstrate that Horna is equally, if not even more indebted to Hungarian Activism, through which she encountered Constructivism. Specifically, Hungarian Activism influenced Horna’s nuanced approach to politically engaged art that does not necessarily instrumentalize art as propaganda. Horna’s work exemplifies the tension felt by politically engaged avant-garde artists during the interwar period. She, like many other artists of this generation, were committed to avant-garde strategies of defamiliarization and sought to make these compatible with their political engagement. As a result of this negotiation between avant-garde art and politics, Horna created open-ended photography and photomontages whose value extended beyond the context of the Spanish Civil War into the broader social movement of feminism. 3 II. Horna and Hungarian Activism: The Influence of Lajos Kassák Even before Horna picked up a camera, she was drawn to the intellectual circle around the avant-garde artist, writer and founder of the Hungarian Activist movement, Lajos Kassák (1887–1967). Scholars have determined that Kassák’s teachings had a profound impact on Horna’s artistic and political development, primarily through his tenet that photography can be used to advocate for social revolution.7 His doctrine for peaceful revolution culminated in Horna’s artistic and political practices during the Spanish Civil War. However, a relatively undiscovered terrain remains regarding Horna’s indebted to Kassák, notably his ambivalence about the role of art in politics. Kassák founded Hungarian Aktivizmus (Activism, later called Hungarian Constructivism) in 1915, in the tenth issue of his socialist-anarchist Expressionist journal, A Tett (1908–1916).8 The movement, like surrealism, linked artistic innovation and social revolution, advocating for a “synthetic art” that held the potential to liberate humankind externally and internally. Although Kassák advocated for an autonomous position for artists and assured Hungarian censure authorities that A Tett was apolitical, Oliver Botar concludes that it was nonetheless a vehicle for Kassák’s political views.9 Therefore, Hungarian Activism was political from its very origins, even if this stance was thinly veiled.10 After A Tett was banned in October 1916, Kassák began to publish a new journal, MA the following month. The year 1918 marked the beginning of a period of political upheaval in Hungary. After the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Hungary became a democracy. However, it only lasted a year, overthrown by the Chrysanthemum Revolution, a Communist uprising, in October. Botar observes that after the Chrysanthemum Revolution, Kassák shifted towards greater politicization within MA.11 As the political turmoil in Hungary worsened, Kassák’s platform steadily merged with the geometric abstractions and aggressive political stance of Russian and international 4 Constructivism. Like the Constructivists, Kassák believed that art had the power to change the world and retained that “only revolutionary art was truly art.”12 After the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Kassák abandoned his anarchist origins and joined the party in power, the Hungarian Socialist Party.13 He even accepted an offer as an official poster censor within the Soviet government; a position he sat uneasily with and soon left. Botar explains that his interest in the position was understandable, as he advocated for the revolutionary power of art, but Kassák rejected the role of “propagandist.”14 In August 1919, a counter-revolution overthrew the Soviet Republic and instigated a violent policy of discrimination against communists and Jews.15 Kassák was arrested and held briefly. Upon his release, he traveled to Vienna to escape persecution, where he reinstated MA in exile and published his manifesto titled, “An die Künstler aller Länder!” (To the Artists of All Countries!). In the manifesto, Kassák purposely echoes Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, as observed by Forgács and Miller. In the place of “proletarians of all countries,” Kassák writes, “to artists of all countries.”16 In doing so, he conflates “proletarians” with “artists,” advocating for the creation of proletarian artists, who could establish an art that resonates with their social class. Kassák himself worked as a locksmith his entire life, a rare example of an avant-garde artist who maintained a working-class profession. However, unlike the Constructivists, Kassák did not believe that art should serve as the instrument of any religion, political party, or national group, evidenced by his discomfort working in the propaganda department of the Hungarian Soviet government.17 He emphasized the autonomy of art and yet, simultaneously believed that art reflected its artist. He disagreed with the Constructivist tenet of an art movement to serve the ideological needs of any socialist doctrine. However, he acknowledged that if the artist was socialist, then the art itself would 5 inevitably also be socialist.18 The artist could produce revolutionary work, but they should not be subordinated to directly serve a social class or political ideology.19 Kassák returned to Budapest from exile in 1926, and it is most likely around this time that Horna, and her childhood friends, Capa and photographer Emérico ‘Chiki’ Weisz (1911– 2007) met him and came under his influence through his journals Dokumentum (Document, 1926–1928) and Munka (Labor/Work, 1928–1930). Their involvement in Kassák’s political philosophy influenced them to choose careers in photography, albeit through different routes.20 While Munka’s predecessor, Dokumentum remained tied to artistic concerns, Kassák shifted towards a documentary focus within Munka, directed towards young, socially conscious, and skilled workers. Photography became the central medium of the journal, captured by Hungarian social documentary photographers such as Sándor Frühof, Gyula Halberg, Ferenc Háar and Lajos Lengyel. These artists were a part of a movement of social photographers that championed “the idea of worker self-representation” and demonstrated social disparities through documentary photography. 21 It is possible that Kassák and his journals even introduced Horna to the artistic method of photomontage. On the cover of the January 1927 issue of Dokumentum, Kassák published a collage by German designer, painter and typographer, Willi Baumeister (1889–1955). Kassák created and published his own photomontages, mainly as advertisements and promotions. However, the bulk of his artistic practice centered on austere, geometric abstractions of early Constructivism. Horna’s affinity with Kassák, therefore, is less formal and more ideological. Through his influence, Horna engaged with his ambivalent considerations of the role of the politically driven artist, learning to walk the thin line between artist autonomy and service to a political program. 6 III. Berlin, Paris, and Spain: Horna’s Artistic and Political Development Horna met her first husband Partos through Kassák’s circle of artists. 22 In 1930, Horna and Partos moved to Berlin, where she studied at the Hochscule für Politik.23 They began to shift away from Kassák’s moderate leanings towards the more radical politics of German Marxist philosopher, Karl Korsh (1886–1961). For his devotion to Marxist dialectics, Korsch was expelled from Germany’s Communist Party in 1926.24 Horna and Partos attended Korsch’s secretive meetings, which were often held at the German playwright, Bertolt Brecht’s (1898– 1956) apartment.25 In addition to philosophical topics, Otayek posits that conversation likely included artistic theory as well, such as Alfred Kemeny’s essay, “Photomontage as a Weapon in the Class Struggle.”26 It is likely that while in Berlin, Horna remained connected with Constructivism through fellow Hungarian artist, Moholy-Nagy, who regularly collaborated with Kassák. Eleanor Hight suggests that Kassák’s “influence on Moholy-Nagy cannot be overestimated.”27 In a letter to Antal Németh, in July 1924, he writes that “the regular exhibitions of MA and its intellectual movement of decisive importance became the criterion of my work.”28 Moholy-Nagy was the Berlin representative for Kassák’s journal MA. His contributions internationalized the scope of the journal, which began to include numerous avant-garde influences from Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Constructivism. Moholy-Nagy introduced Horna to his photographic method of New Vision and photomontage. Horna arrived in Berlin a few years after Moholy-Nagy left his position as professor at the Bauhaus and opened his own studio. Although he had distanced himself from Constructivism and Dada by this time, he retained the practice of photomontage. At his own studio, he primarily created designs using photomontage and typography for advertising posters, periodicals, and book jackets.29 7 After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Partos and Horna left Berlin to return to Budapest. There, Horna enrolled in classes at the studio of left-wing pictorial photographer, József Pésci, one of the leading figures in Hungarian photography. Horna’s first photographs taken while studying with Pésci are clearly informed by an emphasis on aesthetic and formal values. However, Horna also captures a particularly intriguing photograph of a woman sleeping on a park bench, likely reminiscent of the social documentary photography that Kassák advocated for. This socially-engaged photograph likely prefigured Horna’s entry into humanitarian photography during the Spanish Civil War. After their marriage in the autumn of 1933, presumably due to issues concerning her inheritance, Partos and Horna moved to Paris and rented an apartment at No. 22 de la Rue des Bois. 30 Horna secured a position as a photojournalist for Agence Photo Anglo Continental and Partos wrote for the journal, Exposition internationale sur le fascisme. While Horna attests that she did not meet any of the surrealists in Paris, she certainly encountered surrealist influences. Rodríguez and Rubio Pérez suggest that French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work inspired Horna.31 The two may have met, considering that he shared a darkroom with Capa and his colleague ‘Chim’ Seymour. While in Paris, Horna also created a series of photographs with Ernst’s pupil, Wolfgang Bürger, under the pseudonym “Wo- ti.” The photographic series is an early example of Horna’s combination of avant-garde techniques with political inflections and a denunciation of fascism, titled Hitlerei (1936-1937). It portrays anthropomorphized eggs to represent the dictators, Hitler, Franco or Mussolini. Hitlerei was published in Die Volks-Illustrierte on March 31, 1937, titled, “Eine lustige Ostergeschichte: Das Franco-Ei” (A Funny Easter Story: Franco, the Egg) as a commentary on Franco’s advancing Nationalist forces in Spain. It is possible that during Horna’s collaboration with 8 Bürger, she became familiar with Ernst’s theory of collage, which will be explored in a later section. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) erupted on July 17, 1936, after Francisco Franco’s fascist forces attempted to overthrow the newly formed Republican Government of Spain. Horna and Partos contacted Souchy, a fellow attendee at Korsch’s lectures in Berlin and head of the Foreign Propaganda Office to arrange positions for them within the CNT.32 On January 9, 1937, Horna became an authorized photographer for the CNT-FAI. Three months later, she arrived in Barcelona with her Rolleiflex camera to photograph the developments of the Spanish Civil War and the accompanying revolution. Until July 1937, Horna was the official photographer for the Spanish Photo Agency (Photo SPA), under the CNT-FAI. Afterwards, Horna became the graphic editor of Umbral. Horna’s photographs and photomontages were published not only in Umbral but also other anarchist journals such as Tierra y Libertad, Libre-Studio, Mujeres Libres, and Tiempos Nuevos. Her Spanish Civil War oeuvre contains 270 negatives stored at the Kati Horna Photo Archive at the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica (CDMH) in Salamanca, Spain.33 A recent discovery by Almudena Rubio Pérez uncovered an additional 522 photographs within “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam,” a shipment containing important CNT documents and image archives that were smuggled out of Spain shortly before the fall of the Republic.34 Between 1937 and 1939, Horna created 20 known photomontages, several of them in collaboration with José. 35 Photomontage is the artistic method of cutting, pasting, and manipulating photographic fragments into a whole, accomplished either in the darkroom or physically altering the hard copies of the photographs themselves. While these photomontages are only a relatively small fraction of Horna’s output during the Spanish Civil War, they are exceptionally demonstrative of the fluctuating balance between art and politics in the interwar years. 9 Many of Horna’s photographs play with unexpected perspectives and diagonal framing as in Moholy-Nagy’s theory of “New Vision.” However, Horna’s photomontages also contain influences from Moholy-Nagy’s brand of Constructivism. Like Moholy-Nagy, Horna uses the Dadaist collage techniques as an entry point into the medium in Navidad de España (1937). Horna’s L’enfance (1938) may also be considered Constructivist in comparison to Moholy- Nagy’s Die Eigenbrötler II (The Mavericks II, 1927). Both pieces create triangular relationships between the incorporated figures against a neutral background. This formal analysis demonstrates that although Horna’s photomontages contain surrealist elements, they can also be interpreted through a Constructivist lens. 10 IV. Constructivist or Surrealist? Horna’s Photomontages During the Spanish Civil War Moholy-Nagy’s Influence on Horna’s Spanish Civil War Oeuvre Scholars have consistently identified Moholy-Nagy’s political and artistic influences on Horna.36 However, these connections warrant greater exploration through identification of specific works by Horna that adhere to the formal and ideological canon of Soviet Constructivism. Moholy-Nagy was a Soviet Constructivist insofar as he appreciated photography for its connection to industry, experimented heavily with geometric abstraction and believed that art could be used to facilitate social revolution. In Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), published in 1924, Moholy-Nagy designates photography as the ideal mode of communication and education because it can convey clear and direct messages to large numbers of people. Like Kassák, Moholy-Nagy praises photography for its potential to erode class distinctions. Horna and Moholy-Nagy both use his technique of “New Vision,” Dadaist techniques of collage as an entry point into experimentations with photomontage, and white backgrounds that are given structure through the interaction of the figures within the frame. Horna uses these techniques to advance the anarchist revolutionary efforts during the Spanish Civil War, while Moholy-Nagy employs them to critique the Weimar Republic and advocate for the proletarian masses. As observed by scholars, Horna utilized Moholy-Nagy’s method of “New Vision” during the Spanish Civil War. While Moholy-Nagy advocated for and advanced these techniques, he did not invent them, as they were already in use by advertisement photographers. New Vision encouraged artists to approach and capture the world using unexpected perspectives, including “worm’s-eye” view, “bird’s-eye” view, elimination of the horizon line, and diagonal positioning of the camera.37 A comparison of Horna’s untitled photograph of the model jail in Barcelona 11 [Figure 1] and Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhausbalkone in Dessau (1926–28, Bauhaus Balconies) [Figure 2] illustrates her application of New Vision during the Spanish Civil War. The CNT-FAI sent Horna to take photographs of the jail in Barcelona to dispel rumors of mistreatment towards the fascist inmates in April 1937. In Figure 1, Horna angles her camera upwards and diagonally to capture inmates peeking over two parallel balconies underneath arching skylights. She eliminates the horizon line and provides the viewer with a surprisingly light-hearted orientation of the inmates and the jail. Similarly, Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhausbalkone in Dessau uses an extreme upwards angle to capture a young man climbing on the rungs of the balcony above. He eliminates the horizon line and turns his camera diagonally to highlight the repetitive right angles where the balconies meet the building. It takes a moment for the viewers’ eye to adjust to the unfamiliar scene, as they attempt to renegotiate where the young man and cameraman are in relation to each other. While the methods are the same, the artists’ intentions behind the two photographs diverge. Moholy- Nagy plays with perspective to present different modes of thought, but Horna uses New Vision techniques in a way that is closer to the intentions of advertisement photographers, with a clear political goal for the viewer in mind. Her photograph of the jail in Barcelona contains the levity of New Vision experimentation, with the purpose of demonstrating that prisoners of war in anarchist jails were not mistreated. Moholy-Nagy considered photomontage an ideal method for communication with the masses.38 The invention of the term, “photomontage” is attributed to the Berlin Dadaists John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, and Hannah Höch, who believed that photomontage could democratize art through clear, direct communication and technology. The term refers to both the German words, “montieren” meaning “to assemble” and “Monteur” signifying 12 “engineer.”39 Likewise, Moholy-Nagy considered himself to be an “artist-engineer,” a title possibly introduced to him by Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko. Krisztina Passuth asserts that this terminology mandates that “the artist must use material components and industrial technology to express himself, as this was the only way for him to be useful to society.”40 Although perhaps not as deeply embedded in the Soviet notion of an artist to serve the proletariat, Horna’s preference towards the designation “art worker” or “photography worker” may have stemmed from these working-class connotations.41 Kassák, Moholy-Nagy and Horna all began by deploying the Dadaist techniques of montage. Moholy-Nagy created his first collage, 25 Pleitegeier (25 Bankruptcy Vultures) [Figure 3] in 1922, during the depths of the financial crisis in the Weimar Republic. He used mixed-media Dadaist techniques that brutally chopped figures and chaotically layered words and phrases to critique the financial failures of Germany. Moholy-Nagy praised the method of collage for its ability to directly communicate, however, he later rejected the Dada desire to shock the spectator. Rather, Moholy-Nagy preferred Kassák’s belief in order over Dada’s unruly insistence on chance. Krisztina Passuth writes, “nothing could be more remote from Dadaism than this utopian view of the world.”42 Nevertheless, Kassák, too, experimented with Dadaist photomontage techniques in an advertisement poster for his journals, Munka and Dokumentum [Figure 4]. Kassák calls to the young artists of Budapest through lettering and phrases scattered throughout the poster. Although the edges of the cropped figures are not as chaotic as those of Moholy-Nagy’s 25 Pleitgeier, Kassák’s photomontage also includes evidence of the limitations of the Dadaist technique. However, Kassák avoids a critique of Hungarian society, and instead projects an image of hope, personified by a worker climbing the ladder in the middle of the 13 scene. Horna, similarly, begins her photomontage experiments in alignment with Dada as well, albeit with a different purpose in mind than Moholy-Nagy and Kassák. One of Horna’s first collages, published in Libre-Studio in January 1938, titled Navidad en España (Christmas in Spain) [Figure 5], laments the destruction of Madrid’s San Isidro cemetery by fascist air raids. Pelizzon and Basilio observe that while the work represents the destruction of the cemetery, it also alludes to the horrific Nationalist siege of the Battle of Teruel, that Horna witnessed firsthand.43 The scene includes photographs, drawings, and a copy of a supplicating Jesus, painted by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) in his Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.44 His outstretched arms extend beyond the frame of the collage, creating the shape of a cross in the upper left corner. Behind him, a white dove flies away from the wreckage of tombstones. Some are crumbling, some have fallen on their side, and some have sunk into the graves beneath them. In the foreground of the collage, skeletons litter the ground. Horna layers the images haphazardly upon one another to mirror the fractures of devastation. Throughout the collage, she includes writings and inscriptions, for example, the center tombstone reads, “reposa en la paz del señor (rest in the peace of the lord)” and a shred of paper between two skeletons reads, “el Cementerio de San Isidro, bombardeado por la artilleria fasciosa (the Cemetery of San Isidro, bombed by fascist artillery).” In its published iteration, the collage is titled, “y hasta Cristo, huyendo de la barbarie fascista exclama: ‘YA NI EN LA PAZ DE LOS SEPULCROS CREO’ (and even Christ, fleeing from fascist barbarism exclaims, ‘I NO LONGER EVEN BELIEVE IN THE PEACE OF THE TOMBS’).” Like the Dadaists, Horna brutally crops the elements of the photomontage to instill havoc within the scene and include phrases and words of different sizes and typographies splashed across the montage. 14 Basilio posits that Navidad de España alludes to the impending failure of the Popular Front—a left-wing coalition of socialists, moderates, and anarchists—against the advancing Nationalist forces.45 Similarly, Pelizzon interprets Navidad de España as a forlorn statement that “not even Christ can do anything” to stop the fascist air raids.46 Her interpretation of the collage emphasizes that a protective presence is nowhere to be found for the Spanish civilians. The air raids certainly had an immense effect on Horna; in an interview shortly before her death in 2000, she told Manuel García that she considered the bombings to be the most influential experience in Spain.47 However, this collage was published in a magazine managed by the CNT, sandwiched between a poem rallying the proletariat in the war of the classes, titled “Indignación” by J. Santana Calero, and illustrations by Borrás Casanova that decry bourgeoise decadence while praising proletarian work ethic.48 Horna’s goal within Navidad de España may have been to shock the viewer with grotesque drawings of exhumed corpses and critique the Nationalist war strategy that targeted civilian populations. Much like the surrounding art and literature, Horna’s collage seeks to unify resistance against the combined fascist and bourgeoise powers. The anarchists were exceptionally concerned with the advancement of social revolution during the Civil War. While other factions of the Popular Front called to “First, Win the War,” the anarchists insisted on the importance of instituting socialist policies.49 Although Horna uses a Dadaist technique to shock the viewer, it perhaps was meant to serve as a rallying cry against fascist barbarism, which threatened to maintain the very class distinctions that the anarchists fought to erode. David Evans and Sylvia Gohl note that there is a possible connection between Dada’s shock effect (specifically Heartfield’s methods, whom this paper will return to in a later section) and the estrangement effect (Verfremdungseffekt) in Brecht’s epic theatre.50 Through epic 15 theatre, Brecht presents the familiar in an unfamiliar way, as Horna does with the copy of Goya’s Christ figure from Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. In Goya’s version [Figure 6], Christ is located in the bottom half of the painting, supplicating upwards to an angel. The background is completely dark, except for a stream of light that appears around the angel. Horna’s reintegration of Goya’s Christ within her photomontage not only capitalizes on Goya’s renown and popularity, but that most will recognize the figure as Christ immediately. However, Horna recontextualizes Christ within the top-left corner of the photomontage. Here, he is simultaneously looking over the cemetery and supplicating upwards to his Holy Father. Verfremdungseffekt is not the only connection between photomontage and theatre. Brecht experimented integrating film and photography through his co-scripted film, Kuhle Wampe (1932). Evans and Gohl assert that the film, which contained numerous examples of cinematic montage, “was probably the nearest equivalent to Heartfield’s [photomontage] work.”51 Ades similarly contends that cinematic montage has equivalents in photomontage through the collapse of time and space, juxtaposition of perspectives, and double exposures.52 Therefore, many scholars also look to Brecht’s epic theatre as a possible source for her artistic practice.53 Horna and José created L’enfance (Childhood, 1939) [Figure 7] in Paris for Agence Photo shortly after the fall of the Republic. It features a neutral, white background onto which, they pasted the photograph of a young boy, an abstraction to represent a decaying tree, piles of rubble, and a building that has been cleaved in half. The ruins incorporated into the photomontage are remnants of the devastating air raids on Barcelona in March 1938. They loom over the figure of the young boy, threatening him with their very presence. Horna’s photomontage contains an element of imminent danger and peril. Nevertheless, the young child in L’enfance is almost completely exposed. The only shelter for the child is the abstracted form 16 of a dying tree, whose branches are weak and bare. L’enfance is a denunciation of the fascist violence of the Spanish Civil War. Pelizzon argues that the young boy sits on a cloud, which implies that he holds a Christ-like status as a martyr.54 She explains that his perch on the cloud indicates that the young boy is a ghostly figure, who perished during the air raids, and represents all the victims of the Civil War.55 Her argument can be expanded through a formal and ideological comparison to Moholy-Nagy’s Die Eigenbrötler (The Maverick, 1927) [Figure 8]. Both photomontages illustrate the victimization of the masses through similar formal artistic methods. However, Horna addresses the victimization of the Spanish civilian population while Moholy-Nagy speaks to the exploitation of the proletariat. It is important to note that these photomontages were created almost ten years apart from each other. While the formal similarities may be a coincidence, this possibility becomes slightly more remote upon comparison of the two photomontages side-by-side and through an understanding of Horna and Moholy-Nagy’s artistic affinities. Both artists employ a neutral, white, background and give it structure through triangular relationships that connect the incorporated figures. In L’enfance, the young child immediately captures the viewer’s eye. Then, the eye moves upwards and across the photomontage to the hulking form of the crumbling building. Afterwards, the viewer’s gaze drifts down the length of the building, to the rubble at its base. Then, the eye returns to the figure of the young boy, thus completing the triangle. Moholy-Nagy’s Die Eigenbrötler II features a white background that flattens the plane. However, he creates dimension through the relationships established within. On the right side, a building rises above its surroundings. Behind jail-like windows, groups of people gaze outwards. Animals surround the fortified building. A fish with a gaping mouth invades the bottom left corner of the photomontage while a cat and a dog approach the structure. 17 Three intertwined, running figures are at once separate and a part of the scene. Hight concludes that Moholy-Nagy uses the figures that are safe behind the barred windows to represent the bourgeoisie, the running children exposed to the elements represent the proletariat, and the roaming animals represent danger.56 Spatially, these interlocking figures visually form a triangle in which each corner is represented by each group. One corner begins at the gaping mouth of the fish, which immediately draws the viewer’s eye. From there, the eye follows the trajectory of the fish upwards and across, towards the fortified bourgeoise. Then, the eye moves across the photomontage, to the proletariat children and down again to the fish. Horna’s photomontage, L’enfance mirrors Moholy-Nagy’s Die Eigenbrötler II. Both works denounce political and social structures, respectively, that are harmful towards the masses through similar formal strategies. Moholy-Nagy provided Horna with the formal methods and artistic techniques of photomontage and New Vision to communicate with the masses. Their shared connection to Kassák most likely facilitated the artists’ interaction. However, Kassák may have also introduced Horna to another avant-garde movement that she remained associated with throughout her lifetime, surrealism. In an interview with Jozefa Stuart in 1962, Horna describes Kassák as a “man who opened her mind to new ideas,” from which she learned the term, “surrealism.”57 Although not specifically a Surrealist, Horna applies surrealist methods within her Spanish Civil War photomontages. Horna and Kassák’s adoption of both Constructivism and Surrealism suggests that these boundaries between the interwar avant-gardes were thin and permeable. Horna’s Surrealist Affiliations Horna walked a tenuous line with the surrealist movement. While certain aspects of Horna’s work are unquestionably surrealist, others are not. She meticulously curated her use of surrealism by simultaneously adopting and omitting different elements. While Horna adopts 18 German Surrealist Max Ernst’s (1891–1976) technique of collage, she replaces his domestic scenes with open-air ones to reflect wartime danger. Like Hans Bellmer (1902–1975), Horna uses the uncanny as a critique of fascism but excludes the overt sexual connotations that he uses. I believe that these differences are the result of different traumas. While Ernst and Bellmer ruminate on Freudian traumas, Horna focuses on wartime trauma. Nonetheless, she uses surrealist methods of collage, the uncanny combination of danger and childhood and the démodé (outmoded). Although the outmoded and the uncanny are revolutionary rather than overtly political, when placed into the context of anarchist publications, as we will see with sin titulo (untitled, 1938) and Subida a la Catedral (Ascent to the Cathedral, 1938) in particular, they adopt rather radical meanings. Surrealism, although staunchly anti-fascist, held a tenuous relationship with the political left. They openly supported revolution, as evidenced by the title of the surrealist journal, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolucion (Surrealism in Service of the Revolution,1930-1933). However, the surrealist revolution did not align seamlessly with leftist political aims. Breton’s group maintained a fraught relationship with the French Communist Party (PCF) while Aragon, at an International Conference of Revolutionary Writers in the USSR in 1930, distanced himself from the Trotskyite affiliations of surrealism.58 Breton maintained the value of the autonomy of art and sought to separate surrealism from propaganda. However, not all surrealists followed suit. Aragon wrote the poem, “Front rouge” in January 1932, which Breton considered propaganda, and therefore broke ties with Aragon. Breton clearly supported the efforts of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, but he may have considered Horna’s photomontages propaganda. This perspective was likely at odds with Horna’s, who in accordance with Kassák’s creed, believed that art naturally reflects the social stance of its artist. 19 Horna’s daughter, Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández claims that her mother considered herself an “invisibilist.” According to Fernández, the term “invisibilist” describes Horna’s true motivating forces, her most “intimate fears, melancholies, delights and longings.”59 This claim attempts to distance Horna from the surrealist movement in particular—a position that Horna herself maintained. In an interview, she states that while in Paris from 1933 to 1937, she never met Breton, members of his surrealist circle, or visited the Café de Flore, one of the standard locations for surrealist gatherings.60 Scholars have generally supported this distinction. In El surrealismo y el arte fantástico de México (1969), Mexican art historian, Ida Rodríguez Prampolini places Horna, not as a member of the surrealist group, but as an individual artist who shares affinities with the group.61 Following Prampolini, José Antonio Rodríguez asserts that “it’s clear that, to Horna, ‘having ties’ with a group does not mean ‘belonging’ to it. Intellectual affinity did not necessarily imply her inclusion in the movement.”62 To bypass this tangle, many scholars hesitate to label Horna a “Surrealist,” and instead, identify her “surrealist implications” as Jean-François Chevrier does.63 Horna’s Application of Ernst’s Surrealist Theory of Collage French Surrealist poet, Louis Aragon credited the invention of collage to Ernst.64 Ernst created his first collages as a founding member of the Cologne Dada group in 1919. Two years later, Breton organized an exhibition of Ernst’s collages at the Galerie Sans Pareil in Paris. In 1922, Ernst moved to Paris and became an integral member of Breton’s Surrealist circle. Aragon explains that although the cubists invented the method of collage by recontextualizing fragments of reality, Ernst made it a poetic procedure.65 Hal Foster interprets Ernst’s definition of collage as “the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them (author’s italics).”66 Ernst titled this unsuitable environment as the 20 “inappropriate plane,” created by recontextualizing original material. In his “Beyond Painting,” Ernst further describes the creation of collage as “the exploitation of the fortuitous encounter of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane (to paraphrase and generalize Lautréamont’s celebrated phrase: ‘Beautiful, like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table (author’s italics).’”67 Ernst finds the combination of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table illustrative of the recontextualization inherent in collage. The dissecting table robs the umbrella and sewing machine of their purpose and identity. Then, Ernst describes, the umbrella and sewing machine will “make love,” or become something entirely new; heterogenous but unified.68 Although Ernst moved away from collage beginning in 1922, he returned to the practice with reinvigorated fervor in 1929. Upon his return, Ernst created collage-novels using wood engravings from gothic novels and early turn-of-the-century encyclopedias. Ernst’s first collage- novel, titled La femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman), was published in 1929 featuring a sequence of 146 collages (not counting the cover) divided into nine chapters, connected by lines of poetry underneath the images. Although there is no inherent logic or evident storyline, Ernst ensured Werner Spies that the “overall structure of the book… was intended from the beginning.”69 One of the collages within the novel [Figure 9] features a young woman seated in an oversized, bourgeoisie jewelry box in the middle of a bloody riot. She is strikingly out-of-place in the violent scene. A line of soldiers stand and aim their weapons past (or at) her, while injured and lifeless figures litter the ground in front of her. She sits in a lavishly decorated jewelry box with ruffled drapery, ornately curved lines and an image of a flower on the back panel. The woman herself, however, is immutable. Spies describes her as “the indestructible goddess of destruction,” comparing her to infamous females that destroy the male 21 such as Cleopatra and Salome.70 This collage represents Ernst’s collision of heterogenous elements within an unsuitable plane; a woman who at first, appears harmless but that presents greater danger than the riot around her. Although Ernst experimented with photomontage, most of his artistic oeuvre consists of the recontextualization of found images through collage. Nevertheless, his theory of collage that combines disparate elements within an “inappropriate plane” can be observed in Horna’s Spanish Civil War photomontages. The environment of the Spanish Civil War subverted everyday life under the conditions of the war. Pelizzon asserts that photomontage aptly captured the ruptures and chaos that emerged due to the realities of war.71 Unlike previous conflicts, during the Spanish Civil War, the boundaries between the war and civilian zones faded. Franco’s nationalist forces, with aid from Italy and Germany, attacked Republican strongholds cities through air raids. Civilian houses and apartment buildings were shattered, streets torn open, families displaced, and the unlucky were killed. To represent these, Horna combined visually and temporally distinct elements to create heterogenous photomontages. In sin titulo (untitled, 1937) [Figure 10], a skeleton that represents imminent death looms over a group of infants who represent budding life. Horna integrates the figures into the buildings of the city. The skeleton hangs from a tall building that looks down onto a rooftop, on which the children reside. Like Ernst’s collage in La femme 100 têtes, Horna’s sin titulo combines strikingly different figures within an unsettling scene. The children, usually protected within the domestic sphere are instead unsheltered from the ever-present threat of death. In a photomontage the following year, sin titulo (1938) [Figure 11], a father embraces his young child in a field. However, glimpses of the dangers of the Civil War punctuate the photomontage. The father’s right leg has been amputated, so he leans on two crutches to support his remaining leg. Although the landscape is prolifically 22 filled with flowers, the sky above is filled with airplanes, a reminder of the destructive air raids. The contrasting elements within the environment create an unsettling scene that juxtaposes the beauty of life with the dangers of war. Horna created these photomontages specifically for the CNT-FAI, to promote their antifascist campaign. However, sin titulo (1938) carried a particularly direct political inflection once contextualized in the fervently anarchist newspaper, Tierra y Libertad on July 23, 1938, as the Nationalist army neared victory. A few months earlier, the Republican government had attempted to sue Franco for peace, but he rejected their offer. It appears under the title, “Nosotros no reiremos” (We will not laugh)[see Appendix C, Figure 35]. The accompanying text asserts that it would be better to die fighting the advancing fascist army than live under their control and calls for continued defense of anarchist liberties. In this context, the photomontage takes on a dark intonation. Perhaps it is not a scene of happiness disrupted by war, but rather a goodbye between a father and his child before he leaves to defend this family from the approaching airplanes in the distance. It may also serve as a projection of the future under fascist rule if the armies were to surrender. At first, the scene appears to capture the love between a father and child, but the planes in the background represent the constant oppression of fascist authoritarianism. Although Horna uses Ernst’s method of collage, it does not result in the combination of dream and reality. Ernst uses collage to “fuse experiences—both conscious and unconscious— into a new unity, a whole whose indissolubility is intended.”72 Ernst’s fusion of experiences (dream and reality) results in the marvelous. Foster concludes that the marvelous was “founded on traumas that involve the origin of desire in loss and its end in death, and surrealist art can be seen as different attempts to repeat and/or work through such events.”73 Ernst’s collages replay 23 Freudian primal scenes (many of which take place in the domestic sphere, such as “The might- have-been Immaculate Conception”), perhaps in an attempt to release the repressed memory and associated fears. In Horna’s case, the fears were real and present ones related to the Civil War. The role of the unconscious in her work is therefore diminished. However, in a later photomontage (Muñecas del miedo), she too uses the technique of collage to attempt to release repressed experiences. The Uncanny as a Critique of Fascism In the photomontage, Muñecas del miedo (1939) [Figure 12] Horna uses the uncanny conflation of inanimate and animate states to critique fascism. Rosalind Krauss, using Sigmund Freud’s definition of uncanny as the “primitive belief in magic,” interprets it further as “the collapse of the distinction between imagination and reality.”74 Therefore the uncanny, in this context, describes the collapse of the distinction between imagination of reality which results in the conflation of the inanimate and the animate. In Muñecas del miedo, crumbling ruins dominate the background of the photomontage. A road leads away from the broken buildings into the foreground. On the road, a doll carrying another, smaller doll faces the viewer. Footsteps on the road run from the city to the doll in the foreground, suggesting that it is abandoning the wreckage. Pelizzon reads this photomontage as an analogy to Horna’s photographs and experience of the evacuation of Teruel in December 1937.75 She also labels the larger doll as a “simulacrum,” of a human body.76 However, I hesitate to do so because I believe that the doll in Muñecas del miedo could refer to Horna herself and the photomontage as an attempt to release Horna from the memory of experience. Nonetheless, Horna imbues an inanimate object with human characteristics, which creates an uncanny image. Surrealist use of the uncanny, according to Foster, contests fascism. He explains that fascism employed the uncanny to create a temporal 24 lock into a “repetition governed by the death drive.”77 Surrealism, however, interrupts fascist repetition and looks to the future, an action that “might somehow free the subject from defusion and death, then at least to divert its forces in a critical intervention into the social and the political.”78 Although Horna’s Muñecas del miedo looks backwards to her memory of the Battle of Teruel and critiques fascist violence, it simultaneously suggests an unknown but readily approaching future. The viewers, who gaze at the doll walking away from the ruinous city cannot see its future. However, it is implied that the doll is looking and moving toward it, exemplified by the viewers themselves. Although Muñecas del miedo is Horna’s attempt to free herself from the terrorizing memories of Teruel to be able to move forward, as the doll does, it also interrupts fascist temporal repetition. Pelizzon compares Horna’s Muñecas del miedo to Bellmer’s La Poupée (The Doll) [ Figure 13], a photo series published in December 1934 in the Surrealist journal Minotaure.79 The two-page spread features ten photographs documenting Bellmer’s construction of a series of dolls. His poupées inflate the animate with the inanimate to create an uncanny image. Foster describes them as “evocative of sex as well as death.”80 Bellmer turned to his poupées for a few reasons. He renounced his commercial art practice to protest the Nazi government in 1933, which allowed him to experiment with his own artistic interests. Bellmer’s experiments with the doll were fueled by his troubled relationship with his father, who was unsupportive of his artistic endeavors. Around the same time, he became infatuated with his younger and flirtatious cousin Urusla, whose family lived in Berlin with the Bellmers. After viewing Max Reinhardt’s production of The Tales of Hoffman (1881) by Jacques Offenbach, a tale of a mechanical doll named Olympia, Bellmer discovered that a doll could provide an antidote to the torment of Urusula’s flirting as well as the patriarchal tyranny of fascism.81 Foster interprets Bellmer’s 25 poupées as a critique of fascism. He argues that the sexuality of the dolls invades the fascist armoring of the Nazi male, who was formed from the outside in, and encourages a release from the “outline of the self.”82 The external armor of the Nazi male was informed and constructed by the highly militaristic values of the Nazi regime. While Foster interprets Bellmer’s poupées as critiques of fascism, Wieland Schmied approaches Bellmer’s experimentations more broadly. He believes that Bellmer’s work “revolted against an existence that struggled under the oppression of reason.”83 Through this lens, Bellmer does not rebel against fascism perse but rather rational and structured ways of life within modern society. Nevertheless, in both cases, Bellmer’s poupées are rebellious and confrontational. However, Horna’s Muñecas del miedo is more direct than Bellmer’s La poupée, through its criticism of fascist militarism for its unforgivable acts of violence towards Spanish civilians. Nevertheless, Bellmer’s poupées are undoubtedly posed voyeuristically and sadistically, which can lead the viewer to conclude that he is the perpetrator. However, Bellmer’s poupées can also be viewed as self-destructive, in which Bellmer himself is the victim and the doll. Bellmer used La Poupée to disengage his longings for Ursula and to come to terms with his fathers’ disappointment towards him. However, Horna’s use of a doll within Muñecas del miedo is not erotic or sexual. Rather, she uses the image of a doll to de-embody her own experiences during the Battle of Teruel. Both Bellmer’s La Poupée and Horna’s Muñecas del miedo are representations of suffering, which release the artists from what traps them. They both additionally use the uncanny inflation of animate and inanimate objects to as a method of critique. The Revolutionary Energy of the Démodé 26 When Chevrier identifies Horna’s “surrealist implications,” he specifically refers to her “narrative collages.”84 He identifies one the most common techniques that she uses, overprinting, in which photographs are layered over each other to create transparent specters and uncanny scenes, as a “Surrealist specialty.”85 Scholars identify Horna’s Subida a la Catedral [Figure 14] as undoubtedly surrealist.86 The photomontage features a woman’s face, projected onto a wall with two small windows flanked by a staircase. Pin curls and thin, flapper-esque eyebrows frame her face as one of her eyes peers out from one of the windows. Sánchez-Mejorada explains that Horna “humanizes the objects by assigning them a primordial space in the scene, thus giving them their own life and personality.”87 Using this method, according to Sánchez-Mejorada, Horna “transforms the known place into a dreamlike scene.”88 In other words, Horna combines the inanimate with the animate and the familiar with the unfamiliar. Sánchez-Mejorada argues that Horna’s entire artistic oeuvre after she left Paris for Madrid can be categorized as “lo insólito cotidiano” (the unusual every day).89 Horna herself coined the phrase and described it as “the moments in which chance took a turn, breaking into the common and every day.”90 This phrase and definition share an affinity with the surrealist concepts of the uncanny and objective chance. Foster argues that the surrealist marvelous is uncanny. He explains, “the marvelous as convulsive beauty will be seen as an uncanny confusion between animate and inanimate states.”91 Objective chance, like Breton finding his slipper spoon in the Parisian flea market after he had been dreaming about such an object, occurs spontaneously when dream briefly interrupts reality. However, one surrealist aspect that has not yet been discussed is the effect of the outmoded on the collage. Foster defines the outmoded as “the cultural detritus of past moments residual in capitalism against the socioeconomic complacency of its present moment.”92 In other 27 words, the outmoded is everything that is left behind in the constant evolution of commercial trends. Walter Benjamin credits the surrealists with the discovery of the revolutionary energy of the outmoded.93 The surrealists valorized the outmoded in their work, as shown by their interest in Atget’s photographs of turn-of-the century corsets in a shop window or in Art Nouveau architecture, which was highly praised by Dalí. Benjamin explains in “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” as quoted by Foster, that the revolutionary energies of the outmoded recall “destitution—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects—can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism.”94 The pin curls in the woman’s hair and her pencil-thin eyebrows are trends reminiscent of the 1920s flapper. Her fashion and appearance are outmoded. Perhaps, to suggest, that the woman before the revolution was outmoded. Or, to use Benjamin’s connection to architecture, the woman before the revolution was enslaved to the interior, with only a small window with which to see the world. Horna’s decision to superimpose a human face onto an architectural façade can also be interpreted as an uncanny return to the long-standing tenet in architecture that buildings and bodies reflect one another. This belief harkens back to the Renaissance but was replaced by Romanticism in favor of the desire for buildings to express physical or mental states of the body. By reintegrating a woman’s face into the side of the building, Horna returns to the repressed notion of architecture that represents a human body, this time as a fracture of the whole, both of which create a sense of disquiet.95 However, the Surrealists were not the only groups to use the outmoded during the interwar period. It is no coincidence that the fascists also utilized the outmoded and nonsynchronous. For Benjamin, the outmoded became tainted by its partnership with fascism, but for German philosopher, Ernst Bloch, the outmoded became a space for 28 surrealism to critique fascism.96 In his 1935 text, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Heritage of our Times), Bloch suggests that the employment of the outmoded against fascism can repurpose the elements that are “hostile to capitalism and homeless in it” towards surrealist revolution.97 This method uses the same ammunition as fascist temporal repetition, but to different ends. Horna’s use of the outmoded and, as previously mentioned, the uncanny in Muñecas del miedo, a photomontage that looks to the future to disrupt fascist temporal repetition, are exemplary of the constant experimentation that she engages in to create politically engaged art during the interwar years. Horna uses a combination of social and architectonic destitution within Subida a la Catedral to exemplify the advances of women’s rights during the Spanish Revolution, but also to suggest how far there is yet to go. It was first published in the anarchist journal, Libre-Studio in March 1938, with the caption, “La Mujer Espanola Antes de la Revolución” (The Spanish Woman Before the Revolution).98 Although most scholars apply Surrealist interpretations of the scene, Basilio contributes the only political reading. She suggests that the adjoining caption possibly refers to both the advances of women’s rights by liberal and anarchist groups during the Civil War as well as their waning agency as the Republican government suppressed women back into the domestic sphere.99 As with sin titulo (1938), the recontextualization of Subida a la Catedral into an anarchist publication encourages its readers to remain committed to anarchist definitions of liberty. This meant to resist the attempts of the Popular Front to subdue their efforts towards social revolution in favor of the war campaign. Horna’s photomontage uniquely addresses both the extending powers of the Popular Front and fascism that sought to marginalize anarchist revolutionary aims, albeit in differing degrees. 29 V. Humanitarian Photography At first, the surrealists used documentary photography to capture and preserve the beauty of the marvelous in the moments when dream punctuated reality. As it developed, however, the surrealists created a practice, as observed by Ian Walker, that simultaneously exploits and subverts the realist frame.100 He argues that surrealist documentary photography is “in fact more disruptive of conventional norms than the contrivances of darkroom manipulation.”101 French film critic André Bazin explains that photography became a prized medium for the surrealists because “it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely a hallucination that is also a fact.”102 Photography, with its privileged position as a document of the “real,” anchors surreality within its frame and thus proves its existence. Barthes similarly observes the hallucinatory effect of a photograph. He explains that the photograph is “a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time.”103 A photograph is a testament to something that once was, but becomes a hallucination over time, as the photograph remains, but the subjects do not. It is both evidence that the subject existed at one point and of the subject’s absence. Surrealism exploits the camera’s claim to the real (objective/ fact) and subverts it through hallucination and the marvelous (subjective). Walker concludes that surrealist documentary photography fuses fact and hallucination.104 As frequently as scholars label Horna a surrealist, they also title her work as documentary. However, her documentary practice is not surrealist, but rather humanitarian. In the context of the Spanish Civil War, and in scholarly publications, scholars have generally considered Horna’s materials in terms of photojournalism. She herself, in an interview with García, affirmed that she considered herself a photojournalist while in Spain.105 However, Horna’s photography during the Spanish Civil War does not search for the decisive, singular 30 moment as photojournalism does. Instead, Estrella de Diego suggests that Horna’s Civil War photography is documentary.106 However, I posit that Horna’s photography seeks to mobilize the viewer and their humanitarian impulses. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno define humanitarian photography as “the mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries.”107 Using this definition, Horna may be considered the humanitarian photographer of the Spanish Civil War par excellence due to her oeuvre that is consistently described as empathetic and rooted in human connection to mobilize the viewer to action. While her contemporaries Capa and Taro photographed the Spanish Civil War as photojournalists, Horna photographed the Spanish Revolution as a humanitarian photographer. Her political affinities may be most likened to those of her predecessor at the CNT-FAI, Margaret Michaelis (née Margaret Gross, 1902-1985), a connection first posited by Juan Manuel Bonet and verified by Rubio Pérez’s discovery of “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam” that contained photographs taken by both Horna and Michaelis.108 While their political affinities are closely related, the humanitarian aspects and content of their work diverge. Michaelis’s photographs capture the first six months of the Spanish Civil War, before the Nationalist air raids began. They project the beginnings of a utopic future, full of hope and optimism. Her photographs depict proletarian communities capable of defending themselves from the advancing Nationalists and making great strides in the social revolution. However, shortly after Horna arrived in Spain, Nationalist attacks on the civilians disturbed and shocked the population. Her photographs are pacifist and ask for protection of the vulnerable: the elderly, women, and children. Photojournalism was born out of war photography. It became prominent during the interwar years in Europe, facilitated by technological developments to the camera. Before the 31 invention of handheld cameras like the Rolleiflex and Leica in the 1930s, cameras were immobile instruments, unable to capture dynamic action. For the first time, photographers captured the activity of the frontlines during the Spanish Civil War. These technological developments were enthusiastically met with a public demand for visual materials, exemplified by the success of the widely popular American illustrated magazine Life or its French counterpart, Vu. Although initially centered around war photography, the demand for photographs encouraged photojournalists to capture all aspects of life. Scholars commonly compare Horna’s Civil War photography to that of the two quintessential photojournalists Capa and Taro, renowned for their frontline portrayal of the Spanish Civil War characterized by their proximity to the conflict. Capa famously instructed Taro, “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”109 Capa felt that to best communicate the facts of the war visually, he and Taro needed to be in the thick of the action. They sought to capture a “true image,” or a faithful representation of reality caught in the decisive moments at the battlefront.110 María Rosón and Lee Douglas frame Capa’s oeuvre through a humanitarian lens, in which he sought to document the suffering of war, to shock his audience and motivate them into action.111 The realities of suffering that war causes, were, according to Capa, the key to incite political action in the viewers.112 However, Fehrenbach finds this categorization of Capa’s work “puzzling” as Capa does not foreground the suffering figure of the civilian.113 Humanitarian photography, according to Fehrenbach is rooted in the specific experiences of women and children in war.114 She observes that early humanitarian photography emerged from ethnographic travel literature and traces the iconography of the child in humanitarian campaigns to the end of World War I, when photographs of starving children from famine in Russia and Eastern Europe sought action from 32 the viewer.115 The vast majority of Capa’s photographs during the Civil War consist of frontline military action, showing women and children only on rare instances. Rather, Fehrenbacher categorizes Taro’s oeuvre as humanitarian due to her antifascist and socialist causes, which Capa shared. This distinction, although she attests is not due to the requirement of a maternal instinct in humanitarian photography, does appear to designate Taro’s work as humanitarian solely based on her gender. Taro’s photographic practice is closer to Capa’s than Horna’s. Therefore, Fehrenbacher’s assessment that Taro is a humanitarian photographer can be called into question, as Taro worked in the same vein as Capa. Rather, Horna’s oeuvre is perhaps the greatest example of humanitarian photography from the Spanish Civil War. Rosón and Douglas assert that due to the technological advances of the handheld camera, in which the shutter speed came to mimic the speed of shooting a gun, photography during the Spanish Civil War became entangled in concepts of masculinity and fearlessness.116 The numbers speak for themselves. María Aránzu Díaz-R. Labajo calculates that out of fifty foreign photographers, reporters and journalists present during the Spanish Civil War, only eight were women.117 The male gaze of the Civil War, according to Rosón and Douglas, is physically close—recall Capa’s saying, “if your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”—and emotionally distant.118 However, gender is not the only variable to consider. Rubio Pérez posits that the Rolleiflex, the camera Horna used, is less aggressive than the Leica, the camera that Capa and Taro used.119 The main reason for this differentiation is the location on the body which the camera is held by its user. While the Leica has a standard viewfinder that requires its user to hold the camera up to their eye, the Rolleiflex requires its user to hold the camera at their torso and look downwards through the twin lens. Rosón and Douglas observe that the positioning of cameras like the Leica is akin to the position of firing a gun. Both have a lens 33 or viewfinder that requires the machine to be lifted to the user’s eye. Although the arm placements differ slightly, there are certain roles for each hand in both actions. One hand holds the technology, and the other presses the shutter/trigger. However, the positioning of the Rolleiflex, naturally captures a less direct angle. While a Leica captures its subjects head-on, the Rolleiflex automatically captures its subjects from a lower, more empathetic angle. For subjects that are seated, bent over, or simply shorter (like children), the Rolleiflex is naturally closer to their height, and creates a stronger connection. Nevertheless, there is a distinction between the photojournalistic moments of singularity in Capa and Taro’s work as opposed to Horna’s humanitarian photography. Humanitarian Impulses within Horna’s Spanish Civil War Oeuvre Among scenes of battle and the ruins of air raids, Horna’s Spanish Civil War oeuvre contains photographs of quiet and everyday moments.120 A barefoot soldier writes a letter in a field at the Aragón front. A woman gazes down at her breastfeeding infant. Women gather to do laundry at a fountain in Barcelona. An elderly campesina (farmer) gazes out across the countryside. Within these seemingly ordinary moments, scholars remark on Horna’s intentional portrayal of humanity found in each of the subjects included in the photograph. Known for her life-long dedication to portraiture, Horna approached those in front of her lens with benevolence and compassion. In other words, the subjects in Horna’s photographs are not subjects at all, but rather human beings that she connects and empathizes with. The photo series, “la maternidad bajo el signo de la revolución” (motherhood under the sign of revolution) [Figure 15] published in Umbral no. 12 in October 1937 demonstrates Horna’s humanitarian focus on women and children. Beginning in July 1937, Horna worked as Graphic Editor at Umbral, where she had full creative liberty over the photograph—from the 34 moment of its inception to its publication. “La maternidad bajo el signo de la revolución” is a two-page spread with an excerpt written by Lucia Sánchez Saornil, a Spanish anarchist, feminist, and poet. Photographs taken by Horna in August at the Casa de Maternidad located in Vélez- Rubio and refugee center at Alcázar de Cervantes surround Saornil’s text. Doctor and mayor Salvador Martínez Laroca established the Casa as a refuge for mothers, pregnant women, and their children from the Nationalist air raids in Madrid. Horna’s photographs feature mothers breastfeeding their newborn infants, children eating in a dining room, and women socializing in small groups. In the 2013 exhibition Kati Horna, art historians Chevrier and De Diego interpreted the children in these scenes as “small, lost creatures” that portray “tragedies, visible in scenes like one of a mother eating ravenously next to her daughter.”121 But despite the tragic elements within the photographs, Pelizzon interprets the photographs as showing the children as positive symbols of hope.122 She observes that the layout is unique for two reasons: it rejected the wartime focus on young men and emphasized the preservation of life.123 During the Civil War, the role of the mother was praised for her ability to give birth to young men who could grow up to be soldiers and fight for the Republican cause. Therefore, photographs of young girls were often not published. However, as Pelizzon notes, Horna discards this practice, choosing to include photographs of young girls. By doing so, Horna removes women from the status as a producer, de-industrializes them, and re-humanizes them. Basilio notes that the journal spread “advanced positive ideas about the education of women and modern methods of childrearing as tools of emancipation.”124 Her reading, like Pelizzon’s, centralizes Horna’s commitment to anarcho-feminist efforts to improve woman’s place in society. 35 The journal layout is reminiscent of a photomontage, which integrates different photographs into one, unified scene. Horna’s spread departs from the standard photojournalist spreads, seen in the quintessential illustrated magazine, Life. In the first edition of Life, published in November 1936 [Figure 16], a single-page layout of photographs details the unfolding of the Spanish Civil War. The photographs are arranged in a grid-like pattern with even strips of negative space to delineate between each one and their captions. However, the photographs in the design of the two-page spread by Horna in Umbral are placed along the border of the text artistically. Out of the eleven photographs included, only two are placed along straight lines. Horna situates the other nine along diagonal axes and allows overlap between the photographs. This effect guides the viewer’s eye from one photograph to its neighbor in one, continuous flowing movement. Horna’s graphic design choices depart from the traditional illustrated magazine conventions, and establish her not as a photojournalist, but a humanitarian photographer who applies avant-garde methods in her portrayal of the images. While Horna was certainly present for the dark and dangerous moments of the Civil War, she mostly refrained from capturing photographs of corpses. Only two corpses appear throughout the 272 negatives at the CDMH: the corpse of a dog on the streets of Barcelona after the March bombings of 1938 and a deceased soldier from the Divisón Ascaso from the Aragón front. Instead of capturing the bodies of the deceased, Horna uses allegory to allude to death. Pelizzon asserts that the key to understanding Horna’s Civil War oeuvre lies in the significance of the empty spaces and the voids within her photographs.125 For example, Pelizzon analyzes a photograph by Horna after an air raid on Barcelona again between the 16th and 18th of March 1938, sin titulo (Marina Street, March Bombings) [ Figure 17]. The photograph captures a building that has been cleaved in half by the air raid. The rooms gape open towards the street, 36 displaying the delineations between each floor to the viewer. On each floor, a set of doors hang precipitously on their hinges, as if they are about to fall to the rubble beneath them at any minute. Pelizzon interprets this photograph in two ways. First, in which the building represents the dissolution of public and private space between war and civilian zones. And second, that the empty rooms of the building can be compared to empty coffins.126 Applying French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman’s concept of the ineluctable modality of the visible, Pelizzon concludes that the empty rooms in the building on Calle Marina induce the same sense of impending mortality that one feels as the gaze into an empty coffin.127 Without including images of corpses, Horna transmits the widespread fear and death that resulted from the March bombings through allusion and representation. Horna and her CNT Counterpart, Margaret Michaelis While their contemporaries Capa and Taro captured the Civil War, Polish photographer, Michaelis and Horna photographed the Spanish Revolution. Michaelis was Horna’s predecessor at the CNT-FAI from August 1936 to January/February 1937. Among the photographs attributed to Horna in Las Cajas de Ámsterdam are over 200 celluloids of 35 mm taken by Michaelis with her Leica and Contax cameras.128 Michaelis fled from Nazi Germany in 1933 and was living in Barcelona when the Nationalist coup d’état ignited the Spanish Civil War in July 1936. Souchy, tasked with transmitting the revolutionary experience of Spain to the surrounding countries to win their support, contracted Michaelis as a photographer. While there is no evidence that Michaelis held an official position within the CNT, Rubio Pérez concludes that she worked as a paid, independent photographer because her photographs are marked with the seal of her personal photo studio, Foto-Elis.129 The Sección Exterior created an itinerary of places for 37 Michaelis to visit and photograph that focused on anarchist improvements to transportation, agriculture, and industry.130 Michaelis captured most of her Spanish Civil War photographs over a six-day tour between October 21 and 27 with Russian anarchist activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940), her traveling companion, H.E. Alperine Kaminski (1881–1951), and Dutch anarchist writer Arthur Lehning (1899–2000). The tour began in Barcelona and traveled through the regions of Aragón and Valencia, stopping in Lérida, Castellón (accidentally, due to a car mishap), Xátvia, Alcoy, Utiel, Valencia, Tarragona, and Alorca. The subjects of Michaelis’s photographs of the tour vary widely and include textile and shoe workshops, churches converted into offices and hospitals, and the collectivization process of agricultural fields, and transportation services. However, as Rubio Pérez notes, in all these settings, the proletariat is the main protagonist.131 While in the town of Xátvia, which Horna visited less than a year later in July 1937, Michaelis photographed a grape harvest. In one photograph, three young girls clip and arrange bundles of grapes into baskets [Figure 18]. In another, Michaelis captures a campesina, steadying a wooden bucket of grapes on her shoulder, while gazing across the frame [Figure 19]. Taken from below, gazing upwards at the campesina, Michaelis affixes her silhouette against a clear sky which gives her a noble quality. Taken early in the Civil War and Revolution, Michaelis’s photographs project hope for a utopic future. The civilian population had no reason to believe that they were in immediate danger from Nationalist air raids. Therefore, Michaelis’s photographs document the accomplishments of the anarchist defense and revolution. Horna’s photography centers on depictions of the most vulnerable populations: the elderly, women, and children. She seeks to motivate the viewer to come to the aid of the subjects pictured by appealing to their humanitarian impulses. However, she too, demonstrates anarchist 38 efforts to improve social conditions, but specifically for mothers and their children. Horna also captures her protagonists in a grandiose, heroic manner by using an upward camera angle in a photograph of a young girl in Madrid with bright eyes [Figure 20] and a photograph of an elderly campesina gazing out across the landscape [Figure 21]. These photographs transcend documentary photography, as there is a clear, purposeful rhetoric associated with the figures. Horna and José later created a collage using the photograph of the campesina as a symbol of resistance, which I will return to in the following section. The photograph of the young girl was published in Tierra y Libertad on June 11, 1938. Next to the image, a caption reads, “protégé a nuestros niños” (protect our children)[See Appendix C, Figure 33].132 It asks the viewer to protect Spanish children from the heavy, ceaseless air raids that demolished Madrid. However, as observed by Pelizzon regarding the subjects of the photographs in “La maternidad bajo el signo de revolución,” Horna does not portray the young girl as a victim, but rather a symbol of hope, fortitude, and life. She is a representation of everything that is worth protecting. While both photographers use rhetorical strategies to project optimism, the main protagonist in Michaelis’s photographs are the proletarian and Horna’s are the elderly, women, and children. It is possible that the differing content of each photographer may simply be a result of the various assignments given to them by the CNT-FAI rather than personal preference. The CNT-FAI sent Michaelis to Xátvia to photograph the grape harvest and they sent Horna to the Casa de Maternidad in Vélez-Rubio to document refugee mothers and children. The CNT-FAI certainly dictated the locations and areas of interest (industry, agriculture, transportation, etc.) of Horna and Michaelis’s photographs, but they did not direct them as to the specific gender or age of their subjects.133 Moreover, war considerations drastically shifted after the Nationalists began to launch air raids on Spanish communities. Michaelis had already left Spain by the time that 39 these campaigns began. Would Michaelis’s photographs, if she had remained in Spain, have taken on a similar humanitarian agency, as Horna’s do? Horna’s and Michaelis’s shared background as Eastern European Jewish and anarchist photographers suggest that Michaelis may have turned to pacifist and humanitarian aims as well. Both photographers approached their subjects with the intention to understand their cultural experiences, with an ethnographic gaze. In Michaelis’s photographs, Rubio Pérez observes that “they show us real scenes of peasant life, the popular architecture, their unpaved roads, the plazas, the markets, as well as their work customs and history.”134 Horna and Michaelis were perhaps drawn to an ethnographic genre of photography due to their backgrounds as cosmopolitan, bourgeoise women. Entering the Spanish countryside to photograph the proletariat must have felt like a completely different world to explore. Rubio Pérez suggests that the vivid quality of Horna and Michaelis’s work is a necessity due to their role at the propaganda office of the CNT-FAI.135 Since the photographs were employed as and in service to anarchist propaganda, they needed to be visually descriptive to communicate with large audiences. However, their affinities run deeper than their shared position within the CNT-FAI. Nevertheless, it appears that Horna had more creative agency to determine how the photographs she captured were published and contextualized. As official photographer of the Spanish Photo Agency (Photo SPA, created in 1937 as a step towards professionalization of the propaganda office), then graphic editor of Umbral, Horna had greater influence over where and how her photographs were published. As an independent contractor to the CNT, Michaelis sold her photographs to the Sección Exterior, at which point, the creative licensing would have also switched hands. After Michaelis left Spain, most of the photographs that she had taken in the past year remained in the CNT-FAI archives. For example, photographs by Michaelis of the 40 grape harvest in Xátvia appeared in the journal, Mujeres Libres no. 10, published in July 1938, and in Umbral no. 5, published in August 1937, after she had relocated to Sydney, Australia.136 Photography’s Recontextualization of Reality Photography has an inextricable connection to reality, as concluded by Roland Barthes. He posits that although a photograph is never distinguished apart from its referent (or that which it represents), it’s claim to authenticity exceeds its power of representation.137 In other words, a photograph is evidence of a person, scene, or event that at one point, existed in front of the camera’s lens. It is an undeniable piece of proof of “what-has-been.”138 Nonetheless, a discussion on photography would not be complete without its limitations. Although photographs are given a hallowed status as visual evidence of fact, they lack context and are limited by their frame and perspective. Pelizzon emphasizes that a photograph is a fragment of reality. She states that the frame itself is a narrative tool.139 It only shows what the photographer chooses to capture within it. A photograph does not completely or accurately capture reality. Physically being present within a space is a completely different experience than looking at a flat, decontextualized photograph. Moreover, photographs have been manipulated and distorted from the inception of the medium. Therefore, the photograph, as argued by scholars, is more the result of the individual perspective of the photographer rather than a testament to reality. De Diego compares the authenticity of a photograph to an eyewitness account.140 Given one’s perspective and memory, witnessing an event, understanding what happened, and regurgitating it accurately are not analogous. Therefore, De Diego emphasizes the inherently autobiographical nature of photography. She states that Horna’s Spanish Civil War photographs inform the viewer about Horna herself and reflect the way that she approached the world. 141 Horna’s prudent desire to understand the human on the opposite side of the camera demonstrates 41 her deep empathy for others. The subjects that Horna captures, like at the Casa de Maternidad, inform the viewer of her desire for social reforms designed to support women. Horna’s use of allusion to represent death rather than the face of a corpse demonstrates her sensitivity to the pain of the human condition. In other words, the poetic nature of Horna’s photography that scholars repeatedly observe, can also be interpreted as the reflection of Horna’s personal approach to the conflict of the Spanish Civil War. Moreover, photographs themselves can be staged or manipulated. It was common during the Spanish Civil War for photographers to specifically direct and pose the subjects in their photographs. However, Sebastian Faber suggests that for magazine editors, publishers, and photographers, “truth and manipulation did not work at cross purposes. They went together.”142 For many, the circulation of staged or manipulated photographs was not at odds with the truth. Rather, manipulated photographs communicated the truth more clearly than those taken directly from reality, as in the case of photomontage. The article published alongside the photographs of the grape harvest in Xátvia by Michaelis in Mujeres Libres is titled, “Aragón Revolucionario” (Revolutionary Aragón). However, the town of Xátvia is in the Valencia province, rather than in Aragón. As Faber concludes, during the Spanish Civil War, the veracity of the photographs was less important than their narrative function.143 Some scholars attest that the manipulation and recontextualization of photographs can yield a more precise testament to “reality” than simply the photographs themselves. The integration of distinct elements and spaces within a photomontage captures the complexities that a simple photo cannot. Once applied in a narrative role within a photomontage, a photograph can be recontextualized to serve the ideologies of its manipulator, as we will explore in the following sections. In many ways, a photomontage is more ideology-prone than a straight photograph, which can posit numerous and diverse interpretations. 42 A comparison between Horna, Capa, Taro, and Michaelis situates Horna as a humanitarian photographer rather than a photojournalist due to her empathy for her subjects, which are predominantly women and children. I suggest that while Capa and Taro photographed the Spanish Civil War as photojournalists, Horna and her predecessor at the CNT-FAI, Michaelis, photographed the Spanish Revolution using ethnographic principles. However, Horna’s oeuvre stands as a completely unique example of humanitarian photography. 43 VI. The Image of Women in Spanish Civil War Propaganda Kati Horna did not consider herself a propagandist. In an interview with García shortly before her death, Horna stated, “I am anti-propagandist. I don’t want to know anything about propaganda.”144 It is perhaps this stance that informed later discussions about the propagandistic qualities of Horna’s work. Until World War I, the term “propaganda” held a neutral connotation and referred broadly to the dissemination of political beliefs.145 However, as governments needed to control public opinion to motivate recruitment during the First World War, “propaganda” assumed a connection with government manipulation and censure of information. Increasingly in the twentieth century, the term became linked with single party states, such as Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.146 The term retains this wide spectrum of connotation. In this context, “propaganda” will be considered a form of communication that directly propagates the ideologies of a singular political entity. Before the authors of Told and Untold in 2016 recentered Horna’s narrative around her political contributions to the CNT-FAI, scholars only briefly acknowledged that Horna’s work was propaganda.147 In an essay for Told and Untold, Basilio compares Horna’s Spanish Civil War photography and photomontages to other examples of Popular Front propaganda. She concludes that Horna actively engaged in the question of gender equality even when the Popular Front began to project images of women as symbols of factionalism.148 Her analysis prompts two important aspects to consider regarding Horna’s work during the Spanish Civil War. The first, which Basilio originally stated in 1995, is that Horna became interested in women’s equality during the Spanish Civil War, an interest that she continued to pursue throughout her life in Mexico.149 And the second, that through a comparison to Republican propaganda, Horna’s work may also be considered propagandist, as supported by Labajo’s 2017 chapter, “Miradas para la 44 Guerra de España.”150 I seek to augment both of Basilio’s claims by comparing of Horna’s work with her Spanish contemporaries Josep Renau (1907–1982) and Manuel Monleón (1904–1976). Although all three artists employ collage and photomontage to create propagandistic materials, Horna utilizes the image of the female body in a completely unique way. This is exemplary of her anarcho-feminist aims, considered by the Republican government and the Popular Front as factionalist but that additionally illustrate Horna’s burgeoning interest in women’s rights. A Brief Description of Renau and Monleón’s Artistic Methods Due to the prevalence of the traditional artistic canon in Spain, photomontage was welcomed relatively late, in the 1930s.151 Once introduced, the Republicans and Nationalists both used photomontage and photography. Although montage was also used to support Franco’s campaign, it resonated more harmoniously with the aims of the Republican government. According to Ades, “it is not surprising that photomontage is associated particularly with the political Left, because it is ideally suited to the expression of the Marxist dialectic.”152 Photomontage’s ability to demonstrate oppositions through layered juxtapositions makes it an ideal candidate to convey the Marxist dialectic that acknowledges contradiction. Heartfield, who joined the German Communist party in December 1918, envisioned photomontage as a “democratic ‘machine art’ with which to wage an aggressive ideological war” against fascism and capitalism and create worker solidarity.153 He believed, among other avant-garde artists, that photomontage was ideal for mass communication and distribution, due to its ability to combine symbols and reality. Renau and Monleón were major artists of propaganda and montage in Spain. Both men were influenced by Heartfield’s inflammatory montages that critiqued the Nazi regime using symbolism. Heartfield’s montages appeared frequently in the Arbeiter-Illustrierten Zeitung 45 (AIZ), later named Volks-Illustrierte (the same journal that published Horna’s collaboration with Bürger, Hitlerei). According to Evans and Gohl, Renau encountered a copy of AIZ with a photomontage by Heartfield in Valencia in 1932. The cover, referred to as “Heartfield’s peace dove,” displays the corpse of a white dove speared by a sword, suggesting that peace with the rising tide of fascism, is impossible. On reflection, Renau remarks that viewing the photomontage, “was for me like enlightenment. At a stroke I saw a connection between my life and a reasonable and fruitful path for my art.”154 Inspired by Heartfield, Renau began to use photomontage as a weapon of anti-fascism as an “activist-artist.”155 Heartfield’s photomontages in AIZ inspired Monleón as well. In a mysterious interview published in Umbral, a man claiming to be a friend of Monleón describes his artistic practices and experiences. However, at the end of the article, the author suggests that he may have been speaking with Monleón himself, who obliquely spoke through his “friend” while gloriously downing seven glasses of vermouth. The man that is presumably Monleón, explains that Heartfield’s photomontages, “marked a firm route for us in the revolutionary objective of art.”156 Heartfield inspired Monleón and Renau to use photomontage as a political weapon, primarily through his use of easily recognizable symbols to project a clear visual statement. Like Heartfield, Renau and Monleón use skulls to imply danger and death, broken swastikas to imply anti-fascist sentiment, and undamaged swastikas with horrific monsters to denote impending fascist threats.157 Both men borrow Heartfield’s use of symbols to clearly communicate with their audience. However, their photomontages also include Soviet iconography. Renau and Monleón repurposed elements of Soviet iconography into their own montages. Propaganda from the Soviet Union, specifically the journal, USSR in Construction (1931-1941) flooded into Spain after it was translated into Spanish in the late 1930s. Most of Monleón’s early 46 works were Soviet posters that mimicked the Russian Constructivist photomontages by El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko found in USSR in Construction.158 Mendelson observes that Renau culled images from the journal itself and integrated them into his own works.159 While Heartfield’s photomontages inspired Renau, he attributed the theory of montage to Soviet filmmaker, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin (1893–1953).160 Although the two never met, Renau encountered Pudovkin’s work through Juan Piqeras’s film magazine, Nuestro Cinema. Renau planned the layout and sequence of the photomontages in the 1937 Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris as a film. In his autobiography of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, Arte in Peligro, Renau describes his creative process, “from these already prepared photomontages and sketches, one worked from the beginning with a kind of ‘filmic guide.’”161 In 1935, Renau established his own journal in opposition to the growing popularity of the right-wing in Spain, titled, Nueva Cultura (1935– 1937). One issue, published in March 1937 included a film reel, constructed of individual scenes montaged by Renau, signed by Adolf Hitler and titled, “tengo derecho a matar 300,000 españoles” (I have the right to kill 300,000 Spaniards). Within which, Renau situates Hitler as “Papa Noel,” who, for Christmas, brings death to the children of Spain, played by photographs of lifeless corpses of children, killed during Nationalist air raids. Renau’s work is unapologetically propagandistic. In a manifesto, “Función social del cartel publicitario” (The Social Function of the Publicity Poster) published in the following issue of Nueva Cultura, Renau states that the artist’s creative freedoms should be subordinated to the public needs and calls for a shift towards pictorial realism as a wartime measure.162 However, Monleón’s beliefs in the role of the artist are reminiscent of Kassák’s justification for the introduction of politics into art. Monleón, through his “friend” states, “if we know how to feel it, 47 and give expression to it, and the environment is revolutionary, our work of art will be a revolutionary work.”163 He hopes that, although the technique of photomontage itself is not new, it will give rise to new values and ideas.164 Like Kassák, Monleón sidesteps the subordination of art to a political ideology by stating that art is the reflection of the artist and their environment. Representations of Women During the Spanish Civil War Pelizzon observes that the Spanish Civil War was a catalyst in the feminist movement.165 The war brought women into the public sphere, which incited reevaluations of their social value and role. The female image became a radicalized site of ideological experimentation and conflict. At the outbreak of the war, a small number of anarchist and communist women joined their husbands, brothers, and fathers at the front lines to deter the advancing Nationalists. The image of the miliciana (militiawoman) became synonymous with resistance against fascism during the first few months of the war. For example, the Republican government commissioned Renau to create photomurals for the 1937 Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. In a particularly memorable photographic juxtaposition, Renau placed two images of women next to each other to merge the traditional, diverse identities of Spain into that of a single, modern woman [Figure 23]. The first photograph featured a woman in traditional bridal clothing. She stands quietly, gazing at the camera, almost muted by her heavy drapery. Next to her, a militiawoman in modern clothes confidently strides forward, rallying those around her with a call. Renau placed the photograph of the militiawoman on a glass panel that brought her physically into the environment of the pavilion, highlighting her against the image of the woman in traditional dress. Marko Daniel observes, “this dynamism seems a direct challenge to the rigidity and the still, symmetrical pose of the other woman, swaddled as she is by her costume.”166 Renau creates cohesion through the image of the modern- 48 day every-woman represented by the militiawoman, who “would find freedom in her fight against fascism.”167 The image of the militiawoman represented a radical break from tradition, as women had, rarely been represented with the capacity for front-line presence. However, in September 1936, a few short months after the Nationalist coup d’état, the Republican government ordered women to withdraw from the front lines and inaugurated a new slogan, “Primero, ganar la guerra” (First, Win the War).168 This slogan addressed the strong factionalism that ran through the Popular Front. Specifically, the slogan targeted the anarchists, whose platform advocated for the liberation of women and whose response to the Nationalist attack was the most pronounced. Basilio remarks that these anxieties of factionalism were projected onto the female image, as other left-wing groups considered winning the war to be the primary aim of the Popular Front, and women’s rights secondary.169 Efforts for gender equality were marred as distracting and detrimental to the war effort. The slogan, “first, win the war” stifled the image of the strong, courageous militiawoman and she was replaced by male soldiers. Attention then shifted to the role of the combative mother, as labeled by Mary Nash.170 The image of the combative mother was an example for women to emulate. Rather than on the war front themselves, women were encouraged to enact the role of the combative mother as a domestic facilitator. She served to supply the government with male children, who in adulthood, would then join the ranks of the soldiers. Women became “suppliers of male children,” who were symbols of hope for the future against fascism.171 Although Horna also used the imagery of the combative mother, scholars observe that her specific use of the iconography furthered feminist discourse during the Spanish Civil War. Let us return to Horna’s layout in Umbral, titled, “la maternidad bajo el signo de la revolución,” [Figure 49 15] that features breastfeeding mothers at the refugee centers at Vélez Rubio and Alcázar de Cervantes. Basilio notes that the health of women and children represented key aspects of political liberation.172 Therefore, an image of a healthy mother and child became symbolic of the health of the war effort. Pelizzon states that Horna’s photographs do not solely deter factionalist anxieties and represent women in a domestic sphere. She argues that Horna’s portrayal of women at Vélez Rubio is marked by a form of “conscious motherhood,” in which the mother is defined as an individual in her own right.173 Rosón and Douglas find, that in Horna’s portrayal of women, vulnerability is a source of strength.174 Horna’s photographs were incorporated into a similar spread in the anarcho-feminist journal, Mujeres Libres (1936-1938), managed by Doctor Amaparo Poch, journalist Mercedes Composada and Saornil. The journal advocated to liberate proletarian women from the “triple slavery to which they had been subjected: slavery of ignorance, slavery of women, and slavery of workers.”175 Rather than simply subordinate women as producers to the needs of the Republican army, Mujeres Libres used women’s wartime role as an opportunity to advance the position of women within society. Horna’s photographs bolstered these efforts, through the lenses of the combative mother and the mother as an individual. Even before the war, in revolutionary leftist magazines, women’s bodies were associated with fertility, freedom and production. Mendelson identifies anarchist repurposing of the female form “as an image of regeneration and freedom from institutional restrictions, paired with the unrestrained cultivation of the land.”176 Both Renau and Monleón utilize images of nude women in the January and February 1935 issues of Estudios. Published in January, Renau’s montage, la primavera (the spring) [Figure 24] features a male campesino plowing a field with a white horse. As he struggles to move the plow in the foreground of the collage, a youthful, nude female body emerges from the fields in the background. Her figure looms over the campesino, suggesting 50 fertility and productivity. Although delegated to an agricultural context, the female figure is cast as a producer. Monleón’s cover of the following issue, includes a youthful, vibrant, and nude female figure vigorously reaching upwards towards the sky. Pages of a magazine, presumably those of Estudios, surround her lower torso, perhaps signifying that the articles within present rejuvenation, rebirth, and revolution. In this iteration, the female form does not represent agricultural production, but the generation of knowledge and liberty. This precedent, of the nude, youthful, female body representative of freedom and production, provided a clear framework within which the image of the combative mother could be utilized towards the same ends. Horna’s Integration of the Female Form within Propaganda However, Horna captured and published images of elderly women, which her Spanish contemporaries avoided. This choice completely breaks the mold fashioned around the dichotomy of miliciana or combative mother. This differentiation suggests that perhaps Horna’s work did not contribute to Popular Front or Republican propaganda specifically, but rather to anarcho-feminist aims. In propagandistic photomontages and collages, Horna uses the image of an elderly campesina to represent production, freedom, endurance, and the proletariat class. The 2013 exhibition of Horna’s work attributes an untitled photomontage of a campesina in a field [Figure 25] to both Kati and José Horna.177 However, only José’s signature—written as “Horna”—appears at the bottom of the photomontage. Kati retained her maiden name “Deutsch” through the Civil War and signed her work either “Kati” or “Fotos Kati,” as identified by Labajo.178 It may be possible that Horna’s only role in the creation of the montage was in allowing José to use her photograph. However, because the iconography of an elderly woman appears in her photomontage, Carcel (Jail) [Figure 26], signed by Kati alone and in another untitled photomontage signed by both Kati and José [Figure 27], we may somewhat confidently 51 conclude that Kati was a part of the creation of all three photomontages. Published in the anarchist newspaper Tierra y Libertad on June 18, 1938, the montage features a photograph by Kati of an elderly peasant woman (campesina) standing proudly in the foreground, hands resting on her hips, gazing towards the fields behind her. Although the woman’s hair is grey and her face wrinkled, she stands upright and steady, symbolic of women’s ability to continue producing even after her ability to bear children has diminished. She appears no less capable of agricultural labor than a younger woman. In the background, presumably drawn by José, two horses pull a plow while a man guides them. The words, “¡campesinos! La FAI esta con vosotos” (farmers! The FAI is with you) frame the montage. This montage contains the same elements as Renau’s la primavera, but replaces the faceless, young, nude female torso with a robust, hopeful, elderly campesina. This substitute speaks to the past and continued fortitude of the agricultural workers. The campesina does not simply represent freedom and productivity, but past and future resilience to authoritarian control. While José and Kati use the same method and symbolism as Renau, they further feminist discourse through their use of a photograph of an elderly woman. Horna repurposes the same face of an elderly woman in two separate photomontages. The first, titled Carcel, has been described as a “dreamlike scene” and a “ghostly woman” but whose political intonations require greater exploration.179 Horna layers a photograph of the anarchist jail in Barcelona over the face of a woman, trapping her within the space. She gazes at the camera, her mouth slightly ajar, while lines of concern ripple across her forehead. When the viewer meets her gaze, her eyes directly transmit her pain. She clutches her shoulder with her opposite hand to protect herself or perhaps to retain body heat. A lone guard, perched on a balcony, stands watch over the scene. An excerpt by Jaime Espinar accompanies the photomontage, published on December 4, 1937, in Umbral, warning that freedoms can be lost, 52 but the ordeals of those trapped can rally the proletarians of the world to create a different future.180 While the photomontage directly references anarchists trapped in Nationalist prisons, it symbolically alludes to the liberties of marginalized classes. The woman in the photomontage represents those who have fought for these liberties and who will continue to serve as a symbol of hope and resistance for future generations. This combination of meaning within the photomontage provides evidence that Horna’s work was open-ended enough that it served multiple causes: the antifascist war effort, women’s rights, and the rights of the workers. Although the shadow of the guard contains the trapped proletariat, the woman’s face looms over and overwhelms his form. Horna’s choice to use the face of an elderly woman serves a dual purpose: to represent the past and the future resilience of the proletariat. She is not a miliciana or a combative mother, but the embodiment of painful endurance. Horna and José apply the woman’s face to another photomontage, this time, encased in a crumbling home. They printed the photomontage on a glass for photographic projection and endorsed it with the heading, “Federación Anarquista Iberica” (Iberian Anarchist Federation), to demonstrate its political alliance with the FAI. At the bottom of the photomontage, the explanation, “el fascismo es…” (fascism is…) contextualizes the image. The same pain and fear- ridden face from Carcel stares out from a pile of wreckage. The crumbling and decrepit environment that Horna and José use references the destructive air raids that targeted civilian zones. A child’s face peers out from behind the woman’s cheek and dramatically changes the symbolism of the elderly woman. In Carcel and the montage of the campesina, the woman represents past and future anarchist resistance and fortitude. However, in this third iteration, the elderly woman represents the vulnerability of the civilian population and its history of suffering. Her meaning is altered by the addition of the young child behind her, who speaks to hope for the 53 future and the danger that the air raids present to children. This photomontage, unlike Carcel, returns women to their domestic, child-rearing role emphasized by the combative mother. However, the woman is not the child’s mother. She represents one half of the civilian population, while the child represents the other. Pelizzon observes that the fragmented and chaotic nature of the photomontage inherently resists fascism.181 While this is one purpose that the photomontage serves, it also serves as a call to maintain the momentum of anarchist revolution. It was published on the front page of Tierra y Libertad on March 19, 1938, with a rallying call to the “proletarians of the world” to “resist” bourgeoise interference in their socialist efforts. Horna’s incorporation of elderly women into propagandistic photomontages renegotiate the inherent meanings of images of women during the Spanish Civil War. However, they also condemn fascist violence and call for the unity of proletarian workers to continue to fight for the anarchist revolution. Horna’s photomontages speak to a targeted section of the population and contain distinct values that support the aims of the CNT-FAI. But she does not adhere to a “Spanish” or “Republican” iconography. She instead communicates in ways that allow for multiple interpretations. These photomontages can be considered through an antifascist lens, a socialist lens, or a feminist lens. Horna uses the same technique as Renau and Monleón but employs a different representation of women. Perhaps Horna’s political affiliations, contributions to anarchist propaganda and politically driven work are an understudied area of her life because propaganda is considered to be “ideologically tainted” and the anarchist efforts during the Spanish Civil War considered factionalist. Horna drifted away from the practices of photomontage and propaganda after the fall of the Republic. Fernández and Otayek attribute this shift to her disillusionment with the inability to achieve revolution in Spain.182 Although Horna 54 strayed from her radical political affiliations and direct propagandistic work, she remained committed to efforts to promote gender equality for the remainder of her life.183 55 VII. Conclusion Horna left Spain in the summer of 1938 to purchase photography materials in Paris. While there, the fall of the Republic became imminent. She remained in Paris, while José joined the Ebro Division, which safeguarded refugees through the Pyrenees as they fled to the French border. When he attempted to cross the border into France, he was interred at a refugee camp, which the French government instituted to manage the flood of refugees streaming into the country. April 1, 1939, marked the official end of the Spanish Civil War and the fall of the Republican government. José was released from the refugee camp at the border and joined Kati in Paris. Then, the two secured visas to travel to Mexico, a refuge from Franco’s newly established regime and the Nazi advance across Europe. Horna returns to avant-garde, humanitarian, and feminist artistic trends throughout her lifetime. For example, all three appear in Horna’s portrait of British surrealist artist Bridget Tichenor (1917–1990), taken in 1967 [Figure 27]. Although the photograph is not explicitly humanitarian, Horna uses the same upward camera angle to capture Tichenor’s resolute gaze, giving her a noble quality. Tichenor’s mixed-media surrealist sculpture, “Los encarcelados” (the imprisoned) sits in the background, towering over the viewer. Four faces peer out from behind bars, each trapped in a series of cubes stacked on top of each other. They are reminiscent of Horna’s Subida a la Catedral, and perhaps also allude to the restricted rights of women. Horna’s art is inseparable from her life, which reflect a multitude of artistic styles, due to her manifold experiences across Europe and Mexico. Horna was a “multilingual” artist in the sense that she was conversant in several artistic languages of the interwar avant-garde, particularly Constructivism, Surrealism and Dadaism. She, like numerous other interwar avant-garde artists conducted rigorous experimentation of 56 artistic methods to create politically engaged work. Her continued perseverance towards an effective technique to integrate art and politics demonstrates her core desire, held by many of her contemporaries, to reintegrate art with life.184 Therefore, throughout this thesis, I emphasize that Horna’s narrative reflects her integral contributions to the European interwar avant-garde. She employed these avant-garde methods in service to the CNT-FAI, but to various degrees. Many of her photomontages and photographs are open-ended and simultaneously project multiple ideologies from antifascism to socialism and feminism. This thesis traces Horna’s young artistic and political development from its origins in the interwar avant-gardes to humanitarian photography during the Spanish Civil War. In following this trajectory, I found that although Horna’s photography served a political purpose during the interwar years, its significance extends beyond the Spanish Civil War. Horna acted as a politically engaged artist, but she did not sacrifice the humanity of her subjects in service of any political organization or message. Her photographs primarily illustrate her sensitivity and empathy for human subjects. Horna’s unique sense of affinity for those in front of her camera lens extended the value of her photography into contexts beyond its immediate application with the CNT-FAI. Her photography serves a social dimension as well, particularly through advocacy of feminist discourse, a conversation that continues into the twenty-first century. 1 Manuel García, “Kati Horna,” Lápiz: revista mensual de arte 173 (2001): 71. Translations from sources in Spanish throughout this thesis are mine. 2 Michel Otayek, “Loss and Renewal: the Politics and Poetics of Kati Horna’s Photo Stories,” in Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press, ed. Gabriela Rangel and trans. Christopher Leland Winks (New York: America’s Society, 2016), 22. 3 Throughout the war, Partos and Horna grew distant and by April 1938, Rubio Pérez suggests that the two were living in separate apartments. Almudena Rubio Pérez, “‘Las Cajas de Ámsterdam’: Kati Horna y los Anarquistas de la CNT-FAI,” Historia Social 96 (2020): 28, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26863342. 57 4 Emma Cecilia García Krisky, ed. Kati Horna: Recuento de una Obra (Mexico City: Fondo Kati Horna, CENIDIAP-INBA, 1995); Alicia Sánchez Mejorada, “Kati Horna y su manera cotidiana de captar la realidad,” Addenda, no. 10 (October-December 2004): 5–30; Sergio Flores, ed. Kati Horna (Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2013); Lisa Pelizzon, Kati Horna: Constellaciones de Sentido (Barcelona: San Soleil, 2015). 5 Otayek, “Loss and Renewal,” 27. 6 Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography: a History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. 7 Joanna Moorhead, “Kati Horna,” in Surreal Friends (Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2010), 59; Estrella de Diego, “The Photojournalist as Ethnographer,” in Kati Horna, ed. Sergio Flores (Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2013), 293; Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 21; Maria Antonella Pelizzari, “The ‘Social Fantastic’ in Kati Horna’s Paris (1933-1937)” in Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press, ed. Gabriela Rangel and trans. Christopher Leland Winks (New York: America’s Society, 2016), 45; Rubio Pérez, “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam,” 23. 8 Éva Forgács and Tyrus Miller, “The Avant-Garde in Budapest and in Exile in Vienna,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, eds. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1128. 9 Oliver Botar, “Lajos Kassák, Hungarian ‘Activism’, and Political Power,” Canadian-American Slavic studies 36, no. 1–2 (2002), 394. 10 Botar, 394. 11 Botar, 399–400. 12 Forgács and Miller, “The Avant-Garde in Budapest,” 1128. 13 Botar, “Lajos Kassák,” 400. 14 Botar, 401. 15 Moorhead, “Kati Horna,” 57. 16 Forgács and Miller, “The Avant-Garde in Budapest,” 1137. 17 Esther Levinger, “The Theory of Hungarian Constructivism,” The Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (1987): 457, https://doi.org/10.2307/3051066. 18 Levinger, 457. 19 Forgács and Miller, “The Avant-Garde in Budapest,” 1137. 20 Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 15– 17, 30. 21 Jean-François Chevrier, “A Cosmopolitan Biography in the Feminine,” in Kati Horna, ed. Sergio Flores (Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2013), 289. 22 Otayek, “Loss and Renewal,” 22. 23Pelizzari, “The ‘Social Fantastic,’” 44. 24 Otayek, “Loss and Renewal,” 22. 25 Otayek. 26 Otayek, 23. 27 Eleanor Hight, Moholy-Nagy: Photography and Film in Weimar Germany (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Museum, 1985), 10. 28 László Moholy-Nagy, “Moholy-Nagy’s letter to Antal Németh,” in Moholy-Nagy, 1st Paperback, ed. Krisztina Passuth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 396. 29 Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 1st Paperback (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 38. 30 Rubio Pérez, “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam (2020),” 25. 31 Rubio Pérez, 25; Rodríguez, “Introduction to the Kati Horna Archive,” 282. 58 32 Otayek, “Loss and Renewal,” 25. 33 Kati Horna, The Kati Horna Archive, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain. 34 Rubio Pérez, “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam,” 22. 35 It is likely that there are more photomontages by Horna that scholars have not yet found or identified. I recently conducted research on the newspaper, Tierra y Libertad at the CMDH and found two previously unidentified photomontages signed by José using Kati’s photographs. See Addendum C to view my original research on the photomontages and photography published by Kati and José Horna in Tierra y Libertad. Although the scope of this thesis did not allow me to fully investigate this topic, it provides a promising path for future scholarship. 36 Concepción Bados Ciria, “La cámara de Kati Horna: Fotografías y textos de la Guerra Civil de España,” Letras Peninsulares (Spring 1988): 76; Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 21; Chevrier, “A Cosmopolitan Biography,” 288. 37 Hight, Moholy-Nagy, 42. 38 Hight, 105-6. 39 Hight, 106. 40 Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 32. 41 “Obrera de la fotografía.” Lisa Pelizzon, “El conflicto en el cruce de fronteras: Kati Horna y la Guerra Civil Española,” DeSignis 28 (01 January 2018): 76. 42 Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 22. 43 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 124; Miriam Margarita Basilio, “‘First, Win the War!’ Kati Horna, Gendered Images and Political Discord During the Spanish Civil War”, in Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press, ed. Gabriela Rangel and trans. Christopher Leland Winks (New York: America’s Society, 2016), 71. 44 Basilio. 45 Basilio, 57, 71. 46 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 126. 47 García, “Kati Horna,” 68. 48 Libre Studio no. 8 (January 1938). 49 Basilio, “First, Win the War!,” 58. 50 David Evans and Sylvia Gohl, Photomontage: A Political Weapon (London: G. Fraser, 1986), 19. 51 Evans and Gohl, 34. 52 Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), 16. 53 Pelizzari, “The ‘Social Fantastic,’” 44; Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 22; Rubio Peréz, “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam (2020),” 23. 54 Pelizzon, 237. 55 Pelizzon, 237–240. 56 Hight, Moholy-Nagy, 110. 57 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 20. 58 Raymond Spiteri, “Surrealism and the Question of Politics, 1925-1939,” in Companion to Dada and Surrealism, ed. David Hopkins (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 122. 59 Pelizzon, 20. 60 Rodriquez, “Introduction to the Kati Horna Archive,” 282. 61 Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, El surrealismo y el arte fantástico de México (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas-UNAM, 1969), 78. 59 62 Rodriquez, “Introduction to the Kati Horna Archive,” 282. 63 Chevrier, “A Cosmopolitan Biography,” 288. 64 Louis Aragon, “The Challenge to Painting,” in The Surrealists Look at Art: Eluard, Aragon, Soupault, Breton, Tzara. Edited by Pontus Hulten. Translated by Michael Palmer and Norma Cole (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1990), 64. 65 Alison James, “‘Pris sur le vif’: The Surrealist Poetics of the Document,” in The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature: Writing with Facts (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2020), 92, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198859680.003.0003. 66 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 81. 67 Max Ernst, “Beyond Painting,” in Surrealists on Art, ed. Lucy Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 126. 68 Ernst, 126. 69 Werner Spies, Max Ernst Collages: the Invention of the Surrealist Universe (New York: Abrams, 1991), 128. 70 Spies, 225. 71 Pelizzon, “El Conflicto en el Cruce de Fronteras,” 84. 72 Spies, Max Ernst Collages, 219. 73 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 48. 74 Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” in L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, D. C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985), 85. 75 Foster, 199. Pelizzon, I believe, incorrectly refers to the photomontage, Muñecas de Miedo as Cartel de Francia. A corresponding image is not included in the book. However, I have concluded that based on the description that Pelizzon includes of the photomontage, that it is in fact from Horna’s Muñecas del Miedo series. 76 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 208. 77 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 189. 78 Foster, 189. 79 Foster, 189. 80 Foster, 102. 81 Wieland Schmied, “The Engineer of Eros,” Hans Bellmer (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 16– 18. 82 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 120. 83 Schmied, “The Engineer of Eros,” 25. 84 Chevrier, “A Cosmopolitan Biography,” 288. 85 Chevrier, 291. 86 Alicia Sánchez-Mejorada, “El legado de Kati Horna,” Artes de México 56 (July 2021): 8, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24314078; María Aranzazu Díaz-Regañon Labajo, “Miradas para la guerra de España: los usos de las fotografías de Kati Horna en la propaganda del Gobierno republicano, de la CNT-FAI y en las revistas ilustradas Weekly Illustrated, Umbral, y Mujeres Libres (1937-1939),” in Liberales, cultivadas y activas: redes culturales, lazos (2017): 516. 87 “Humaniza los objetos al asignarles un espacio primordial en la escena, así logra conferirles vida y personalidad propias.” Sánchez-Mejorada, “El legado de Kati Horna,” 3. 88 “Con la que consigue transformar el paraje conocido en una escena onírica.” Sánchez-Mejorada, 4. 89 Sánchez-Mejorada, 7. 90 “Los momentos en que el azar daba un vuelco irrumpiendo en lo común y corriente.” Sánchez- 60 Mejorada, 7. 91 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 21. 92 Foster, 159. 93 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, New Left Review 108 (1978): 50. 94 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 158. 95 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 71–72, 79. 96 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 188. 97 Foster, 189. 98 Horna also published Subida a la Catedral, reincorporated into a photomontage titled, “Luchamos hasta la Muerte o la victoria (We are Fighting Until Death or Victory)” in Umbral No. 29 (March 31, 1938) with a photograph of El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, photographs of children performing exercises outdoors, and heroic soldiers to counter fascist claims of anarchist brutality. 99 Basilio, “First, Win the War!,” 69. 100 Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 3. 101 Walker, 3. 102 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 9, https://doi.org/10.2307/1210183. 103 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1st American ed., trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 115. 104 Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 23. 105 García, “Kati Horna,” 71. 106 De Diego, “The Photojournalist as Ethnographer,” 293. 107 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 1. 108 Juan Manuel Bonet, “Kati Horna, in the Context of her Culture and Life,” in Kati Horna, ed. Sergio Flores (Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2013), 296; Rubio Pérez, “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam (2020 and 2022).” 109 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 292. 110 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 43. 111 María Rosón and Lee Douglas, “The Things They Carried: A Gendered Rereading of Photographs of Displacement during the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 21, no. 4 (2020): 464. 112 Rosón and Douglas. 113 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 185. 114 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, 193. 115 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, 165. 116 Rosón and Douglas, “The Things They Carried,” 462. 117 Labajo, “Miradas para la guerra de España,” 455. 118 Rosón and Douglas, “The Things They Carried,” 462; De Diego, “The Photojournalist as Ethnographer,” 292. 119 Rubio Pérez, “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam (2020),” 26. 120 While there have been exhibitions of the photographs from “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam” and two articles published between 2020-2022 by Rubio Pérez, the full archive has yet to been made public. 61 Therefore, this thesis draws from the Kati Horna Archive at the CDMH and integrates Rubio Pérez’s findings on the “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam” archive for support. 121 Chevrier, “A Cosmpolitan Biography,” 291; De Diego, “The Photojournalist as Ethnographer,” 294. 122 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 153. 123 Pelizzon, 149–150, 154. 124 Basilio, “First, Win the War!,” 69. 125 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 33. 126 Pelizzon, “El Conflicto en Cruce de Fronteras,” 79. 127 Pelizzon. 128 Almudena Rubio Pérez, “‘Las Cajas de Ámsterdam’: Margaret Michaelis y los Anarquistas de la CNT-FAI,” Historia Social 104 (2022): 90. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48683154. 129 Rubio Pérez, 78. 130 Rubio Pérez. 131 Rubio Pérez, 82. 132 Tierra y Libertad, June 11, 1938. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. 133 Rubio Pérez, “Las Cajas de Ámsterdam (2022),” 77. 134 “Nos muestran escenarios reales de la vida campesina, su arquitectura popular, sus calles sin asfaltar, las plazas, los mercados, así como las costumbre y la historia del trabajo.” Rubio Pérez, 84. 135 Rubio Pérez, 84. 136 Rubio Pérez, 90. 137 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5, 89. 138 Barthes, 82. 139 Pelizzon, “El Conflicto en Cruce de Fronteras,” 77. 140 De Diego, “The Photojournalist as Ethnographer,” 292. 141 De Diego, 292. 142 Sebastian Faber, Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018), 17. 143 Faber, 17. 144 “Yo soy anti-propagandista. No quiero saber nada de la propaganda.” García, “Kati Horna,” 68. 145 Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: the Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 7. 146 Clark, 7–8. 147 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 60; Norah Horna y Fernández, “Legacy and Nostalgia: the Reconstruction of Memory,” in Kati Horna, ed. Sergio Flores (Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2013), 302. 148 Basilio, “First, Win the War!,” 71. 149 Basilio, “The Art of Kati Horna,” Latin American Literature and Arts 51 (1995): 71, https://doi.org/10.1080/08905769508594459. 150 Labajo, “Miradas para la Guerra de España,” 449–529. 151 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 123. 152 Ades, Photomontage, 12. 153 Margit Rowell, “Constructivist Book Design: Shaping the Proletarian Conscience,” in The Russian Avant-Garde Book, ed. Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 57. 62 154 Evans and Gohl, Photomontage: a Political Weapon, 22. 155 Doğan Arslan, “John Heartfield’s Photomontages as a Political Tool,” European Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies 3.4 (2018): 76. 156 “Nos marcaron una ruta firme en el objetivo revolucionario del arte.” Jaes, “Las otras armas: El fotomontage Monleón,” Umbral 9 (04 September 1937): 12. 157 Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, “Montage as Weapon: the Tactical Alliance between Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield,” New German Critique 107 (2009): 199, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25609150. 158 Cuevas-Wolf, 199. 159 Mendelson, Documenting Spain, 148. 160 Mendelson, 158; Cuevas-Wolf, “Montage as Weapon,” 199. 161 Mendelson, 158; Josep Renau, Arte en peligro 1936-39 (Valencia: Ajuntament de Valencia and F. Torres, 1980), 19, 22–23. 162 Basilio, Visual Propaganda, 23. 163 “Si sabemos sentirlo y plasmarlo y el ambiente es revolucionario, nuestra obra de arte será una obra revolucionaria.” Jaes, “Las otras armas,” 12. 164 Jaes, 12. 165 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 140. 166 Marko Daniel, “Spain: Culture at War,” in Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators, 1930- 1945, ed. Dawn Ades (Stuttgart: Oktagon Verlag, 1995), 67. 167 Mendelson, Documenting Spain, 138. 168 Basilio, “First, Win the War!,” 58. 169 Basilio, 59. 170 Robyn Munford and Mary Nash, Social work in action (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, 1994), 99. 171 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 143–145. 172 Basilio, “First, Win the War!,” 66. 173 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 150; Rosón and Douglas, “The Things They Carried,” 474. 174 Rosón and Douglas, 474. 175 “Triple esclavitud a la que habían sido sometidas: esclavitud a la ignorancia, esclavitud como mujeres y esclavitud como trabajadores.” Labajo, “Miradas para la guerra de España,” 503. 176 Mendelson, Documenting Spain, 151–152. 177 Sergio Flores, ed., Kati Horna, 261. 178 Labajo, “Miradas para la guerra de España,” 514. 179 Sánchez-Mejorada, “Kati Horna,” 180 The publication date of “Carcel” in Umbral suggests that Horna experimented with photomontage months before the date provided by many scholars. “Navidad en España” is commonly attributed as Horna’s first montage, however, “Carcel” was published almost a month prior to “Navidad en España” in Libre-Studio. It is likely that Horna collaborated on both photomontages around the same time, as photo #185 in the Kati Horna Photo Archive at the CDMH displays “Carcel” propped in front of “Navidad en España.” 181 Pelizzon, Kati Horna, 133. 182 Fernández, “Memory and Recovery,” 9; Otayek, “Loss and Renewal,” 29. 183 Christina De Léon, “Kati Horna in Mexico and her Representation of the Female Experience,” in Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press, ed. Gabriela Rangel and trans. Christopher Leland Winks (New York: America’s Society, 2016), 75. 63 184 Gail Day, “Art, Love and Social Emancipation: on the Concept ‘Avant-Garde’ and the Interwar Avant-Gardes,” in Art of the Avant-Gardes, eds. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood (New Haven: yale University Press, 2004), 333. 64 APPENDIX A FIGURES Figure 1. Kati Horna, untitled (Carcel modelo de Barcelona), 1937, photograph on cellulose nitrate, 6 x 6 cm, #119 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/118104. 65 Figure 2. László Moholy-Nagy, Bauhausbalkone in Dessau (Bauhaus Balconies), ca. 1926–28, gelatin silver print, 37.2 x 24.7 cm. Collection of the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin. 66 Figure 3. László Moholy-Nagy, 25 Pleitegeier (25 Bankruptcy Vultures), 1922–3, collage of printed paper with ink on paper, 30 x 23 cm. The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. 67 Figure 4. Lajos Kassák, Munka/Dokumentum (Work/Document), c. 1928, collage on paper, 21.9 x 17.8 cm, Petöfi Literary Museum, Budapest, Hungary. 68 Figure 5. Kati Horna, Navidad en España (Christmas in Spain), 1938, photomontage, 15 x 24.5 cm, #183 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/118173?nm. Published in Libre- Studio no. 8, January 1938. 69 Figure 6. Francisco de Goya, Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, 1819, oil on panel, 47 x 35 cm, Escuelas Pías de San Antón, Madrid. 70 Figure 7. Kati Horna, L’enfance (Childhood), 1938, photomontage, 25.5 x 20.3 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, Mexico City, México. 71 Figure 8. László Moholy-Nagy, Die Eigenbrötler II (The Mavericks II), 1927, photomontage (gelatin silver prints and ink), 22.4 x 15.7 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 72 Figure 9. Max Ernst, “Chaque émeute sanglante la fera pleine de grâce et de vérité” (Each bloody riot will help her to live in grace and truth), in La femme 100 têtes, 1929. Private Collection. 73 Figure 10. Kati Horna, sin titulo (untitled), 1937, photomontage, 22.4 x 17 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, México City, México. 74 Figure 11. Kati and José Horna, sin titulo (untitled), 1938, photomontage, 8.3 x 5.2 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, Mexico City, México. Published in Tierra y Libertad, July 23, 1938. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain. 75 Figure 12. Kati and José Horna, Muñecas del miedo (Dolls of fear), 1939, photomontage, 25.4 x 20.5 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, Mexico City, México. 76 Figure 13. Hans Bellmer, La Poupée spread in Minotaure no. 6, December 1934. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 77 Figure 14. Kati Horna, Subida a la Catedral (Ascent to the Cathedral), 1938, photomontage, 22.2 x 19.6 cm, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/118174?nm. Published in Libre- Studio, March 1938. 78 Figure 15. Kati Horna, journal layout for “La maternidad bajo el signo de la revolución,” Umbral no. 12, October 1937. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, https://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/hd/es/viewer?id=4e766593-eff2-4c30-9697-702582d32ceb. 79 Figure 16. Photographs of the Spanish Civil War, Life no. 1, November 1936. Published by Time Inc., www.LIFE.com. 80 Figure 17. Kati Horna, sin titulo (Marina Street, March Bombings), 1938, photograph on cellulose nitrate, 6 x 6 cm, #148 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/118136. 81 Figure 18 (left). Margaret Michaelis, untitled, October 1936, photograph on glossy paper, 14.4 x 11.9 cm, accession #86.1384.61, National Gallery of Australia. Figure 19 (right). Margaret Michaelis, untitled, 1936, photograph on glossy paper, 17.2 x 11.9 cm, accession #86.1384.63, National Gallery of Australia. 82 Figure 20. Kati Horna, sin titulo (Girls of Madrid), 1937, photograph on cellulose nitrate, 6 x 6 cm, #220 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/118215. 83 Figure 21. Kati Horna, sin titulo (Campesinos en un vinedo en el camino de Madrid), 1937, photograph on cellulose nitrate, 6 x 6 cm, #89 in the Kati Horna Archive. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/118340. 84 Figure 22. Josep Renau, photomural contrasting two types of women: the traditionally dressed “Albercana” and the “Miliciana,” Popular Arts Section, second floor, Spanish Pavilion, 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la vie Moderne, Paris. Ministère de la Culture-France. Photograph by François Kollar. Figure 23. Josep Renau, la primavera (the spring), collage. Archivo José Huguet, Valencia, Spain. Published in Estudios, January 1935. 85 Figure 24. Kati and José Horna, ¡Campesinos! La FAI está con vosotros (Farmers! The FAI is with you!), 1937, photomontage, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain. Published in Tierra y Libertad, June 18, 1938, http://www.mcu.es/ccbae/es/consulta/registro.do?id=8608. 86 Figure 25. Kati Horna, Carcel (Jail), 1937, photomontage, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain. Published in Umbral no. 20, December 4, 1937, https://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/hd/es/viewer?id=b3fabbfe-4012- 4324-9178-742e676b972a. 87 Figure 26. Kati and José Horna, sin titulo (untitled), 1937, film projection glass, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/118272. 88 Figure 27. Kati Horna, Bridget Tichenor, 1967, vintage gelatin silver print, 25 x 20 cm, Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, Mexico City, México. 89 APPENDIX B TIMELINE OF KATI HORNA’S YOUNG LIFE, MAJOR AVANT-GARDE MOVEMENT EVENTS, AND SIGNIFIANT POLITICAL EVENTS (1912-1939) 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 APPENDIX C PHOTOMONTAGES AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATI AND JOSÉ HORNA PUBLISHED IN TIERRA Y LIBERTAD Figure 28. Front page of Tierra y Libertad on March 19, 1938 featuring Kati and José Horna’s untitled photomontage (1937). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://www.mcu.es/ccbae/es/consulta/registro.do?id=8608. 97 Figure 29. Page four of Tierra y Libertad on April 16, 1938 featuring Kati Horna’s photograph, untitled (Miliciano de División Ascaso, #29 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH, 1937). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://www.mcu.es/ccbae/es/consulta/registro.do?id=8608. 98 Figure 30. Page four of Tierra y Libertad on May 21, 1938 featuring Horna’s photograph (#225 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH) from a meeting of the anarchist women’s organization and journal, Mujeres Libres (issue no. 11 can be seen in background of image). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://www.mcu.es/ccbae/es/consulta/registro.do?id=8608. 99 Figure 31. Page four of Tierra y Libertad on June 4, 1938 featuring an untitled and previously unidentified photomontage by Kati and José Horna. Although only José’s signature appears at the bottom of the photomontage, it uses Horna’s photograph of the División Ascaso (#28 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH, 1937). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://www.mcu.es/ccbae/es/consulta/registro.do?id=8608. 100 Figure 32. Front page of Tierra y Libertad on June 11, 1938 featuring an untitled and previously unidentified photomontage by Kati and José Horna. Although only José’s signature appears at the bottom of the photomontage, it uses Horna’s photographs of a campesino (farmer) in Monte Aragón (#22 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://www.mcu.es/ccbae/es/consulta/registro.do?id=8608. 101 Figure 33. Page two of Tierra y Libertad on June 11, 1938 featuring Horna’s photograph (#220 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH, 1937). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://www.mcu.es/ccbae/es/consulta/registro.do?id=8608. 102 Figure 34. Page four of Tierra y Libertad on June 25, 1938 featuring photographs by Horna in a hospital in Barcelona (#138 in the Kati Horna Archive at CDMH). Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca, Spain, http://www.mcu.es/ccbae/es/consulta/registro.do?id=8608. 103 Figure 35. Page two of Tierra y Libertad on July 23, 1938 featuring Kati and José Horna’s untitled photomontage (1938). 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