Exhibitions
The cartoonist who fought with ink
Catalan Ink Against Hitler , with work by Mario Armengol, is one of the exhibitions that will close the year at the National Art Museum of Catalonia. We will be able to discover, in this way, a work that until now was forgotten. Armengol was a Catalan artist known for his work as an anti-fascist caricaturist during the Second World War, and now he will take center stage with a detailed exhibition that explains the great world conflict through his creations.
Mariano Armengol Torrella was born in 1909 in Sant Joan de les Abadesses, later signing as Mario Armengol or Mario Hubert Armengol. Initially, the artist supported the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. In 1938 he had to emigrate to France and in 1940 he arrived in the United Kingdom. He died in Nottingham in 1995.
He fought in these conflicts from his ink and from 1941 he worked for the British Ministry of Information, which made him the only Spaniard who collaborated massively in Allied propaganda during World War II. Armengol produced between 1,900 and 2,000 caricatures directed at Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo and other Axis figures that ended up being distributed by major media outlets such as the Boston Globe , the Chicago Sun or the Daily Mail .
The exhibition at the MNAC is a selection of the originals preserved by the author and his family which, together with the publications, become one of the largest collections worldwide of political satire illustrations of the most terrible conflict in history. Armengol created a modern, incisive, provocative style with many influences from contemporary comics.
The first exhibition stop was at the MuVIM in Valencia and from October 7 to January 11, 2026 it can be visited at the MNAC, under the curatorship of Plàcid Garcia Planas and Arnau González. A tour with more than 150 original unpublished drawings, in parallel with the creations of cartoonists from the United Kingdom such as David Low, Giles or Illingworth.
Tinta catalana contra Hitler explains in a caricatured way all the war fronts and the most prominent figures of that brutal combat in all areas. The exhibition is of enormous artistic quality, as well as versatile and modern, pointing to current comics, and continues to question the limits of humor in dramatic and brutal, fierce and atrocious contexts.
