Armengol, the Catalan caricaturist who portrayed fascist leaders as silly children playing at war

Wars are not always won by the strongest; Sometimes, it is the smartest one who wins the day. In the case of the Second World War The intervention of the United States was definitive due to its weapons power, but before that propaganda played a very important role.

Nazism, the first force to move – the German invasion of Poland was the trigger for the conflict – poured much of its efforts into disseminating its ideology with great fanfare. With Joseph Goebbels At the helm, the Third Reich tried to inoculate aversion to Jews throughout Europe. This stubbornness was, precisely, the object of the advertising campaign that the allies used against him.

One of the great exponents of propaganda against Hitler was the Catalan cartoonist Mario Armengol Torrella (Sant Joan de les Abadesses, Gerona, 1909 – Nottingham, England, 1995), the only Spanish artist who toiled in this task for the British cause. From 1941 to 1945, he drew around 2,000 cartoons –vignettes– at the service of the British Ministry of Information. They were published in different magazines from allied countries – that of the French exiles in London – which were distributed throughout the world.

The National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC) dedicates the exhibition to the artist Ink against Hitler. Mario Armengolcurated by Garcia-Planes and Arnau Gonzalez and Villa and framed in the program of exhibitions and activities Art, war and memory.

You can visit from October 7 to January 11, 2026 and includes a selection of the originals preserved by the author and the family. Surprisingly unknown to many, his work constitutes one of the largest collections of political satire illustrations from World War II in the world, according to the museum.

In addition to the value of the exhibition, it is worth dwelling on the artist’s life adventures, who He only dedicated himself to cartooning during the conflictneither before nor after. He was the son of some textile industrialists from Terrassa, but he wanted to be an artist. He studied in Madrid and Paris years before the war broke out.

In 1938 He enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and was destined for the Sahara. He then fought against the Nazis in the Battle of Narvik (Norway), trying to stop German expansion towards the Arctic, and ended up in Great Britain in 1941.

The Ministry of Information of Churchill’s government required his services. From then until the end of the war, his mission was to discredit the Axis powers with mocking caricatures. It was about “undoing the force of myth with ink”as we read in the exhibition dossier.

Mussolini, for example, appears characterized as the jester of the Duke of Mantua in the Rigoletto by Verdi. Or we see him “as a silly boy playing at war.” Although Hitler is Armengol’s most recurrent targetwhich ridicules his mustache and strips of solemnity the Nazi swastika, an oriental emblem that the führer became a symbol of his crusade.

The idea was to interpret reality profitably so that it seemed that Hitler was always losing, despite what the propaganda said. “Weren’t we a superior race?”ironically about it in one of his vignettes.

The French collaborationists led by the marshal are not spared from his darts. Philippe Petain and its president of the government, Pierre Lavalwhose physical features are exacerbated by Armengol, bringing him closer to the gypsy ethnic group. He does the same with the Japanese. A fact that invites us to question ourselves, from today, about the limits of humor. In this sense, to what extent is a joke justified in a context as tragic as World War II?

Be that as it may, his drawings are a good starting point to immerse yourself in the development of the contestas it reflects a good part of the milestones that occurred there. Armengol caricatures many of the war fronts, as well as the most prominent figures of the conflict.

Hitler’s defeat in Russia, for example, does not escape his incisive gaze, which echoes the failure of the Wehrmacht tanks to advance after the Japanese refused to attack from the rear. It also recreates the horror of berlin in the final bars.

In some vignettes, such as the one with the cobblestones full of blood, we notice that Armengol I was already pointing towards the comicso in vogue currently. The style of his line is influenced by the tradition of Catalan cartoonists and satirical publications from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while at the same time he is related to cartoonists such as David Low o Stephen Roth.

After the war, Armengol worked as a publicist and graphic designer, although he again had a brief dabble with political satire decades later, when he was hired to parody the government of Margaret Thatcher. In 1995 he died without claiming his work in World War II.