“The Spanish people gather to fight, to defend freedom”

Although research on the nearly 2,000 Yugoslav volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War has generated renewed interest in the past few years, the role of art and the representations of the conflict by Yugoslav artists has not been sufficiently explored. While Picasso's Guernica is among the most famous visual representations of the Spanish Civil War, the Yugoslav experience was dramatically depicted in the images of Đorđe Andrijević Kun.  

Born in present-day Poland in 1904, Andrijević Kun moved to Belgrade to attend Art School ten years later, after which he went to Italy for further education. During the 1930s began exhibiting independently in Belgrade as well as in Zagreb. He was one of the founders of the group Earth (Zemlja) in 1937, and later that same year he published his first collection of prints, Bloody Gold.  

Andrejević Kun volunteered to fight in Spain but was commissioned to produce a series of drawings and woodcuts illustrating the plight of the Spanish people. In subsequent memoirs his compatriots recalled how he had wanted to hold a rifle in his hands but was told the Republic needed more artists. Kosta Nađ, a fellow volunteer and later a famous Yugoslav Partisan commander, noted that Andrejević Kun “just wanted to be a regular soldier. But his paintings, drawings, and talent were more important to us. Later, when he was in the headquarters of the 129th Brigade as a cultural worker, he made a number of excellent posters... we all highly respected this artist who marvelously and unselfishly transformed his talent into a weapon.” The resulting images were published in 1938 under the title For Freedom and dedicated to the Republic, which included “The Spanish people gather to fight, to defend freedom”. During the Second World War, Andrijević Kun actively participated in the Partisan movement, and after the war published works dedicated to the memory of the antifascist struggle. In the post-war period he was an acknowledged and award-winning artist, until his death in Belgrade in 1964. 

Andrijević Kun’s images from the Spanish Civil War are in harmony with one another, creating a singular whole.  As art historian Oto Bihalji-Merin noted, Andrijević Kun gave short, almost laconic names to his works, thus further creating an atmosphere of horror. The author had witnessed the horrors of war through his participation in the International Brigades, and masterfully conveyed his experiences by way of his woodcarving techniques. His works influenced the further formation of the art scene that dealt with depictions of war in the manner of the new social-realist art, and his images were used to illustrate numerous publications dealing with the Spanish Civil War and the People’s Liberation War.