Daily Life and Normality during the Second Republic

In Galicia, the summer of 1936 began with the campaign for the plebiscite on the Autonomy Statute. There was no end of meetings, events, and propaganda in which the best- and best-known artists and intellectuals of the day took part. More than just a political process, it was driven by the collective desire to achieve full recognition of an identity. Voting days was two weeks before the military coup on July 17, and those days saw the fiestas and celebrations that marked the beginning of summer, events that were not interrupted by political events taking place in Madrid. It was not thoughtlessness. Things were just completely normal.

This poster for the Apostle festival in Santiago de Compostela by the well-known artist Camilo Díaz Baliño captures the moment well. It shows the motifs of the festival, the Cathedral of Santiago in the background with an old bagpiper and a Young drummer. But it also contains a set of waving flags that testify to what the Statute had achieved, melding aspirations for an autonomous government with strengthened republican feeling.

The poster’s history reflects the brutality of the unexpected coup that came afterwards. Díaz Baliño was murdered in August, one of the first in Santiago de Compostela to suffer this fate. His son Isaac Díaz Pardo, who would later become a great Galician artist and intellectual but had then just turned sixteen and was a member of Unified Socialist Youth (JSU), had to flee for his life. The poster was used for the 1950 version of the festival, but with the democratic flags of Spain and Galicia cut out and without any recognition of who had created it.

AMM