Poster - Les Milicies us Necessiten!

The Militias Need You!, by Cristóbal Arteche, 1936.

Cristóbal Mauro Arteche de Miguel was born in Gijón in 1900. He left Spain for Cuba at the age of 17 and went on to New York where he worked as an illustrator, creating posters for plays and drawings of silent movie stars for newspapers. He moved to Argentina and worked for a newspaper which sent him as a correspondent to France.

In 1932 he returned to Spain where he produced posters advocating voting for the Left Front in the 1936 General Election and promoting the Olimpiada Popular (an alternative international sporting event that was due to be held during the Berlin Olympics). He was in Barcelona during 1936 and during the war he produced illustrated reports from the front. After the war he crossed the border into France and managed to get on a ship to Argentina where he lived until he returned to Spain in 1962, where he died in 1964.

For this poster, reminiscent of Kitchener’s “Your Country Needs You” and Dmitri Moor’s Soviet poster “Have you volunteered?”, Arteche is thought to have used a photograph of Marlene Dietrich as a model.

This is a digitally cleaned up print. The size is A3 (approx. 11.7" x 16.5"). Printed on good quality 170gm poster paper.

Printed by the Radical Poster Collective, UK

The Radical Poster Collective is dedicated to making good quality classic radical posters available at an affordable price. Posters are either digitally cleaned up to remove tears, stains, etc., or completely recreated to be as close as possible to the original.