Intelligent humor under Franco

The Spanish press under Franco saw life from different points of view. One of them appeared in La Codorniz (or, the quail), the legendary publication founded in 1941 by Miguel Mihura, and edited in its heyday by Álvaro de Laiglesia, who in the 1950s, coined the slogan 'La revista más audaz para el lector más inteligente' (or, the most audacious magazine for the most intelligent reader).

And this is what it was for its three decades of life: a publication that purveyed humor as intelligent as was possible in the days of Franco's fascist regime, navigating the exceedingly shallow and rock-infested waters of censorship ? until Franco's death in 1975 when a multitude of new publications sprang up, snapping up most of the magazine's best talent, and finally driving it out of business in 1978.

The Museo de la Ciudad is now celebrating the 70th anniversary of its birth with an exhibition of more than 30 drawings by the many artists who published in its pages: Chumy Chúmez, Forges, Gayo, Julio Cebrián, Kalikrates, Madrigal, Máximo, Mihura, Mingote, Summers, Tono, and more.

The show's curator, Felipe Hernández Cava, has paid particular tribute to De Laiglesia, who, he says, was "the best cinema-poster artist in Spain, together with Renau. He looked to the heritage of Goya, Alenza and Solana, projecting an affectionate yet pitiless view of Spanish things."

In the catalog, he adds that "this goes far in explaining the work of other artists who, with personalities as distinct as his own, followed his line as they grew: Chumy, Julio Cebrián, Madrigal, El Roto, etc." Hernández Cava also notes that it is impossible to understand La Codorniz without the figure of El Perdiguero, a well-known cartoonist before the Civil War who was recruited by Mihura. Sentenced to death for his leftist sympathies, he was later pardoned, but forbidden to use his artistic pseudonym. "This magazine never practiced ideological discrimination. There were Republicans, fascists, anarchists and nationalists, but one's opinions never got in the way of the harmony that existed in the group," explains the curator.

De Laiglesia himself, for example, possessed suitable right-wing credentials, having fought in the Blue Division (the Spanish volunteer force that Franco sent to help Hitler against the Russians). Yet he received death threats from a band of fascists who, one day in 1952, walked into the office, armed with pistols, chains and a bottle of acid, offended by a parody of the fascist newspaper Arriba. Trouble with the fascist censorship was an abiding fact of life in the magazine, which was fined or shut down a number of times.

The exhibition is organized in four periods, those of the magazine's four editors: Mihura (1941-44); De Laiglesia (1944-77); Summers (1977-78), "a vain attempt to find a new role for the masthead in democracy"; and that of Cándido (1978), who, drawing inspiration from the satirical French newspaper Le Canard Enchainé, "tried uselessly to apply new criteria."

La Codorniz, 1941-1978. Until April 15 at Museo de la Ciudad, C/Príncipe de Vergara 140, Madrid. Free entry.