The Reina Sofía Museum receives 30 original covers of La Codorniz by the illustrator Enrique Herreros

30 covers of La Codorniz by the illustrator Enrique Herreros arrive at the Museo Reina Sofia, where they will become part of the Collection 15 etchings from the series Tauromaquia de la muerte by the same author.

Legacy. Enrique Herreros Foundation. Madrid 2018. Via courtesy of the Reina Sofia Museum

At the Reina Sofia Museum, the signing ceremony took place between the director of the museum, Manuel Borja-Villel and Enrique Herreros, of a contract by which the latter bequeaths a set of 45 works by his father, the illustrator of the same name, linked mostly to the magazine La Codorniz, which will swell the Collection.

The legacy consists of thirty covers of La Codorniz, (collages or drawings) from the first years of the magazine and 15 etchings from the Tauromaquia de la muerte series by Enrique Herreros (Enrique García-Herreros y Codesido), (Madrid, Spain). 1903- Picos de Europa, 1977), renowned illustrator, filmmaker, draftsman and comedian who developed an interdisciplinary artistic work from the twenties onwards. The presence of Herreros in La Codorniz was really significant: author of more than eight hundred covers, thousands of drawings and hundreds of collages, he was one of the main responsible for the artistic design and visual style of the magazine, characterized by humor and irony.

The set of works is of great interest for the Museum's collection as it is part of the line of research that has been developing on the popular in avant-garde art and graphic humor during the post-war period in Spain. It should also be noted that the interest also lies in the practical non-existence of the original materials on the magazine's covers in the market.

La Codorniz was, without a doubt, the great humor publication of the dictatorship, and on the artistic level, Herreros' work stands out in avant-garde quality and audacity over the rest of the collaborators. The magazine was able to survive in the Franco regime thanks to the distancing from the immediate political context but its great achievement was to achieve continuity with an absurd and absurd humor of clear avant-garde roots, a battle against logic and social conventions.

A second set of works that will become part of the Collection is the 15 etchings, of Goya nature, from the series called La Tauromaquia de la Muerte, which were made by Herreros in 1946. They show the quality of the author as engraver and his domain of etching and are of interest for the Museum Collection since they are related to the classical iconography of Spanish finisecular art and to the graphic work of other Spanish authors primordial for it, such as Goya and Gutiérrez Solana.

About the Author

Enrique Herreros stood out in the 1920s by publishing drawings in the most relevant magazines of the time (Muchas gracias, Gutiérrez or Buen Humor) and making film posters for the production company Filmofono. Since then he is part of the known creative group, a posteriori, as "the other generation of 27", along with Miguel Mihura, Tono, López Rubio, Neville or Poncela. With them, during the civil war, he worked for the magazine La Ametralladora, and from 1941, and until his death, in La Codorniz.

Throughout his life, he also made oil painting and etchings (highlights the goyesca series La tauromaquia de la muerte, 1946). In his cinematographic facet it is necessary to emphasize that he directed the films Maria Fernanda the Jerezana (1946) and the happy wall (1947). Mihura, director of La Codorniz until 1944, and his colleagues -the hard core formed him with Tono and Herreros-, had to negotiate their artistic language, because as Hernández Cava emphasizes, "the postwar period did not seem willing to those modern joys of yesteryear".