• Exhibition Image

  • Sileno. December 3rd, 1916

  • Sileno. December 30th, 1916

  • Sileno. March 27th, 1916

  • Sileno. February, 10th, 1917

  • Sileno. March 18th, 1917

  • Nieuwpoort, 1918-19. Photographer: Arthur Brusselle. The Heritage Collection of the City of Bruges

  • Ypres, September, 3rd, 1921. Photographers: Maurice y Robert Antony. The Heritage Collection of the City of Bruges

SILENO. DRUMS IN THE BATTLE

An illustrated chronicle of First World War

03 JUL — 29 NOV 2016

Archive

When the martial rythms of the drums sounded in all the corners of the Old Europe, in the Summer of 1914, Antonio Villahermosa y Borao (Saragossa, 1870 – Madrid, 1945) was one of the most remarkable cartoonists in Spain. Best known as Sileno, he would be one of the best artists of the Spanish Illustration.

The magazine Blanco y Negro, the newspaper ABC and its supplement Gedeón, published weekly cartoons by Sileno as a briefing of the main developments of the First World War. The exhibition gathers a selection of 100 original drawings of this warlike series. These works had never been studied by a curator or showed to the public before. They are displayed with the text of the joke as it was originally published, but also with a short summary of the moment of the War to which it refers. The show also includes a selection of 20 masterpieces of Sileno among the 3,725 drawings by this author in the Colección ABC.

Tambores en la batalla (Drums in the battle) is a review of the First World War from a different point of view, the drawings in ink and gouache, by an observer from the distance of a neutral country: Sileno in Spain. It is a renewed point of view of the most remarkable moments of the War: the battle of Verdun, the Gallipoli landings, the invention of the terrifying zeppelins, the war at sea, the involvement of the United States in the conflict or the difficult neutrality of Spain. It forms a burlesque chronicle, but also a thorough and accurate narration, of the conflict.


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