Josep Bartolí

In the 1950s he was a member of the 10th Street Group of artists, and in 1973 he won the Mark Rothko prize. His time in France was portrayed in the César Award winning 2020 film Josep, directed by French cartoonist Aurel (cartoonist).

• Name — Josep Bartolí i Guiu • Born — 30 June 1910 • Birthplace — Barcelona • Died — 3 December 1995 • Place of death — New York City • Resting Place — Ashes scattered in waters of Premià de Mar

While working as a newspaper illustrator, Bartolí was active in trade unions, helping to found a UGT affiliated illustrators' union. He later fought in Aragon with a unit of the Catalan Communist Party. In 1939 he crossed into France, and was incarcerated in a series of internment camps, including Bram, Argelès-sur-Mer and Le Barcarès. Having escaped the camps to Paris, where he worked on costume and scenery design, Bartolí was subsequently arrested near Vichy and due to be transported to Dachau concentration camp. He was able to escape again, and made his way to Mexico via Casablanca, arriving in 1943.

While in Mexico in 1944, with some 20,000 fellow Spanish exiles, Bartolí first published his collection of drawings of life in the French camps. In 1946, he moved to New York where he worked as a screenwriter, artist and writer, contributing to Holiday and The Reporter supplement of the Saturday Evening Post. He worked as a Hollywood set designer until he was blacklisted under McCarthyism. He also worked as an illustrator, contributing to French editions of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels in the 1950s. He would not return to Spain until the 1970s.

In 1938 he met Maria Valdés. While pregnant, she died during a German aerial attack on her train as she attempted to leave Spain. Bartolí met painter Frida Kahlo in 1946 and the two exchanged love letters for the next three years. A collection of these letters and poems sold for $137,000 in 2015. He was survived in 1995 by his wife Bernice Bromberg, whom he had met in 1958.

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