Toward the end of that first summer of the Republic [Madrid, 1931], a time of dreams and hope for the future, my father finished the frescoes for the Casa del Pueblo and the panels were permanently hung in the Conference Hall. Several prominent Socialists appeared at the inaugural, including Francisco Largo Caballero and Julian Besteiro. So did Miguel de Unamuno, Ramon del Valle Inclan, and Jose Ortega y Gasset. But Madrid's professional art critics stayed away and the critic of his own party's newspaper, El Socialista, "didn't skimp in making vituperative remarks about my mediocrity as an artist." [All quotations from Luis Quintanilla, unless otherwise specified, are from Pasatiempo, the artist's memoirs.] Sometime later, though, Miguel Utrillo, the critic and art historian who gave his name to the famous painter of Montmartre street scenes, wrote a lengthy appraisal in which he argued that the frescoes "were the only good things being done at the time in Madrid with a modern tendency."

My father was nearly flat broke once again, but that "providential fairy who protects artists," interceded, once again, and he won a national prize which provided him with several thousand pesetas. And through Juan Negrin, he obtained a commission to paint the murals for the new Administration Building of the University City.

After two and a half months the frescoes were finished, which depicted "the misfortunes and disgraces of poverty and ignorance as opposed to the benefits of modern science." And once again the critics' comments were, for the most part, unfavorable. When Ernest Hemingway came to see them he was amused by the appearance of a siphon bottle, the natural accompaniment back in the thirties to a cocktail shaker, among the laboratory equipment portrayed up on the panels. And Ernesto asked my father if siphon bottles were required in scientific research? The bottle had been included to represent Negrin, who frequently employed such a device and was known among some of his friends as "Doctor Sifon." And from then on my father would occasionally add a siphon bottle to his work as a memento of Juan Negrin and "as the symbol, according to Hemingway, of modern scientific research." Then he went on to paint the murals for the entry hall to Madrid's Museum of Modern Art.

We can only judge the frescoes he did at this time from a few black and white photographs which still survive, for nearly all the murals he painted in public places were destroyed by the war or by the Fascists after the war. Angel Sanchez Rivero had remarked, though, that photographs are a "slander" against his work, for it possessed "the virtue of not being a photogenic art." And in these ancient photographs the impressions which are created tend to be somewhat harsh and crude, recalling the "proletarian" art of the thirties. But one fresco still survives: a small panel from the entrance hall to Madrid's Museum of Modern Art, which was restored by the Ministry of Culture sometime in the late seventies. The figures possess a somewhat Italianate classicism, combining a variety of moods, as if Pompeii had somehow mixed with modern Spain and the industrial age. But the rhythms in this mural are extremely powerful, the colors beautiful and brilliant, and even in a photograph this all somehow becomes discernable. And there is nothing "proletarian" or harsh about this one remaining mural, for the women in the foreground appear very Spanish, classical and modern all at the same time, the end result being, I think, that it is simply a beautiful mural, for all time.

With the architect Esteban de la Mora and the sculptor Emiliano Barral he entered into a competition to design and decorate the monument to Pablo Iglesias, the founder of Spain's Socialist Party. Madrid's Ayuntamiento put up 600,000 pesetas for the project and it was my father's intention that instead of constructing "montones de piedras," mountains of stone, with numerous sculpted figures, "a simple porch in a beautiful and tranquil setting where visitors could quietly contemplate the benefits Pablo Iglesias had left behind" would be more appropriate. And while awaiting the outcome of the competition he travelled through Andalucia with the elderly wife of Emile Vandervelde, the leader of Belgium's Socialist Party and sometimes Premier, and in Granada they visited the home of Manuel de Falla, Madame Vandervelde's friend. And having agreed to trade a drawing for each drink she bought on the way, he did the portrait of de Falla for Madame Vandervelde in his sketch book. Then, with an unidentified girlfriend, he toured Morocco and when he returned to Madrid painted another fresco for the University City and with these new funds went off to visit Elliot Paul on the Island of Ibiza.

A man who enjoyed enjoying himself, Elliot organized many fiestas and banquets, entertaining by playing his accordion and other instruments, and had become so popular with the local Ibizanos that my father proposed making him the mayor of Santa Eulalia, the small town he and Flora and Peanut lived in. "Everything was peace," we are told, "on that happy island, and the people were tolerant and amiable." Elliot asked him to paint "various things," including a portrait of the two village idiots, who would only sit still if he, Elliot, played the accordion for them. And as my father painted and Elliot played his accordion they could hear the hotel owner's pigs grunting in the background as they foraged for food. And far from the fierce pace of modern city life, Elliot and my father spent their days undisturbed in a calm and creative atmosphere. Then my father received word from Madrid that their project had won the competition.

Esteban de la Mora began to oversee the construction of the large monument which would be in Madrid's Parque del Oeste. And my father began to draw the preliminary outlines for the monument's eleven frescoes. These, he tells us, depicted the "prominent events in the life of that austere self-taught man, typesetter, and great organizer, who dedicated his life to improving the well-being of the working class following Socialist lines, who was even respected by his most fanatical enemies and detractors among the bourgeoisie."

At about this time the Museum of Modern Art of Madrid inaugurated a new hall for the graphic arts with a show of Rembrandt's engravings. These were the same drawings my father had studied under the tutelage of Sanchez Rivero in the National Library. When the show came to an end the museum's Director, Juan de la Encina, suggested that he show his own engravings next.  My father balked at the idea for he had never shown any of them before except to a few close friends whose opinions, he suspected, might be biased. And thought that a show of his drawings on top of the Rembrandts could be "audacious."

In the spring of 1934 forty of these engravings of Madrid street scenes and life were shown and the reaction, it appears, surprised everyone, especially my father. For the first time the professional art critics wrote extensively about his work and large crowds of visitors began to appear at the show. It was with these engravings that his name first began to become widely known and the first comparisons to Goya were made. These were the etchings that Hemingway and Dos Passos became so excited about. Even now, I still have the engravings, in their original paper wrapping, Hemingway picked out for himself, known to us in the family as "the Hemingway Collection," which inspired him to exclaim that they were: "the first true Madrid we have seen since Goya." And though my father considered himself first and foremost a muralist there have been those critics over the years who have thought his graphic work superior to his painting. Fortunately, a good deal of that early graphic work still survives. And it was as a Spanish artist, perhaps even as a Madrid artist, that he was emerging, with a uniquely personal aesthetic vision of his own. And whether it was the gray grit of the street or common domestic intimacies within an ordinary household, Madrid in the thirties poetically appears in these long forgotten etchings. For isn't it the power of reality which is the great driving force behind any artistic expression?

In the meantime the porch for the Monument to the Memory of Pablo Iglesias was completed and my father set about to work on the frescoes. "We had placed it in the Parque del Oeste, one of the most beautiful spots in Madrid. It only took me ten minutes to walk through the park from my home to the monument in the early morning, this contact with the beauty of nature helping to awaken me and to enliven my eagerness to work. And, truly, I placed my highest illusions in this work for a number of reasons: the murals' theme, their popular purpose, the chance to give form to my ideas, and even the location of the monument in an isolated garden, with its perfume of the magnolia trees and the songs of the blackbirds and nightingales. We constructed a studio made of wood which we could move along the length of the frescoes and in this manner I painted tranquilly without being disturbed by the curious. It took me about ten days to paint each fresco, and I would then rest three or four days before starting the next one. Painting within this rhythm of alternating work and rest I had completed four panels when circumstances imposed a parenthesis within my artistic labors which lasted several months. And I knew an experience which ordinarily doesn't occur in life and which stamps its permanent mark."  Note: The experience he refers to here is of being thrown into jail.

On the night of the fifth of October, nineteen thirty four, my father was arrested in his studio for being a member of the Revolutionary Committee which had intended to overthrow the Madrid government. He was taken a mere short block away to the Carcel Modelo where, with a sizeable group of politicians, intellectuals, and workers, he was locked up to await trial. And though once again more sympathetically than actively involved he had indeed hosted a large group of revolutionaries who were awaiting the moment when they would go out onto the streets to oust the central government: though when the police arrived he vigorously protested they had all gathered in his studio merely to look at art.

What had provoked these revolutionary activities on the left was a decisive move on the part of the central government toward the far right. "The first republican who was opposed to the Republic," my father tells us, "was the President of the Republic," Don Niceto Alcala Zamora, who didn't view the Republic as a "fundamental change in philosophy" but simply as "a change in who holds the power." Under the Socialist attorney Luis Jimenez de Asua the Republic wrote a constitution which guaranteed the freedoms of speech, assembly, and of the press. Women were given the right to vote and Largo Caballero, the Minister of Labor, signed into law a minimum wage, paid holidays and sick leaves, the eight hour day and fair mechanisms to settle labor disputes. Manual Azana, the new Minister of War, attempted to reduce the overbloated officer corps by offering the generals early retirement at full pay. Agrarian reforms were cautiously initiated, with a modest redistribution of those lands belonging to the aristocracy among the peasants who worked them. And Article 26 of the new constitution called for the separation of church and state: government financial aid to the Church was eliminated, education was removed from parochial schools and placed into public schools, divorce and civil marriages were allowed for the first time, and the Church became subject to the law like any other civil or religious institution.

The reaction on the part of the right was a howl of persecution and reactionary devout Catholics enlisted into such emerging rightwing organizations as Jose Maria Gil Robles Accion Popular, which combined traditional Catholic beliefs with the Fascist doctrines which were circulating then about Europe. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the military dictator, formed the Falange, an overtly Fascist organization and the more reactionary aristocrats and monarchists were drawn toward such groups as Renovacion Espanola under Antonio Goicoechea and Jose Calvo Sotelo. And as Calvo Sotelo performed his "patriotic duties" as an elected deputy in the Cortes, Spain's national parliament, he secretly began to plot with Mussolini for the overthrow of the Republic while General Sanjurjo visited the Winter Olympics in Berlin in order to trade Spain's iron ore for the Fuhrer's support.

After the brief respite of hope and promise, when the founders of the Republic had hoped the new government would be able to correct the accumulated abuses and injustices of centuries, those reactionary forces which had only recently been ousted began to emerge again. And the entrenched privileged classes illustrated, once again, the attitude they had so often displayed in the past even toward the most simple and fundamentally fair reforms. They would not budge an inch. Elections were held in November 1933 and the right was better organized now, brought together by Gil Robles into a coalition known as the CEDA. And since the Anarchists, being anarchists, refused to vote and the women, having been given the right to vote, tended to be devoutly Roman Catholic the left lost its majority in the Cortes. Alejandro Lerroux became the Republic's new Prime Minister and when in September 1934 he appointed three members of the rightwing CEDA to ministerial posts, with the blessings of Generals Franco and Goded, the parties of the left believed they had to act.

Having lunch one afternoon with Largo Caballero and Juan Negrin in a restaurant just outside Madrid, Largo explained the threats which were emerging against the Republic, and directing himself toward my father said: "You too can become active. Remember what you saw of the Fascists in Italy."

His "sporting spirit" thus awakened, he and Indalecio Prieto helped move several boxes of pistols, machineguns, and hand grenades from one hiding place to another in Madrid and, he tells us, his sporting sense "didn't lack in emotion" as they traversed the city several times in various cars full of arms. Due to the strategic location of his studio, with its terrace overlooking the heart of Madrid, the leaders of the revolution chose it to be their command post. At the beginning of October a general strike began and for several days the capital was paralyzed by street fighting. The government declared a "state of war" and General Franco led his troops against the people of Madrid who held the major streets and plazas. My father's job then was to act as an intermediary in the distribution of arms to the revolutionaries. On the fifth night of the revolt, the fifth of October, Santiago Carillo and several prominent directors of the UGT, the Socialist Youth, and two labor unions (my father didn't identify the directors: could it be because Franco was still alive?), were in the studio awaiting the moment when they would go out onto the streets. They had idled the day away by making and consuming an enormous paella and at about ten o'clock that night my father went to bed. "Brief was my repose," he tells us. The police arrived shortly after he turned off the lights.

What had given their presence away was a lapse among some of the more youthful members of the committee who had gone out onto the studio's terrace to discuss the day's events, and a neighbor overheard them and reported them to the police. When they arrived the police were astonished by the importance of some of the leaders they discovered. "Whether it was due to the professional excitement of making an important arrest or because they thought we might react with violence, the police became extremely nervous, holding their rifles on us in a threatening manner." And though I doubt my father ever intended to use it, he had a pistol tucked under his belt which he quickly hid in a planter out on the terrace. Searching everywhere, including the planters, the police never found the gun but discovered instead four pistols Julio Alvarez del Vayo had inadvertently left behind in the library before leaving earlier that evening. Indicating the importance of their arrest, the Commissioner of Police soon arrived. And in a very gentle manner told my father: "Close everything up very tight, friend Quintanilla, for you can see for yourself where you are all
going."

As has happened on other occasions when a prominent artist has found himself in jail the world's intellectual community immediately rallied to his aid. Andre Malraux organized the protests and circulated the petitions in France. Lady Margo Asquith, the wife of the former Prime Minister, did the same in England. And in the United States Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos arranged to have forty of the Madrid street-scene
etchings displayed at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Ernesto paid for the show and for having the prints pulled and along with Dos Passos wrote the catalog. He also arranged for a picket line to parade back and forth before the Spanish consulate in New York. The Consul, Antonio de la Cruz Marin, was a good friend of my father's and allowed the picketers to march undisturbed, dispatching telegrams back to the Madrid central government informing them that on the first day more than two hundred picketers appeared, on the second more than six hundred, and on the third there were more than a thousand. A "fabrication," my father quietly adds, for "in New York at that time there weren't that many people who were disposed to waste their time, in the cold, marching on the street for some unknown, even if they were asked to by Hemingway."

Dos and Hemingway wrote to several well-known writers and artists, including Edmund Wilson, Henri Matisse, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, "and a few people of no definite political color," as Dos Passos put it, to rally their support. "One of my best pals," Hemingway wrote Arnold Gingrich, "is having a show of his etchings at the Pierre Matisse gallery in the Fuller Bldg... . The etchings are damned wonderful, the finest dry points I've ever-seen by anybody alive... Do you know anybody you can steam up to go and see it or anybody who buys etchings in New York you could get to go and see these? The stuff is no charity business nor helping out a pal. They're simply bloody marvelous. If you've got twenty bucks to spend you ought to buy one. The money all goes to Quintanilla except twenty percent to Pierre Matisse as dealer. Pierre is all worked up about them and thinks they're marvelous. I know damned well they are but because I'm his pal I might be supposed to be prejudiced."

"Say, Malcolm," Dos Passos wrote Malcolm Cowley, "on Nov 20th at the Pierre Matisse Gallery on E. 57th Street there's going to be an exposition of etchings by Luis Quintanilla. I think he's a great etcher. He's a hell of a good guy and is at present in jail as a member of the Madrid revolutionary committee - if you like the stuff, please try to get the boys to go to bat for it, articles and stuff like that. I'm hoping that if he's hailed as Spain's best etcher which he is - in the great line of Goya etc it may be possible to circulate a petition of some kind that might induce the Spanish gov't to go a little easy on him. Anyway Quintanilla's work is damn good and he's a wonderful guy and everybody ought to do everything they can to get him out."Within only a few weeks after his arrest those smart New Yorkers who desired an intimate glimpse of Madrid street life could visit the Pierre Matisse Gallery to examine the etchings. The show ran from November 20 to December 4 and its catalog was a small, glossy, twice-folded sheet which reproduced an etching of two Madrid working men in workingman's caps, very black and gray and evocative of old Madrid. [See Emigrantes] In that small cramped space the quality of the artistry could have perhaps been lost but, nevertheless, that dark reproduction strongly evoked the aesthetic qualities of the original, which was so Spanish and foreign to anything about New York, in spite of the American city's great cosmopolitanism. Hemingway and Dos Passos, I believe, were deeply aware of this disparity and a sense of it vividly appears in what they had to write for the catalog. There is also something poignantly evocative of the "old days" in what they said: those "old days"when they could get together after work for a beer, to calmly talk and laugh, in a tavern or cafe, when they were all merely artists together living day to day within the slow and patient creation of their work and politics was a distant activity engaged in a world far away. When unwritten and unpainted dreams could dominate their lives and fill their hearts with hope. For there is also something very impassioned and bitter about their comments. Hemingway's came first.