La séptima cruz
Date: 1942
Medium: Wood engraving
Dimensions (cm.): 18.6 x 12.4
Alternate titles: Portada de un libro; Das Siebte Kreuz
Black ink
Black and brown ink
Published edition:
Unknown. Mendez [1949?] gives number of impressions as 200 approx.
Reprinted in 1943 in portfolio 25 Prints of Leopoldo Méndez: 100 impressions in numbered portfolios, 50 of them on China paper (described as “special imported chinese stock”), plus 3 impressions in unnumbered portfolios. Each impression signed in graphite, lower right, and annotated 24, lower right corner of sheet. Sheet dimensions 24.4 x 19.2 cm.
Contemporary publication: Anna Seghers, Das Siebte Kreuz (Mexico City: El Libro Libre, 1942), cover
References: Exposición de Homenaje 443, Méndez INBA 76; Prignitz 1373
Commentary: In 1943 Méndez provided a color woodcut for the cover of the book La séptima cruz (Das Siebte Kreuz, The Seventh Cross), by Anna Seghers, a German Communist in exile in Mexico and the United States. Published in Mexico City by the German exile press, El Libro Libre, the book, which was made into a Hollywood movie with Spencer Tracy during a period of anti-German propaganda production, concerns a prison break by a group of socialists and communists from a Nazi concentration camp during the 1930s. Only one prisoner succeeds, and the unnamed narrator says: “Never perhaps in man’s memory were stranger trees felled than the seven plane trees growing the length of Barrack III. Their tops had been clipped before, for reasons that will be explained later. Crossboards had been nailed to the trunks a the height of a man’s shoulder, so that at a distance the trees resembled seven crosses.… …What would it have amounted to, compared to what we felt when the six trees, and finally the seventh one, were cut down? A small triumph, assuredly, considering our helplessness and our convict’s clothing; but a triumph nevertheless -- how long was it since we had felt the sensation? -- which suddenly made us conscious of our own power, that power we had for a long time permitted ourselves to regard as being merely one of the earth’s common forces, reckoned in measures and numbers, though it is the only force able suddenly to grow immeasurably and incalculably.”
Adapting his style to the subject, Méndez’s print depicts the Nazis as faceless thugs viciously attacking an unarmed man, using a tightly detailed style and dramatic contrasts of texture and pattern. Méndez may have chosen to delineate his forms with “Germanic precision.” The Germans’ uniforms, boots, gun and swastika are a trope for Nazism in general, symbols of Nazi terror. They appear to be deriving satisfaction from their cruelty and the exercise of absolute power; In addition, the exaggerated masculinity of the Nazis includes the fetishistic leather boots and phallic weapons associated with sadistic pleasure In Méndez’s previous portrayals of politically motiivated violence. (Deborah Caplow)
Catalogue record number: 432