La venganza de los pueblos
Date: 1942
Medium: Linocut
Dimensions (cm.): 25.4 x 20.3
Alternate titles: La venganza del pueblo; Venganza del pueblo (Yugoslavia); Nenganza; Homenaje al heroico ejército de Yugoslavia; Homenaje al Heróico Ejército de Guerilleros Yugoeslavo
Published edition:
Edition printed on on right side of horizontal (landscape) format sheet with typset text “Grabado de Leopoldo Méndez” printed below image, lower right and typset text “HOMENAJE al Heroico/Ejército de Guerrilleros Yugoeslavo” printed on left side of sheet. Méndez [1949?] gives number of impressions of this edition as 100 approx.
Unknown number of impressions outside the edition.
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 25, below image. Sheet dimensions 24.4 x 19.2 cm.
Freies Deutschland 12 (Oktober 1942), cover
Revista Tricolor 5 (14 octubre, 1944), cover
Contenido y trascendencia del pensamiento popular mexicano. Mensaje de la Universidad Obrera de México a la UNESCO (México: diciembre 1947), p. 39
References: Exposición de Homenaje 437 (illus.); Méndez INBA 72
Commentary: La Venganza de los Pueblos (The Vengeance of the People), also called Homenaje al Heróico Ejército de Guerilleros Yugoeslavo (Homage to the Heroic Army of Yugoslavian Guerrillas), honors the heroic resistance of the people of Yugoslavia during the German invasion of 1941 and the subsequent German occupation. Published in El libro negro del terror nazi, the print accompanied essays on the German occupation of the Balkan countries, placed at the beginning of an article called “Resistance and Treason in the Balkans” by Erich Jungmann. Méndez portrayed the aggressors as small and despicable: a distorted Hitler, his body covered in wolf-like hairs, clutches naked babies in both claw-like hands, cowering before the battle-ax of a Yugoslav peasant. Similarly craven and hirsute, Mussolini and Hirohito huddle behind Hitler, while the giant figure of the ax-bearer emerges from a town in flames, visible through his translucent leg and foot. An army of peasants and soldiers backs him up, wielding an assortment of weapons, including guns, swords and sickles. Méndez portrayed the single enormous individual emerging at the forefront as a metonymic representation of the masses in resistance. La Venganza de los Pueblos is reminiscent of Kollwitz’s Peasant Revolt, which also has a large figure leading a crowd of peasants, with echoes of Goya’s Colossus.
Catalogue record number: 433