Luis Sarabia. Drawing the war
This drawing exhibition aims to present the political context, as well as the geographical framework (urban and port) in which the events narrated by Luis Sarabia take place, as a memory of his personal experiences during the last months of the Spanish Civil War in Cartagena.
They present and give meaning to his drawn narration, which thus transcends that of private memories, to stand as a testimony of events of historical significance that precipitated the end of the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War, and allow us to discern its value as a historical document.
Luis Sarabia Vera was born in Madrid on 10 September 1910. His grandfather, Julián, had been a torpedoman in the Cuban War on board the Almirante Oquendo. Luis preferred the merchant navy. In 1931, when he was barely 20 years old, he produced his first sketchbook, a series of 40 small prints dedicated to his sweetheart. In this marvellous graphic story, Sarabia divided life into four stages: courtship, life together, the birth of children, and death. As a good lover, he maintained that his love for his fiancée, who would be his wife for the rest of his days, would survive his death. And so it did.
The outbreak of war in 1936 violently changed their lives and their dreams. Luis Sarabia was mobilised for the Republic, and went from being a merchant seaman to a military sailor in the port of Cartagena until the end of the war in 1939. There, in the port, he captured his experience of the conflict in 50 drawings. Like Goya in the disasters of war, Sarabia also wanted to add a small text to each of the prints. The drawings, mostly done in pencil and sanguine, many of them dated and signed, offer us, in addition to their undoubted artistic value, an exceptional document to bring us closer to the experience of the war, of that war, of any war.
