The designer José María Cruz Novillo, author of some of the most recognizable logos in contemporary Spain, died this Saturday at the age of 89, according to the specialized media. Graphic.
Cruz Novillo He is responsible for the graphics and image of Correos, Renfe, the fist and the rose of the PSOE, the flag and shield of the Community of Madrid, the change to blue of the National Police, the peseta banknotes from 1979 to 1985 – which had writers on their obverses -, of Endesa, Repsol, La Cope, El Mundo, Grupo PRISA, Antena 3 Radio…
But he was also a poster artist. of the best cinema produced by Elías Querejeta: Ana and the wolves; Hurry, hurry; Mondays in the sun, My cousin Angélica, The spirit of the hive… Novillo made the logos of the Transition and is considered the most important graphic designer in the history of Spain.
Cruz Novillo was born in Motilla del Palancar (Cuenca) in 1936 and began his career as a cartoonist at Publicidad Clarín in 1958. A year later, he began his collaboration with the Society of Industrial Design Studies (SEDI). In 1965 he left Clarín and created his own studio. In the documentary The man who designed Spain (2019), by Andrea G. Bermejo and Miguel Larraya, explained that this was an “unbelievable space-time leap,” because the son of the one who was secretary of the socialist youth of Cuenca before the Civil War ended up in New York at the age of 26, since he was selected, along with other artists, to be part of the Spanish pavilion at the World’s Fair in that city in 1964. The creator recalled in this film that those weeks in the city were a brutal lesson, that he lived effervescence seen in the series Mad Men, and who learned modern design as he never would have been able to in Spain. “Those who dedicated themselves to design were draftsmen, who behaved like painters. When recycling arrived, graphic design was born.”
The designer claimed to feel “the responsibility of working for big clients.” And he built the new Spain: Correos, Renfe (“The greatest thing I have ever done”), media, peseta bills… Of that assignment he proudly said: “I learned many things… Like the most important thing is that they cannot be counterfeited.” Cruz Novillo stamped on them, on the one hand, the portrait of great writers of the 19th and 20th centuries (Rosalía de Castro, Benito Pérez Galdós or Juan Ramón Jiménez) and, on the other, a quote and a place related to their work. He was also the designer of the stylized fist and rose of the PSOE emblem, a work that, when remembering his father, the artist described as “sentimental.”
His youthful friendship with José Luis Borau—they were an advertising tandem—led him to receive the commission for the poster of The secret intentions (1970), by Antonio Eceiza, which was filmed in his office at the Clarín agency with Jean-Louis Trintignant. Through Borau he arrived at Elías Querejeta’s production company, and in what he defined as the jobs “that took up the least time, about two weeks a year”, he began to design his posters, masterpieces such as The spirit of the hive either Ana and the wolves (work that made him proud). “I was coming from my Ibizan summer, I watched the film after having read the script,” and in 15 days I had the poster.
Among his awards and recognitions, the National Design Award in 1997 and the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2012 stand out.
In that 2019 documentary, the designer explained that he had never locked himself into his work. For example, He made various sculptures, like those that were located for years in the Madrid complex of Azca (qualified by its author as “a radical work, with a clean structure, without any type of manipulation”), and he explored in music and investigated the concept of “diaphragms”: “I divide something into parts and play to regroup them in another way”, which was his main weapon in his “aversion to the routine.” And he defined his work with seven words: “Design is a return trip.”
