José María Cruz Novillo dies, the artist who designed post-Franco Spain
He created the logos for PSOE, Correos, Renfe, Repsol and the peseta banknotes that were launched in 1978
BarcelonaDuring the 70s and 80s, José María Cruz Novillo, renewed the iconographic imagery of post-Franco Spain. He did not limit himself to creating logos; he built the visual imagery of a society emerging from the lethargy of the dictatorship and aspiring to be modern. Born in Cuenca in 1936, he died just a few weeks shy of his 90th birthday. In 2020, Filmin released a documentary that pays tribute to him and allowed many generations to discover him: The Man Who Designed Spain, by directors Andrea G. Bermejo and Miguel Larraya
Cruz was the creator of the PSOE's fist and rose, the logos of Correos, Renfe, Repsol, Endesa, the newspaper El Mundo, Cope, the Community of Madrid, and even the peseta banknotes launched in 1978 and the blue of the National Police uniforms. It was practically impossible not to go out on the street and encounter one of his logos. The most surprising thing is not that a single man signed all of this –and much more–, but that most of them are still in use decades later, resisting the fads and trends of an ever-changing society. It is the most conclusive proof of modernity: becoming a classic.
Beyond the corporate world, Cruz Novillo was the visual right-hand man of great filmmakers. The posters for gems such as The Spirit of the Beehive or The National Shotgun, Monday Sun, Barrio or Deprisa, deprisa are his.
Trained at the Clarín agency, he soon understood that design was not something to make things pretty, but a visual poem that said everything with the minimum possible. From there, a fluke took him to New York, to work for the Spanish pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. “It was an unimaginable spatial and temporal leap: from the rural world of Motilla del Palancar to the cosmopolitanism of Manhattan –he explains in the documentary–. A good part of what I have done since comes from this chance encounter, which for me was like getting a degree.”
A work of millions of years
He was a painter, sculptor, and a tireless researcher of the relationship between color, sound, and the passage of time. This duality between the commercial and the purely creative world was never a contradiction for him. Innovating or breaking with the norm, it never stopped being part of his character. Since the nineties, Cruz Novillo explored "chronochromophonic" works. His most ambitious project, the Diafragma dodecafónico opus 14, which premiered at ARCO in 2010, is an audiovisual piece with a theoretical duration of millions of years that generates a unique combination every few seconds.
In 2007, he founded the Cruz más Cruz studio with his son Pepe, an architect and designer, ensuring the continuity of a philosophy. His career was, although a bit late, widely recognized. Among other awards, he received the National Design Award (1997), the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2012), and the Laus de Honor (2023).
