Spanish designer and illustrator Eduardo Muñoz Bachs (1937-2001) first pursued graphic design at the age of 16 without any formal training. As a working professional and animator, Bachs designed an extensive collection of screenprinted film posters for the Cuban Institute of Cinema Art and Industry, an organization centered in distributing advertisements for films made after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Bachs was one of the first members of the ICAIC, and played a vital role in the development of the arts and culture in Havana in the second half of the twentieth century.
Although Bachs’s work was not formally catalogued, he quickly rose to fame when his first poster design Historias de la Revolución was publicly displayed in 1960. Later in his career at the ICAIC, Bachs began designing posters for international independent films, such as the one you see above. El reo necesario promotes a Bulgarian film directed by Borislav Sharaliev called The Indispensable Sinner (Необходимият грешник in Bulgarian), and later re-titled El reo necesario for the Spanish release. Highly influenced by the growing pop-art movement in Cuba, Bachs masterfully creates stark contrasts of color, line, and form that make his work visually appealing and fun.
Carolina Valdes-Lora is a student in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies master’s program at Parsons, and a curatorial fellow in the Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design Department at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
