Now that Repulski has his answer, the real question is: Where did Hemingway publish his comment about taxing the use of the word revolution?
And the answer is: In a 1934 catalogue for a show of etchings of Madrid street scenes by the Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.
The artist’s son writes that his father “started out as a Cubist under the influence of his friend, Juan Gris.” Quintanilla was reluctant to engage in politics, but in 1934 he hosted a committee of the October revolution in his studio and was arrested for it. Besides contributing to the catalogue for the show in New York, Hemingway and John Dos Passos circulated a petition and organized protests to free him from prison. Ditto André Malraux in France and others elsewhere.
Quintanilla later played a prominent role during the Spanish Civil War, both as a military commander and as an artist. When the Republicans lost the war, in 1939, he went into exile for 37 years. His war drawings, including Andalucia: “Why do they kill us?” (1937), right, were shown first in 1938 at the Barcelona Ritz and then at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (with a catalogue by Hemingway).
Paul Quintanilla notes that “Why do they kill us?” was “an important drawing, one that Hemingway liked very much and wanted.” He never got it. The drawing “was stolen, by a distant relative, of all people, from my collection,” the artist’s son writes.
A copy of the petition to free his father from prison turned up, however, in the archives of the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Here it is, signed by Henri Matisse:
Incidentally, Hemingway’s commentary on Quintanilla can be found in a recently published book, “Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame,” a collection of his statements, public letters, introductions, forewords, prefaces, blurbs, reviews, and endorsements, edited by Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman.
