Máximo's table with documents, drawings and some personal objects. Photo: BNE
The family of the writer and cartoonist Máximo San Juan has donated his personal archive to the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
The first part of the donation consists of more than 12,000 drawings, those published in El País and ABC. Subsequently, the family will donate the rest of his drawings, autographs, correspondence, photographs, etc. in successive instalments.
Máximo's drawings will share space with the cartoons of Forges, Peridis, the work of Joan Guillén, Chumy Chúmez, Ballesta, Cebrián, Dátile, Kim, Luis Pérez Ortiz, Tino Gatagán, Xiro López and Juan Ballesta, as well as all the work of the cartoonists who took part in the exhibition La Transición en tinta china, which was held in 2013 at the Library.
Some curiosities
Máximo, a cartoonist for El País for three decades, took part, along with other illustrators such as Chumy Chúmez, in the XXV Years of Peace campaign, mounted by the Franco dictatorship in 1964 to extol the achievements obtained since the end of the war through propaganda. We all have a past.
Poster by Máximo. Gallery of posters from Franco's campaign.
37 years later, in 2001, he would take part in the PCE party in Madrid.
From El País to ABC
Máximo began working for the newspaper El País in May 1976. On 20 October 2007 he published what was to be his last cartoon there, and it was this one:
Última viñeta en El País. 20/10/2007
As commented at the time in this blog, Máximo did not fit in with the redesign of the newspaper. And this is what they told him: "We think your cartoon doesn't fit with the new design. You can propose something for Sunday".
At the beginning of April 2008, ABC announced the signing of cartoonist and writer Máximo San Juan. On 13 April, he published his first cartoon in ABC, and on 28 February 2013, his last.
On the left Máximo (1933-2014), in the centre "Ops" (El Roto) and Julio Cebrián (1929-2016)
Photograph accompanying a 1982 article written by Máximo entitled"Hacia dónde va el humor gráfico si es que va a alguna parte" (Where is graphic humour going, if it is going anywhere).
Documentaries about cartoonists and graphic humour.
