Francisco Mateos

Francisco Mateos (1894—1976) was a Spanish expressionist draftsman, painter, printmaker and cartoonist.

Between 1931 and 1936 he exhibited at the Ateneo de Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid. In 1933 he joined the Constructive Art Group and in 1937 he was one of the artists present in the Spanish Pavilion of the International Exhibition in Paris.

After the coup d'état in Spain in July 1936, he joined the Cartoonists Section of the UGT, working in organizations such as "Speaker of the Front" and  the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals. In March 1939 he flees to Valencia, where he is arrested and interned in the Porta Coeli prison, later being transferred to Miranda de Ebro (Burgos) from where he was released in March 1940.

Back in Madrid, he gets a job at the British Embassy "as an illustrator of drawings to be published in America in campaigns against totalitarianism". He was arrested in November 1941 and imprisoned in the Conde de Peñalver prison in September 1942. Once the case was dismissed, he was released in 1943.

Three years before his death, the old Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art organized an Anthological Exhibition in Madrid. He died in 1976, at the age of 82.