Eduardo Muñoz Bachs
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| Eduardo Munoz Bachs | |
| Born | April 1937 Valencia, Spain |
| Died | July 2001 Havana, Cuba |
| Nationality | Cuban |
| Field | Poster |
Eduardo Munoz Bachs (1937-2001) was a Cuban poster artist. He was born on April 12, 1937 in Valencia, Spain, but moved to Cuba with his parents in 1941. In 1960, with no formal training in graphic design, he made the first poster for the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematografica that was founded shortly after the Cuban revolution to produce and promote Cuban films.
The association with ICAIC lasted for a lifetime, and Bachs made over 2000 movie posters for them. He is counted among the greatest cuban poster designers - a group nicknamed el maestro del cartel cubano de todos los tiempos - and contributed to the international admiration that the colorful cuban posters of the 1970's enjoyed.
With a self-taught formation and after a short stop over publicity, his first piece of work showed the visual hability that he was to develop for more than forty consecutive years. Remarkably, in this first Bachs poster, which he made upon the request of Gutiérrez Alea himself, he uses a black and white photo of a film scene, printed in offset, something that he never repeated in his poster production. Bachs displayed a style that was very distant from photographic realism or descriptive illustration. His peculiar way of reflecting the movie quickly was far away from the realist-commercial poster that was predominated in Cuba on the previous years.
His nearly a thousand creations for the cinema can be recognized by the ingenuity and simplicity of the strokes filled with metaphors; the excessive use of colour, which is capable of extracting every possibility of the serigraphic technique and a design filled with ingenuity, imagination and humor. These characteristics can be appreciated on the posters for the movies Juan Quin Quin (1967) and Los tres mosqueteros (The three musketeers) (1976).
Muñoz, as he was called by his friends, made up a team together with those who led the breach and assumed individual ways or “styles” to develop one of the most coherent artistic expressions of that cultural explosion that were the 1960s. Antonio Reboiro, Félix Beltrán, Raúl Martínez, Alfredo Rostgaard, Antonio Pérez (Ñiko), René Azcuy, Raúl Oliva, Umberto Peña, Rolando de Oraá, Esteban Ayala and his compatriot Rafael Morante, shared common concepts of massive communication and, as he did, they made posters from different perspectives which went beyond the limits of the immediate function and turned bit by bit into pieces for collectors.
Although he is best known in Cuba for designing most of the country's cinema posters during the 1960s and 1970s, he ventured into the world of comic strips at the Editorial Pablo de la Torriente in the 1980s. With scripts by Félix Guerra, Bachs made several comic series, most notably 'El Cuento', a collection of ironic fables.
Without a doubt, Eduardo Muñoz Bachs has left behind a genuine work of great aesthetic value as a designer, illustrator and painter that places him, not just among the most prolific representatives of the Cuban cinema poster, but also among one of the greater creators of the country.
