Politics and Practices of visual propaganda in Portuguese Estado Novo. An Introduction
Authors: Serra Filomena , Melo e Castro Paul 
Published: September 2024

Mass print media, such as newspapers and illustrated magazines, created mass audiences at the beginning of the twentieth century, offering fertile ground for governments wishing to mobilise entire societies for war or to disseminate information or propaganda to large groups of people in relatively short spaces of time. In the 1920s and 1930s, these printed means were joined, for political propaganda purposes, by cinema, photography and radio, which were especially exploited in the new authoritarian regimes of the Soviet Union, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Political propaganda aims to indoctrinate audiences, to persuade them to act in certain ways, to adopt behaviours that would then spread generally through proselytising and imitation. One of the most important resources for sensitising audiences is visual propaganda. It was assumed that the ‘people’ would react positively to images and so adhere more easily to the desired aims of propagandistic. But if the circulation of images was crucial for achieving these objectives, the continual reframing of visual production across varied and interrelated contexts was equally so. Visual propaganda raises vital questions of identity and historical memory. Through images propaganda may build in elements that increase the credibility and liveliness of messages, making them more convincing, even commonsensical.
This special themed issue tackles the Portuguese ‘Estado Novo’ (New State) through the analysis of the regime’s visual propaganda, specifically its printed and public images. Like other authoritarian and fascist regimes, the Portuguese ‘Estado Novo’ was convinced that images, being intelligible and persuasive to wide audiences, were vital to achieve its objectives: the reinterpretation of history to fix a certain articulation between past and present. A key figure here was António Ferro, a former futurist and companion of the modernists associated with the literary magazine Orpheu, who did not hide his admiration for a political and cultural solution like that of fascist Italy. He was appointed by Salazar in 1933 to head the influential Secretariat of National Propaganda (SPN) and his implement his ‘Politics of the Spirit’. From the creation of the SPN until Ferro’s dismissal in 1949, visual propaganda played a decisive role as a propaganda vehicle for the Salazar regime as part of an extensive cultural policy programme covering the visual arts, theatre, cinema and literature.
In fact, Portuguese artists adapted international models, assembling images and texts with the aim of transforming them into ideological messages and narratives that were tested and disseminated through the edition of books, albums, luxury editions, posters, maps, leaflets, postcards, documentaries, illustrated magazines, and other formats of visual media. The texts that accompany these images encourage particular ways of seeing. If it is important to analyse images in relation to the written word, it is also fundamental to investigate these public images in exhibitions, films, photographs, ceremonies and performances according to the different purposes which they were expected to achieve. Painters, graphic artists, photographers, filmmakers, ethnographers selected, reinterpreted and framed the images and sought to control their reception.
This special issue will address the public impact of these images, exploring their reproduction across graphic illustrations, printed photography, film propaganda, and expanded exhibition practices for propaganda purposes in the context of Salazar’s dictatorship.
The texts presented here cover the regime’s most fascistic period, from the 1930s to the 1940s. Grounded in the complex political history of this period, several analyses demonstrate the ways in which images were understood, used, imposed, circulated, and spread in various media, taking advantage of the emotional responses of a Catholic population to such imagery.
Overall, this issue gives special emphasis to the way in which formulations of national identity were defined and distributed through systems of images. Though several important studies have touched upon issues of Propaganda during the Estado Novo, they do not focus on visual propaganda, or have approached the subject through very specific disciplinary or methodological lenses.
Our specific issue has a more comprehensive scope and covers a wide range of contexts and disciplines. Each contribution takes a case study related to visual propaganda and provides the reader with a thorough analysis based on comparative close readings.
Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, ‘Female landscapes: the presence of women in the photographs and images of the Portuguese colonial exhibitions’, reflects on the presence of colonized women in photographs and other representations, such as drawings, posters, postcards, exhibition catalogues, newspapers and magazines, which were disseminated in the context of the Portuguese colonial expositions, and in exhibition spaces conceived with a colonial component.
These exhibitions sought to showcase Portugal’s progress in the spheres of land, rail and sea transport, but also roads, communications, trade, industry, arts, architecture, culture, and the most recent advances in science and medicine. These exhibitions were also places where the logic of colonial models was staged, showing a clear relationship between colonial domination and gender representation. Matos includes diverse materials produced during the 1930s, a fertile period for Portuguese participation in such international events. Matos analyses content associated with several exhibitions between 1931 and 1940, such as the International Colonial Exhibition of Paris (1931), the Lisbon Industrial Exhibition (1932), the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition in Oporto (1934), the Portuguese World Exhibition in Lisbon (1940), and Portugal of the Little Ones (Portugal dos Pequenitos) in Coimbra (1940). She gives particular attention to the contexts in which women appear and the way in which they are represented — as active beings (performing tasks), as contemplative beings (as in natural landscapes) or as objects of sexual desire, revealing the context of power (legislative, administrative, male and colonial) in which the images and the representations were produced.
Jesús Ramé López and Caterina Cuccinota in ‘As Pupilas do Senhor Reitor (1935): a film drama of customs and political propaganda in the Portuguese Estado’ Novo analyses this film by José Leitão de Barros as part of a series of films by him that linked the rural world to political propaganda promoting a certain ideal of Portugal. Their comparative analysis of the film shows how the exaltation of rural life in this Portuguese ‘drama de costumbres’ runs parallel to German and Spanish cases. As a paradigmatic example of the use of propaganda through cinema, the authors focus on the triangular relationship of themes, style, and tone. The authors place especial emphasis on the wardrobe created by the film’s costume designer Helena Roque Gameiro, an essential contribution to the mise-en-scène of cinematic ruralism. In the film, reality is aestheticised. Gestures, speeches and sets induce the spectator to believe that what he or she is seeing is real and true. This is a type of cinema of the 1930s and 1940s in which costumes indicate the presence of a precise ideology, underlined by moving images, frames and stylistic elements.
Filomena Serra’s ‘Spectacle-politics’ and propaganda imagery of folklorist practices at the 1940 Portuguese World Exhibition: a case-study of visual propaganda, analyses the exhibition’s visual propaganda discourse through the Regional Center and representations of the Portuguese Villages and the Popular Life Section, as an example of folklorization of whole country using the notion of ‘spectacle politics’.
With the Estado Novo, folkloric practices were institutionalised. By acquiring the standing of a matter of state, it created a hyper-valorisation of popular culture as a language for affirming national identity. The rural life folklorisation aimed to symbolise and reinforce power and ideology. Serra explores the way popular art was transformed into spectacle through the ‘living groups’ with their wardrobe and domestic objects. And also focuses on how Mário Novais’ photography understood this form of ideological indoctrination and aestheticisation of reality. Specifically, this imagery fostered the idea of Portugal as a peaceful, rural country at a time when Europe was at war and Portugal wanted to affirm its status as an imperial nation. As he 1940 Exhibition was accompanied by a wide range of printed material, Serra presented the book Life and Art of the Portuguese People (Vida e Arte do Povo Português) (1940) as a testimony and historical memory related to the folkloric practices displayed at the Regional Center. She focuses in particular on how the traditional media of coloured illustrations by the painter Paulo Ferreira and the ‘new medium’ of Mário Novais printed photography engage in a tense dialogue and harmonise in the national history narrative of ‘the life and art of the Portuguese people’.
In ‘The Past is Our Country: Image, Modernity and Propaganda in “Estado Novo” Portugal’ Paula André and Paulo Simões Rodrigues discuss how printed photography became a propaganda tool employed to construct a meta-image of Portugal. Visually representing the essence of the country, this meta-image was intended to establish a connection between Portugal and Salazar and focused on public works undertaken by the Estado Novo as a material and visible display of the efficiency of the government and of its leader in particular. Instead of his own physical image, it was the works completed through his determination and initiative that represented him. This meta-representation of the country through its leader and his built work resulted from a complex rhetoric of narrative images conveying institutionalised ideas in which printed photographs embodied the rules for propaganda defined by J. M. Domenach: simplification of discourse, repetition of theme, definition of an enemy and promotion of a feeling of unity. Such was achieved by associating photographs of national monuments with examples of material progress and infrastructural improvements or by framing the restoration of monuments as material development and a sign of progress, thus both preserving the past and reiterating its importance in the present. The past that these historic monuments evoked not only validated the actions of the current government, but also endowed that action with an aura of moral resurgence, historical development and fortified national identity.
As these articles substantiate, images in print and on public display are crucial for understanding the Portuguese national myths, imaginaries, collective attitudes and emotions, perceptions, and ways of looking under the Estado Novo and how the dictatorship sought actively to shape and foster these.