Josep Renau’s Las Arenas: Balneario, Piscina Luminosa, completed in 1932, marks a decisive inflection point in his evolution from avant-garde painter to internationally minded graphic designer. Commissioned to promote the newly electrified swimming complex on Valencia’s seafront, the lithograph allowed the 25-year-old artist to test the aerodynamic geometries and saturated colour gradients that would soon underpin his graphic production deployed to defend the democratic cause in Spain against the advance of Fascism. Executed with the airbrush—a technique just entering Spanish commercial printing—the poster fused the streamlined glamour of Art Deco with the hard-edged clarity Renau had absorbed from Soviet photomontage journals and from László Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus experiments with oblique viewpoints and artificial lighting.

Formally, the sheet is a lesson in modernist composition. A crisply modelled female athlete, her body chiselled by raking chiaroscuro, occupies the left foreground, while two cantilevered diving boards slice diagonally across the nocturnal sky, their acid-green planes punctured by vermilion railings. The vertiginous recessional space—deepened by pin-prick constellations—recalls Constructivist dynamics, yet the velvety gradients and chrome-like highlights speak to transatlantic advertising idioms circulating through Fortune and Vogue. Renau’s synthesis of industrial precision and sensuous modelling embodied the poster’s subject: a cutting-edge “luminous pool” whose underwater lamps promised night-time recreation and technological wonder to a burgeoning middle class.

Those promises were not rhetorical. Las Arenas itself, founded as a seaside spa in 1898 and rebuilt in 1933–34 by the rationalist architect Luis Gutiérrez Soto, offered Valencia one of Spain’s first purpose-built leisure complexes. Elevated concrete decks, filtered seawater systems and integrated cafés aligned the resort with GATEPAC’s call for hygienic, egalitarian public architecture. Contemporary critics noted that the facility was “immediately known thanks to Renau’s excellent poster,” linking graphic modernism to the city’s urban self-fashioning during a period of rapid modernization.

The swimmer’s taut physique also registers a broader politics of the body. During Spain’s Second Republic (1931-36) legislators expanded physical-education programmes and celebrated sport as a democratic right, part of a Europe-wide embrace of athletic vitality as emblem of social renewal. Renau’s androgynous, streamlined figure—neither sexualised pin-up nor conservative classical ideal—visualises the Republic’s progressive gender ethos while subtly contesting the chauvinist iconography then emerging in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Such images helped naturalise new habits of leisure and collective health across class lines, embedding modern bodies within modern spaces.

The poster’s enduring significance lies in the way it foreshadows Renau’s mature strategy of fusing avant-garde form with mass communication. The diagonal thrusts, cinematic lighting and utopian promise of technology prefigure his anti-fascist photomurals for the 1937 Paris Exposition and the later American Way of Life series produced in Mexican exile and East Germany. Seen in that genealogical light, Las Arenas stands not merely as an Art Deco landmark but as the crucible in which Renau forged a lifelong dialogue between radical design and public persuasion.

Provenance

Private Collection, New Jersey

Private Collection, New York

Acquired from the above

Literature

F.A. Mercer & W. Gaunt (eds.). Poster Progress. London: The Studio, Ltd; New York, The Studio Publications, Inc., 1939, p. 62.

Alain Weill. The Poster: A Worldwide Survey and History, G K Hall, 1985, n. 490.

Alain Weill. L’Invitation Au Voyage / l’Affiche de Tourisme dans le Monde. Paris: Somogy, 1994, p. 66.

Miroir Du Temps. Exposition d'Affiches Publicitaires 1891-1990. Collection Eric Kellenberger, Gingins, Switzerland: Foundation Neumann, 1995, p. 18.

Françoise Lévèque and Carlos Pérez (Editors). El espectáculo está en la calle. El cartel moderno francés. Colin, Carlu, Loupot, Cassandre. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia - Aldeasa, 2001, p. 138.

Albert Forment (ed.). Josep Renau. Catàleg raonat. València: IVAM, 2004, p. 43.

Louise Fili and Steven Heller. Euro Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars, 2005, p. 275.

Jaime Brihuega (ed.). Josep Renau, 1907-1982: Compromís i cultura. València: Universitat de València, 2007, p. 91.

Alain Weill. L'Affiche Art Déco. Paris: Hazan, 2013, p. 226.

Silvina Schammah Gesser, Robert Lubar Messeri y Eugenia Afinoguénova (editors). The Edinburgh Companion to the Spanish Civil War and Visual Culture, The Edinburgh University Press, the present example illustrated (forthcoming in 2026).