During a period of refreshing honesty and review of the historical and cultural implications of the Spanish Civil War, an extraordinary character is emerging: Mario Hubert Armengol. A Catalan child prodigy, artist, painter, mountaineer, refugee, legionnaire, war cartoonist, sculptor, graphic designer, gourmet and dandy is rising from the shadows, and poised for posthumous glory.

Negotiations between the Cultural Ministry of the Generalitat of Cataluña and regional museums are, after recent elections, back on track. Talk of a major retrospective in Barcelona, a touring exhibition, and a permanent gallery space for Armengol’s work is advancing as his story blends with the retelling of one of Spain’s most turbulent eras.

Mariano Armengol Torrella was born in 1909 in San Juan de las Abadesas, a pretty town in the shadow of the Catalan Pyrenees. The second of six children, and the elder of the two sons of Benito Armengol, a wealthy textiles manufacturer, and Francisca Torrellas, Armengol junior was a bright and affectionate boy with unruly auburn hair, and a love of nature. He was voraciously intellectual.

His commitment to study and learning led him in many different directions. The young Armengol loved fishing and patiently made his own flies to catch trout and salmon. Angling became a lifelong joy. He was a regular hill-walker and, later, an accomplished mountaineer. These skills helped him to survive in future years.

He and his siblings learned to swim during regular family trips to the nearby Barcelona coast. They took turns to develop a strong breast-stroke alongside their very large pet dog, occasionally holding on to its tail for safety. The beast seemed to enjoy its role as ‘swimming coach’, under the watchful eye of the family Governess.

However, Armengol’s overpowering love was painting and drawing, and his extraordinary talent was evident from the age of seven. His mother encouraged him from the outset, and a quite remarkable sense of colour and design, and skilful figurative work emerged.

Always an inquisitive boy, his early ‘investigations’ led to a series of death-defying incidents. A wealthy aunt owned one of the first cars to be seen in the province. After learning to ‘drive’ the noisy auto at the age of eight, he was fascinated by the engine and its mass of mysterious moving parts, and he enjoyed hanging upside down over the bonnet to watch the pipes steam, flywheels turn and gears rotate. Hanks of hair were left scorching on the engine block as the shocked boy was yanked free with a souvenir bloody scalp, after toppling over the bonnet edge. Thrilled by the growing sophistication of airplanes, the youngster was moved to launch himself from the upper balustrade of a grand staircase, with braced bed sheets for wings, and was left severely concussed on the marbled floor below. A primal interest in fire led to perilous experiments with petrol and candles, and his hair combusting over a primus stove. The rapid actions of a servant, who wrapped him in a heavy tapestry, saved his life, but left Armengol with a heavily scarred neck and pitted cheeks. These childhood episodes and wounds neither diluted his intellectual prowess, nor the attentions of women in future years.

His industrialist father moved the family to a large, elegant house in the city of Terrassa, which then had a population of 30,000 and was an important regional centre for textiles manufacture. It had played an important role in the development of Spain’s industrial revolution, particularly in the production of woollen fabrics. It flourished further from the 1890s, and has an important art nouveau design and architecture legacy dating from this period.

The Paris of the 1920s and its dynamic artistic community drew Armengol irresistibly. He left Spain to enrol at an Arts academy and continued his studies living on the breadline, telling tales of cold nights under bridges when the cash ran out. But he thrived on the bohemian lifestyle, and made friends with the painters, radicals and free-thinking women with whom he lived.

Armengol’s paintings, with a distinctive, bold style with dashes of impressionism and wonderful atmosphere, began to sell, and his reputation as an outstanding colourist grew rapidly. He held two successful exhibitions, hanging alongside Picasso and Utrillo, and received favourable critical notices in La Gazette des Beaux Arts and mainstream French press.

With starvation allayed, he became very political, and his eye turned searchingly to Spain, then in the midst of one of the most turbulent periods of its history. Post-Russian Revolution, political ideals and pressures for change were building. The desperate poverty of the Spanish rural poor, set against the vast wealth and unbending authoritarianism of the landed gentry, was inflaming resentment and insurrection as never before, and the whole world was watching.

Armengol was in danger under the new regime. He was on a list of ‘undesirables’ being targeted by the Rightists. Using his knowledge of the mountains and climbing skills honed in his teenage years, he fled, crossing the Pyrenees into France, burying his artistic materials on the way lest he be caught and taken for a spy, arrested by the police and, along with many other Spanish refugees, interned in a transit camp.

The French authorities were inundated with Spaniards escaping the Fascists. Armengol was given two choices; forcible repatriation which would result in imprisonment and almost certain death, or joining the French Foreign Legion. He joined the Legion, enlisting with the 2nd Battalion of 13th Demi-Brigade and, following the custom of the Legion, acquired an official pseudonym – Hubert. The young recruit was posted to the Legion’s headquarters at Sidi-bel-Abbes, Algeria. His head was shaved, and he tried to smarten up his ‘Beau Geste’ uniform- always the dandy- by pressing his tunic between two straw mattresses. He wore wooden-soled boots and was bitten mercilessly by insects. But he did try his best to integrate with the strange mix of men that made up the fighting force, many with murkier reasons for taking on a new identity.

Armengol’s poor soldiering skills soon became painfully obvious. Luckily, the Brigade Captain recognised his artistic talents, took him off rock-breaking, target practise and marching drills, and set him to work as a cartographer on topographical surveys. In between mapping expeditions into the desert, he used his pens to create a caricature narrative of his legionnaire’s life.

After Dunkirk Armengol was evacuated to France and fought a rearguard action, before being evacuated from Brest, in North-West France, to Plymouth Sound, and then to Liverpool, where he was interrogated by political and military intelligence officers. Here he was demobilised from the French Army. He had not fired a single shot throughout the hostilities.

In 1941 Armengol was one of thousands of displaced people newly arrived in Britain. He was granted refugee status and official leave to stay. He and two friends, Juan and Agustyn, an Armenian jewellery designer, were befriended by Francisco Madariaga, a restaurateur, wine importer and ‘big noise’ in Liverpool’s long-established Spanish Basque community. With many hours in the day to fill, Armengol found himself, in halting English, talking with the owner of an art materials shop. The man eventually presented him with a box of inks, paints and cartridge paper, which had been ordered, paid for, but never collected by a number of customers. Armengol had the tools to work again. In return for the Basque hospitality he was enjoying, he painted panels of exotic sea food and traditional paellas to decorate the restaurant bar, and designed advertisements and menu cards. The owner was delighted. Here he met Rolindez, the owner’s striking elder daughter; their relationship was to last 60 years. An instant attraction flared between them, but a penniless, already-married (a connection which had taken place some years before) refugee artist was certainly not part of the family plan for their handsome daughter.

Armengol went to London on the recommendation of the International Commission for War Refugees, to work as an artist for the Ministry of Information. He presented his credentials, his caricatures and legionnaire drawings. He found rooms in Hampstead and joined the Latin American Section, then transferred to the European Art Department, led by Edwin Embleton. Rolindez joined the Army and tried to forget him.

A highly sensitive man, Armengol was close to mental collapse after being on three war fronts, rapidly followed by constant bombing in Liverpool and London. The Ministry billeted their valuable propagandist in a tiny village in rural Nottinghamshire, far away from the air raids. He made friends with the villagers of Laneham, who found him truly exotic, many never having seen or heard a foreigner before. He helped on their farms, and drew murals to brighten up their homes. He also painted atmospheric landscapes of the River Trent, a fisherman walking the banks, and a small oil sketch of one of the lads with whom he went fishing. He had fun showing the kids how to make flies, just as he had done as a boy. And he had a relationship with a ‘certain young woman’, whose reputation is preserved to this day. Mister Mario is vividly remembered, in 2008, by the community as a ‘folklore’ figure.

In better health, Armengol moved back to London, coping with hysterical sprints to shelters and the underground to avoid bombing raids, and had two paintings included in an exhibition of Western Art at The French Institute. Other contemporary artists exhibiting included John Piper, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Walter Sickert, Augustus John and Pablo Picasso. Armengol also had his first political cartoons reproduced in British publications, including Tribune. Political cartoons were then published in the mainstream press; the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, and several US newspapers including the Chicago Sun and Boston Globe.

Those Three (Hitler, Mussolini & Emperor Tojo), a collection of Armengol cartoons, was published with a foreword written by his old Catalan acquaintance, Dr Josep Maria Batista I Roca. A second political cartoon collection entitled According to Plan was also published, and he won a commission to illustrate a children’s book, Spanish Fairy Stories, translated by the American poet and novelist, Gamel Woolsey.

Armengol was a lonely man in a restless, dark and troubled capital city. He met Sylvia Lawrence, a divorced Czech refugee working as an MOI translator. They lived together, more out of comfort than grand passion, which diluted still further into an uneasy mutual tolerance lasting more than 50 years. Paintings of a woman with magnificent skin tones date from this period; were they imagined, or were they drawn from life?

In 1951 Armengol’s career really took off. He created a mural for the Houses of Parliament- a montage of chess figures representing the First Parliament. He produced displays for the Festival of Britain, a post-war celebration to launch the country’s brand new future. These included transparent sculptures. The new material used, Perspex, was manufactured by ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries). Armengol was one of the first artists to work creatively with this medium. An early experiment was to create a translucent corn on the cob, which was immediately purchased by Brown & Polson, a major corn milling company, and displayed at their Company HQ for years afterwards. These early creative innovations cemented his 20-year designer relationship with ICI, one of Britain’s most successful international companies, during which he won many awards and broke new ground, including being the first British designer to visit Moscow at the height of the Cold War. This included a firm handshake and eye-contact with Khrushchev.

For over 30 years Armengol continued to receive high profile and prestige commissions, won international sculpture and design awards and gold medals, furniture design awards, and worked for some of the biggest companies and institutions of the 20th century, including Dexion, the BBC, ICI, and the British Board of Trade. One of his major works for the government was a sculptural group entitled Brotherhood of Man for the 1969 Toronto World Fair, British Pavilion. The sculptures were then offered at international auction, bought for the City of Calgary, and installed outside the Education Ministry building, where they are still a major tourist attraction today.

The mystery is that Armengol stubbornly refused to hold any exhibitions of his fine art, despite the persistent persuasion of friends, business acquaintances and agents. Was he punishing himself, fearful of failure, or simply perverse? A fear of the possible critical rejection of the work which documented so many periods of his life may have been too worrying a prospect.

In his retirement, Armengol moved to Cornwall, built another studio and worked constantly. He experimented with sculpture again, and produced a collection of fascinating paper sculptures which were then commissioned in vast number by a major greetings cards company, Gallery 5, and sold internationally. They were a development from his habit of customising multiple folded sculptural cards of birds and beasts for friends, who never threw a single one of them away. They were all ‘works of art’.

He died in 1995, and was buried in Nottinghamshire, the county where he had spent much of his wartime years and made many friends. His artwork passed to Rolindez, and then to her daughter, for whom Armengol was a surrogate father, and who owns his Estate.

In 2005 an exhibition of his war cartoons, part-funded by the Arts Council, toured Britain, together with a short documentary film of his time in Nottinghamshire, as part of the WW2 60th anniversary commemorations. An Edinburgh Festival exhibition was sponsored by the Spanish Consulate – the festival theme being ‘Cataluña’. The mayor of Barcelona attended the celebrations, and word broke that there was a dead Catalan with a wealth of wonderful artwork, waiting for recognition in the country of his birth.

Armengol, through his art, may well return at last to his homeland. He might tour the Province, perhaps hang alongside Picasso again, and maybe share wall space with Dali. Recognition in Cataluña of this son of Terrassa is well overdue.