Posada's Popular Mexican Prints

José Posada

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780486133874
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) was Mexico's most illustrious graphic artist. For over forty years he worked tirelessly as an incorruptible and truly popular artist, illustrating cookbooks and fortune-telling books, collections of songs and riddles, periodicals and newspapers, children's books and novels, and most of all famous broadsides that were distributed throughout the country. After his death he was venerated by the artists of the new generation — Rivera, Orozco, and many others, who realized that he had both saved and renewed the art of engraving in Mexico, and incorporated much of Posada's imagery into their own work.
Here are close to 300 of Posada's best engravings, all done for the printer and publisher A. Vanegas Arroyo in Mexico City. Posada worked in two techniques — engraving on type metal with a many-pointed burin and, later, relief etching on zinc. The broadsides he illustrated commemorated all sorts of occasions — disasters, political events, crimes, and miracles — or they glorified great popular heroes like Zapata. Posada was known for his calaveras — skeletons that cavorted, ate and drank, rode bicycles and horses, wielded swords and daggers, or were revolutionaries, streetcleaners, dishwashers, and almost everything else. This was traditional art for All Souls' Day, the Mexican Day of the Dead, but in Posada's hands it became extremely versatile, sometimes an instrument of social and political satire, sometimes a sympathetic portrait of a revolutionary, sometimes a comic, cartoon-like memento mori. He did engravings of murders, suicides, catastrophes, robberies, and executions, as well as of snake-men, giant snails, and other grotesques and deformation. He pictured the daily pleasures and chagrins of the people from a proletarian point of view, and with overflowing imaginativeness. There is brutality and horror in his art, but there is also humor, political consciousness, and a sprawling, immediate vitality.
This edition includes explanatory notes and commentary, often giving precise topical meaning to what otherwise appears vague or allegorical. It presents all of Posada's various themes, and all of the many forms in which he worked in his maturity. It is hoped that through it he will gain the wider audience, especially in America, that he deserves.

The Illustrations

Additional commentary on many of the illustrations, with further identification of iconography, persons, events, etc., will be found immediately after the illustrations in a separate section beginning on page 147.

The Spanish titles and identifying phrases in the captions and commentary preserve all the misspellings and idiosyncrasies of the original broadsides and publications.

In the captions, “tm” indicates that the print in question is a type metal engraving, “z” that it is a zinc relief etching. See page xvii for further technical data.

1. Advertisement for the books published by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, for whom Posada did most of his Mexico City work; z; 1900 or after. See full translation, p. viii.

2. "Rebumbio de calaveras" (Skeletons in a hubbub). Broadside: tm. Shows newsboys hawking calavera sheets.

3. Calavera depicting contemporary newspapers as skeleton cyclists. Broadside; tm; between 1889 and 1895.

4. "Gran fandango y francachela de todas las calaveras". (Happy dance and wild party of all the skeletons). Broadside; tm.

5. Calavera of Don Quijote. Broadside; tm. 95% of original size.

6."Gran calavera eléctrica" (Big trolley calavera). Broadside; z; 1907. A cemetery, presumably crowded with victims of the then fairly new electrical conveyances.

7. "Calavera del gato morrongo" (Calavera of the alley cat); z.

8. "La calavera oaxaqueña" (The Oaxaca calavera). Broadside; z.

9. "Calavera de don Folías y el negrito". (Calavera of Don ...

Table of contents

• DOVER PICTORIAL ARCHIVE SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Table of Contents
• The Illustrations
• Commentary on the Illustrations
• Brief Bibliography
• Art and Design from Many Cultures