Monday, October 6, 2008

Jose Guadalupe Posada: Printmaker to the Mexican People

By Sandy McLeod

It is getting to be that time of year again.  El Dia de los Muertos – the Mexican Day of the Dead, a complex festival representing the varieties of the Mexican experience and psyche.  But what about the other 363 days of the year?  (November 1, All Saints' Day, is dedicated to the children, angelitos, the little angels.  Adults are remembered the next day, All Souls' Day.)  Are the calaveras, the skulls or skeletons, put away, never to be seen until next November?

Not likely.

Late in the nineteenth century a Mexican artist combined with a publisher and, using the latest technology of the time, produced art and information for the masses.  Jose Guadalupe Posada and Antonio Vanegas Arroyo combined to produce broadsheets which were tremendously popular with the literate and not so literate masses.

Posada was born in 1852, just before the liberal rebellion led by Benito Juarez.  The conservative forces under Porfirio Diaz gained control, however, and held power until the Revolution of 1910.  It was a contradictory era.  There was stability in the country, achieved through political repression, the centralization of power, and press censorship.  Foreign economic interests entered Mexico, as did foreign ideas.  And modern printing technologies made it relatively inexpensive to produce and distribute broadsides in massive numbers.

This was a period of time before mass communications as we know them today.  No radio, no television, limited books and newspapers, and even more limited literacy.  The broadside was street literature which first emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century following the development of the printing press in the West.  (China and Japan are another matter.)

Printed handbills on any topic of current interest, often accompanied by illustrations, were produced and sold for a penny or two.  They came in various formats and sizes but all were printed on one side of an unfolded paper, a broadside, or on both sides, a broadsheet. 

Posada was born in Aguascalientes, the son of an illiterate baker.  He received early training in drawing and as a teenager apprenticed to lithographer Jose Trinidad Pedroza.  In Pedroza’s print shop he did commercial work and made lithographic caricatures of local political figures.  He moved to Leon in 1872 where he taught lithography in high school and produced illustrations for books and periodicals.  In the meantime he gained greater recognition as an illustrator.  Around 1888 he moved to Mexico City to capitalize on his growing reputation.

Once in Mexico City his methods and style changed.  He began to produce relief prints, engraving and etchings, and his famous broadsides.  Relief prints come in a variety of forms but the basic idea is to create a picture on some media (wood, linoleum, metal) and cut away the part which is not to be printed.  The relief, standing out, is coated with ink and paper is pressed on it.  In an engraving or etching the picture is scratched or etched with acid in the block, ink is spread on the surface and into the lines cut into the surface of the block, and when the ink is wiped off of the block it stays in the engraved lines.  Then the printing process takes place.

It can be a long, slow, painstaking process.  The ukiyo-e woodblock artists of Japan divided the process up among four different people: publisher, artist, woodcarver, and printer.  When Posada met Vanegas Arroyo they developed a process to quickly produce large quantities of prints, sell them to a wide audience for a few cents, and turn a profit.

They devised a time saving plate production method using chemical etching, employed cheap labor, and printed on inexpensive and eye-catching paper of various colors.  The plates, usually of zinc, were nailed to wood blocks to facilitate printing and could be reused for subsequent broadside publications.

The vibrant penny press which flourished in Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a fascinating phenomenon, coming as it did under a repressive political regime.  The subjects were not necessarily political in nature.  They encompassed the interests of Mexico City’s semi-literate and illiterate population.  Horrible murders, spectacular current events, ballads to be sung or recited, and eventually in Posada’s case, the reality of life and death as Mexicans see it.

Posada was not the first Mexican artist to use the calavera as a satirical device.  But the broadsides he illustrated for the Day of the Dead stand out from his predecessors.  The sheets were large, colorful, elaborately designed, and filled with street slang which satirized all socioeconomic classes.  One author calls them the graphic equivalent of the candy skulls eaten during the holiday to offset the bitterness of death.

The calaveras are the constant reminder that death spares no one.  Seemingly grotesque to norteamericanos, Posada’s works satirize all levels of Mexican society.  His broadsides are filled with existential questions, and that twist of humor which leads some to call him the printmaker of the Mexican people.

Death did not spare Posada, of course.  He died in 1913 and was buried in a pauper’s grave.  Seven years later his body was exhumed and reinterred, in a mass grave of the poor.  He thus joined those he lived among during the last days of his life.

Many Mexican artists have claimed Posada as their inspiration.  That may or may not be true.  Of the 20,000 or so engravings he created only about 2,000 remain.  The vivid colors have faded and the wear shows their popularity during the turn of the century in Mexico.  The art scholar Rachel Freeman, who has studied Posada’s technical approaches, points out many of the surviving broadsides have pinholes in the upper corners.  As she writes, “One can only imagine these popular images hanging in Mexican homes and marketplaces.  Their bold compositions and inventive forms remain as compelling today as they were when they were published.”

What artist would not want his work to survive in this manner? 

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Sandy McLeod is an English language essayist with Việt Tide, a California-based magazine mostly in Vietnamese where this article first appeared on September 26, 2008.  Prior to his retirement, with a Ph.D. in comparative culture Dr. McLeod taught history of the Americas in college.

 

Reprinted with permission.