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During his forty-four years of ardent and untiring daily labor, it is estimated he produced more than 20, engravings. His remarkable facility is described by Blas Vanegas Arroyo, the editor's son, who remembers his father preparing the publication of certain works and discussing their illustration with "Don Lupe," as Posada was fondly known among his friends. Posada would study the material, suggest a certain size plate, draw on it rapidly in pencil and produce a complete, alive and eloquent outline in a few minutes.
One hour later, the plate would be ready, engraved on metal or etched on zinc. Posada assumed a frank artisan attitude towards his work. Indifferent to the mode of life of the professional artists of his day, he would spend long hours quietly working over his table, piling up his plates in boxes where he kept his corrosive acids and other materials necessary for etching on zinc, a medium which he introduced in Mexico about He was a constant but amiable victim of the attentions of children of his neighborhood where he lived in one of the largest and poorest tenement houses of Mexico City.
This house, near the Tepito market, consisted of three hundred small rooms and many courtyards with open air wash basins. In spite of the apparent success Rivera was experiencing , he still felt that there was something missing in his art that technical growth alone could not supply.
Diego Rivera began painting murals on the walls of public buildings, a medium he viewed as less elitist than the gallery canvas,. In his autobiography, Rivera credits Posada as one of his principal influences. Both artists shared a strong populist streak Rivera believed that art should play a role in empowering working people to understand their own histories.
He did not want his art to be isolated in museums and galleries, but made accessible to the people, spread on the walls of public buildings. Because Posada was a classic, he was never subjugated by the photographic reality, the infrareality, he always knew how to express like plastic values the quality and the amount of the things within the super-reality of the plastic order.
If it is unquestionable what August Renoir said: that the art work is characterized being "indefinable and inimitable", we can say that the work of Posada is the art work par excellence. None will imitate Posada; none will define Posada. And though Posada's calaveras depicted the idiosyncrasies of both rich and poor, the butt of his jokes were more often white-collar professionals, government officials and the middle and upper classes.
In Diego Rivera was unhappy with the new art director at the San Carlos academy. Because of this he decided to leave the school where he had been a student for six years.
Calling Rivera his "artistic father," Rivera decided to pay homage to the late artist in , when he painted a mural at the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City. He painted himself as a young boy holding the hand of Catrina, next to Posada. Frida Kahlo, Rivera's wife, was also featured in the mural, which became a pantheon of the famous and infamous in Mexican history. During his first two commissions in San Francisco in , Rivera and his wife, artist Frida Kahlo, were extremely well-received.
This work represented a culmination of hundreds of murals painted for the public, and also demonstrated his affectionate relationship with San Francisco.
In his autobiography, Orozco writes, "This was my awakening to the existence of the art of painting. I became one of the most faithful customers in Vanegas Arroyo's retail shop. Technique Always attempting to find a more rapid and efficient method of reproducing his images for the masses, Posada experimented with different types of print technology. The lithograph, introduced into Mexico in by Italian artists, had been Posada first engraving method which he later taught Posada worked for Arroyo from his own shop where his workroom was stacked helter-skelter with thousands of engraved blocks.
His move to Mexico City spurred a drive towards cheaper printmaking on zinc, wood and type metal. There, Posada radically transformed both his style and technique to meet the demands of the penny press and his new urban audience. He developed an expressive shorthand to produce rapid, legible, and appealing illustrations. Early on Posada employed a method known as wood cutting by which he would carve his calavera images onto wooden blocks for printing.
Toward the end of his career, Posada discovered a way to use acid-resistant ink to create free hand drawings on metal plates which were then "bitten" or dissolved with acid so that only the drawn image stood out from the surface. The resulting relief block looks like a rubber stamp, and can be printed in the same press and at the same time as type, instead of requiring a special press like the lithographic stone.
Nevertheless, he kept his art within austere limits, insisting on a simplicity of form very different from the excessively realistic and decorative style that has always been a sign of decadence in Mexican art. It is precisely in the internal structure of its composition, in the terrific movement injected into its forms, that the balance is made potent; here Posada's art achieves a dynamic symmetry.
These later calaveras are noticeable different in terms of style and complexity from Posada's earlier wood cut ones exhibiting a delicate vividness of expression which was achieved through a mastery of tools designed to allow his to render images more quickly. He died shortly after his wife, in that same tenement house at No. Three of his friends, of whom "only one can read," as was recorded in the death certificate, reported his death to the proper authorities.
They carried the body of "Don Lupe" on their shoulders to the Cemetery of Dolores in which the civil authorities had given them a "Ticket for a sixth class grave. Seven years later, Posada's unclaimed remains were exhumed, and tossed in a common grave.
Eight years after Posada's death, his works were still being printed, but his name was virtually unknown. Artist and art-historian Jean Charlot rediscovered the enduring popularity of this singular folk artist.
Charlot wrote a magazine article about Posada in and 20 years later a collection appeared in a museum exhibition in Mexico City which later traveled to Chicago. As his calaveras remind us, death makes fools of us all. Rich and poor, proud and humble are placed on a level playing field. The closest we can come to eternal life is the longevity of those who leave something universal behind, like Posada. In Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and his son Blas came to the capital from Puebla and established a press aimed at producing inexpensive literature for the masses: historical profiles, comedies, farces, hair-raising thrillers, songs and histories of saints.
These sold mainly in plazas and market places. To the press and to these newspapers, Posada was a prolific contributor. Posada and Vanegas Arroyo complemented each other admirably; together they created a center for broadsides, or printed sheets used in the diffusion of political news and argument which reached the remotest corners of the country, guided by the great talent of the publisher, the genius of the illustrator and the intelligence and charm of the poet, Constancio S.
Suarez was poet and writer from Oaxaca who most often expressed the group's ideas in the written word. Like Posada, Vanegas Arroyo possessed an independent spirit; This tenacious, mocking and ferocious combatant experienced the sufferings of imprisonment but his talent as both editor and businessperson allowed him to thrive as Mexico's most popular publisher.
Vanegas Arroyo enjoyed a clear vision which often expressed the progressive political view or that of the people. In , aided by his son Blas, Arroyo was one of the first to bring movies to Mexico. Like Posada he was periodically jailed by the authorities. Printed on inexpensive, brightly colored paper and costing only a few centavos, pennies these corrido s were sold on street corners to an audience that was largely illiterate.
Posada's corrido prints were distributed by corridistas , musicians who traveled from one market to another singing the rhymed verses of corridos. Those without the ability to read could still grasp the meaning intended by the phony obituaries or the rousing corridos glorifying the likes of bullfighters, revolutionary heroes and larger-than-life bandits through the benefit of Posada's expressive engraved skeletal forms.
When Manuel Manilla was an illustrator and the Vanegas Arroyo publishers just beginning, the religious tradition in these sheets, with their romantic colors and prominent typographical features, completely over-shadowed the illustrations. Posada, when he came to work for Vanegas Arroyo, reduced the typographical attractions to a position of minor importance and gave to the illustrations the principal place on the sheet.
This proved to be a great economic success for the publishing house. Through the medium of his work Posada was one of those actively responsible in preparing the way for the Revolution. He took the popular traditions and gave them a material form of such expressive vigor that the macabre surrendered to the dynamic and jovial vitality of his images. Skulls and skeletons are often represented in the art of Prehispanic Mexico particularly the Aztec civilization which ruled much of Mexico at the time of the conquest.
Human sacrifice and collection of victim's skulls was particularly prominent among the Aztec and their subject tribes. Detail of skull necklace, A. Cast gold and turquoise Image courtesy of doaks. Posada's most obvious influence was Manuel Manilla, who preceded Posada at the publishing house of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo was also known for his calaveras.
Calavera of Madero Amateur politician, Francisco Madero, whom Diaz had allowed a few token votes in the election, joined with the bandit, Pancho Villa Doroteo Arango , and the peasant leader, Emiliano Zapata. In Posada's hands, these traditional symbols took on a new life and became a way to make social and political critiques.
Sometimes his calaveras would appear as vain skeletons — dressed in the clothes of the wealthy and performing everyday activities like riding bicycles, playing the guitar or taking the tram. Sometimes they were an instrument of celebration — presenting sympathetic portraits of peasants, heroes and revolutionaries. Posada created his iconic Catrina in , just as the revolution was beginning. The image — often known as 'The Skull of the Female Dandy' — is a zinc etching that shows a grinning skeleton with a fancy feathered hat.
This type of hat would have been common among the upper-classes. During the time in which it was made it would have been common for some members of Mexican high-society to whiten their skin with make-up and adopt aristocratic ways. Becoming more European was a common aspiration for the over-privileged. As the revolution began, Posada created a sort of satirical obituary for this portion of society.
The original work was published on a broadside along with a poem. For Posada, death was the great equaliser. No matter your colour or creed, your wealth or your poverty, everyone ends up as a skull in the end.
Tragically Posada was largely forgotten by the end of his life. He died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave. Satire, by its very nature, is ephemeral; and Posada's work was no exception. Printed on very cheap paper, it meant that only a small collection of his images remain. Yet, thankfully, he found veneration through a number of other artists that emerged in Mexico after the revolution. They recognised his contribution to the art of engraving, and saw how he had shaped the visual language of Mexican art and illustration.
In many ways, Posada was a revolutionary. He helped to establish a national art that was independent of European tradition and that was built around a language of indigenous symbols and motifs. Today humorous political cartoons and satirical comic strips are incredibly popular in Mexico and, for many, Posada is often considered to be the founding father of the genre.
Eleven illustrations by Posada are known from El Jicote. In , after only a year or so Pedroza returned to Aguascalientes leaving Posada in charge of the workshop. In , their only known child was born, Juan Sabino Posada Vela ? He also created images for local printing houses and numerous religious publications. Beginning in , he taught lithography at the Leon secondary school for approximately one year.
But we do know that prior to the flood and in Posada had developed relationships with several publishers in Mexico City as images by him appeared in publications in and Reference: pers. It is reasonable to speculate that the flood together with these contacts, possibly with the desire to seek improved financial opportunity in a larger market, probably prompted Posada to move his business and family to Mexico City where he opened his first workshop at Calle Cerrada de Santa Teresa.
Possibly sometime in the period around the years of , Posada began working for the publishing house of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo The publications produced by Vanegas Arroyo were circulated around much of Mexico and also but less frequently into Spanish speaking portions of North America.
When Posada began working for Vanegas Arroyo there was already a talented engraver by the name of Manuel Manilla ?
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