The Calaveras of José Guadalupe Posada
By GAIL S. MYHRE
October 23, 2009
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| José Guadalupe Posada (Mexican, 1852-1913). La Calavera Catrina (The Elegant Lady Skeleton) (ca. 1910). Zinc etching. 15 x 11 cm (5.9 x 4.3 in.). Aguascalientes: Museo José Guadalupe Posada. |
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| José Guadalupe Posada (Mexican, 1852-1913). Calavera don Quijote (The Skeleton of Don Quixote) (ca. 1905). Type metal engraving. 27 x 15 cm (10.6 x 5.9 in.). Aguascalientes: Museo José Guadalupe Posada. |
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| José Guadalupe Posada (Mexican, 1852-1913). Gran Fandango y Francachela de Todas las Calaveras (Happy Dance and Wild Party of All the Skeletons) (ca. 1910). Type metal engraving. 20.5 x 12 cm (8.1 x 4.7 in.). Aguascalientes: Museo José Guadalupe Posada. |
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| Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886-1957). Sueno de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park) (1947-48). Fresco. 480 x 1500 cm (189 x 590.6 in.). Mexico City: Museo Mural de Diego Rivera. |
José Posada (1852-1913), Mexican lithographer and printmaker, is best remembered for his calaveras or skull etchings. These have been adopted across Mexico and elsewhere as iconic images used in celebration of Dia de los Muertos, which takes place November 1 and 2, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day on the Catholic calendar. Posada’s most famous work, the zinc etching La Calavera Catrina or The Elegant Lady Skeleton (ca. 1910), has been widely reproduced not only in prints but also by numerous modern Mexican artists and artisans in such varied media as clay, tile, papier-mâché and metal.
Born in Aguascalientes, Mexico on February 2, 1852, José Posada is listed on a 1867 census document as a painter. At the age of 16, he became an apprentice to the printer and publisher José Pedroza, in whose studio he learned lithography and engraving. He eventually purchased Pedroza’s shop in the town of León de los Aldamas. Posada's most prolific and important work, however, was done in the Mexico City printing shop of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, where he began as a staff artist around 1890 and soon became the publisher’s chief artist. There Posada abandoned lithography and began to work first with engraving on type metal and later with relief etching on zinc. Unfortunately, since many of his original sheets and books have disappeared, it is often difficult or impossible to determine the specific subject or date of a Posada illustration.
Posada’s images were created primarily as headers for broadsides, cheap one-page leaflets with brightly printed graphics that reported the news and social issues of the day. The artist was intensely political, having favored the revolutionary Zapatistas, and used his calaveras to great effect as social satire. Calaveras art might also be based on popular songs or stories, as with Posada’s type metal engraving Calavera Don Quixote (ca. 1905). His images might also illustrate everyday life, as seen in several small calaveras portraying market women and in the engraving Calaveras de los patinadores or Skeletons of the Streetcleaners (ca. 1910).
Posada's illustrations found a responsive audience in the general Mexican population, given the wide cultural familiarity with skull and skeleton aesthetic forms in pre-Colombian Mayan art. Though to modern American eyes these depictions may have appeared macabre, the calaveras were accepted by contemporary Mexican viewers as salutary reminders of the eternity of the spirit and the equality of all men in death. One example received in this way was Posada’s Gran Fandango y Francachela de Todos las Calaveras – Happy Dance and Wild Party of All the Skeletons (ca. 1910).
Other artists working for Vanegas Arroyo's print house used similar, if somewhat less nuanced, imagery. In fact, the print Calavera Zapatista by Manuel Manilla (1830-ca. 1895) was long considered to be a work of Posada. Posada was employed as a commercial illustrator with Vanegas Arroyo until his death from enteritis on January 20, 1913.
Posada’s influence on later generations of Mexican artists is undeniable. Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) included a calaveras modeled on Posada’s Catrina as a deliberate homage in his fresco Sueno de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park) (1947-1948). In the wall painting, Posada himself walks arm-in-arm with his skeletal creation, while Rivera depicts himself as a child holding her opposite hand. As a young boy, José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), also an artist of the Muralist movement, visited Posada in his Mexico City print shop, and in his autobiography wrote, “This was my awakening to the existence of the art of painting.”[1]
For further reading, a remarkably complete book of Posada’s work, José Guadalupe Posada: Ilustrador de la vida Mexicana, was published by the Fonda Editorial del la Plastica Mexicana in 1963. More generally available texts include Posada’s Popular Mexican Prints (selected and edited by Roberto Berdecio and Stanley Appelbaum, Dover Publications, 1972) and José Guadalupe Posada and the Mexican Broadside (Diane Miliotes, Art Institute of Chicago, 2006).
[1] Orozco, José Clemente. José Clemente Orozco – An Autobiography. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962; ASIN B00117TZV6