Posada's Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery 1890-1910 (review)

José Guadalupe Posada is the most famous Mexican graphic artist and perhaps one of the most famous in the world. Certainly he has been compared to the likes of Hogarth of England, Daumier of France, and Goya of Spain among others. Although he was working in relative obscurity at the time of his death in 1913, his reputation grew during the following decade when muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco claimed links to him. Jean Charlot, another muralist, did the most to bring Posada out of the shadows. Rivera manufactured one of his customary whoppers alluding to Posada as one of his teachers, but Rivera's admiration was genuine and led to his inclusion of a well-dressed Posada in his famous mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park (1946). Orozco, by contrast, actually had some limited contact with the lithographer. In 1928, Frances (Paca) Toor published a ten-page article about him in the July issue of Mexican Folkways and two years later a book about him, Posada, monografía de 406 grabados de José Guadalupe Posada con introducción por Diego Rivera. His reputation has continued to grow ever since, such that images based on his beloved catrinas (skeletons, known as calaveras, rendered as female fashion plates) have been made into everything from jewelry and t-shirts to stamps for sealing envelopes.

This volume examines only one part of Posada's substantial output, his broadsheets. Like those in Paris and corrido illustrations in Spain, these were cheaply printed one-pagers which related a single story. Although they weren't reporting events in real time, they resemble nothing so much as the afternoon newspapers peddled in Mexico City today with their lurid headlines relating the newest accident or murders. The sheets were intended for a specific audience of rural migrants to the big city, aching to preserve traditional values in a sea of chaotic change.

In part, Posada understood these feelings because he too had made the same journey. The son of a baker in Agusacalientes in 1852, he apprenticed at the lithography studio of Trinidad Pedroza, from which he and his employer had to flee after printing one too many cartoons satirizing local politicians. They moved to León in 1872, where Posada would remain until 1888, printing everything from cigar box designs to religious images. During his time there he married, had a son, and taught lithography at the local secundaria.

For the last 25 years of his life Posada worked at the print shop he established in downtown Mexico City near the National Palace. Soon he was illustrating broadsides for publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, a collaboration that would continue until Posada's death. Frank selected the broadsheets because of their number and the relative ease of finding them in substantial collections. This volume specifically refrains from discussing at length two significant components of his vast output—religious imagery, that the author believes is too conservative to examine, and his adorable and noteworthy calaveras.

Frank examines Posada's treatment of crime, prisons and executions, rural heroes, bandits, bullfighting, urban modernity, and the onset of the Revolution for the first seven chapters of the book with the eighth reserved for a brief essay on the making of Posada's reputation. Many of his commentaries about the engravings are interesting and cover new ground, but the author's selection emphasizes Posada as political artist. Yet, even after reading the entire work, it is still difficult to put him in that context. During his career with Vanegas Arroyo, he earned three pesos a day, a princely sum for the period. One of the two extant photos of him shows the engraver in a business suit complete with vest and gold pocket watch and the family of Vanegas Arroyo noted that he took vacations during the holidays...