Posada, José Guadalupe (1852–1913)

José Guadalupe Posada (b. 2 February 1852; d. 20 January 1913), Mexican printmaker. Posada grew up in Aguascalientes, Mexico, where he attended drawing classes for a short time. Otherwise, he was a self-taught artist. In 1868 he joined the local lithography shop of José Tinidad Pedroza, where the opposition newspaper El Jicote was printed. In 1872 Posada and Pedroza moved to León to open a print shop, and there they produced illustrations for documents, cigar wrappers, religious images, caricatures, and the like. Posada moved to Mexico City in 1888 and soon joined forces with editor Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, with whom he would work until his death. By this time Posada had begun to work in the simple, free-flowing style for which he would posthumously become known. He also changed medium, to a kind of print that could be quickly created and easily combined with text.

Posada illustrated flyers, sensational news stories, books of magic tricks, new songs, recipes, and numerous other items for the popular penny press, many of which were printed on colored tissue paper and haphazardly hand tinted. The images for which Posada is now best known are the calaveras (skeletons) he created for the Day of the Dead celebrations. Though he produced well over twenty thousand images in print, in his lifetime Posada was not well known. He considered himself a printmaker and craftsman, not an artist. Posada died in Mexico City and was buried in a pauper's grave. Later, his works were discovered by the Mexican muralists, who made him their artistic mentor and teacher (though he had had little, if any, contact with them) and a political hero (though there is no evidence that he had any particular political affiliation). Posada made prints that satirized everyone and did not single out any one group. His prints do reflect the everyday life and concerns of the people of his time.

See alsoArt: The Nineteenth Century; Art: The Twentieth Century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Roberto Berdecio and Stanley Appelbaum, eds., Posada's Popular Mexican Prints: 273 Cuts by José Guadalupe Posada (1972).

José Guadalupe Posada, José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar: [Exhibition] Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of His Death (1988).

Julian Rothenstein, ed., Posada: Messenger of Mortality (1989).

Additional Bibliography

Frank, Patrick. Posada's Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery, 1890–1910. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Topete del Valle, Alejandro. José Guadalupe Posada: Prócer de la gráfica popular mexicana. México: Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, 2002.

                             Katherine Clark Hudgens