8 minute read

El nuevo grabado en madera mexicano: Posada*

from From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett. Exchanges of Political Print Culture

from From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett. Exchanges of Political Print Culture, page 420

Otto Neurath and Isotype*

Paul Westheim

José Guadalupe Posada is so monumental because he has understood this [i.e., the work of Francisco Goya and Max Klinger in creating realistic, yet phenomenal descriptions of life]. He does not aggrandize the episode; he does not give it dimensions that would give rise to a false monumentality. His observations, astoundingly perspicacious, reveal a pristine and vigorous emotion that he fixes in the print [estampa], which allows him to lash out against present conditions, exhibit social miseries, and fight against injustice.

Mexican art, “on which the country’s social situation had necessarily imposed a “renovation of content,” discovered in the graphic arts the [most] fitting instrument to transmit these new subjects. The aspiration to fulfill his task forced him to develop his own style.

The artistic originality of the new Mexican woodcut is due to three factors:

1) to the Revolution, the most powerful transformation that has occurred in the country, thanks to which the Mexican people gained national consciousness for the first time since the collapse of the Aztec empire;

2) to a tradition, never interrupted since the 16th century, in which the print is the instrument of the education of the people;

3) to the phenomenon of José Guadalupe Posada, a creative spirit, who knew how to develop a highly personal and yet relatable style, which would become, in postrevolutionary Mexico, the basis of all artistic production, not only of graphic arts but also of murals.

A new type of artist emerged from the Mexican Revolution: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, and, as a printer, Leopoldo Méndez, just as the French Revolution brought forth Jacques Louis David, inventor of a new artistic purpose: “social utility,” to use his own expression. The Mexican Revolution, which changed every aspect of daily life, that shook the people in all their layers, provided artistic creation with new content, important to all and understandable to all. In the nineteenth century, the woodcut had achieved a relatively wide effect but only as illustrations in popular books—and in a sense, Posada’s engravings [ grabados] were also illustrations, illustrations of corridos printed on flyers [hojas volantes], although the illustration was in fact more interesting than what was illustrated. The new woodcut, when it seeks to enter into the problems posed by the Revolution, seeks above all to preserve its popularity, without which it cannot be sustained, least of all in Mexico.

No matter how energetically this new woodcut tries to be of its own time—to root itself in the present without recollection of the past or at least to emancipate itself from the past as a link and norm, this being the logical continuation of the Mexican graphic tradition—it is limited to the things of its moment and its epoch.

[…] It is said that Santiago Hernández published the first lithographed “calaveras”; according to others, Manuel Manilla is the inventor of the genre. It reached its artistic peak with José Guadalupe Posada, whose numerous “calaveras” are his masterpieces.

Here is the tradition from which the new Mexican printmaking [ grabado] of the 20th century emerges. The style has changed, the contents have changed. But these two tendencies toward the popular and the current, because of the revolution, have gained major energy and depth.

It has been said that thanks to the Revolution the Mexicans discovered themselves. In this sense, José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) is one of the greatest and most brilliant precursors of the Mexican Revolution. His twenty thousand engravings [ grabados], which have the authenticity of the documentary, are a genuine encyclopedia of the Mexican.

Posada was an artisan. The trade—drawing, lithography, woodcut, printing—was learned in his hometown, Aguascalientes, in a small print shop whose owner, Trinidad Pedrozo, was a lithographer and wood engraver.

Trinidad Pedrozo edited a small progressive weekly journal, El Jicote, whose principal attraction was its lithographed caricatures. The newspaper’s oppositional stance provoked in Aguascalientes such a scandal that Pedrozo had to move his workshop to León, Guanajuato, where Posada followed him. His first drawings and caricatures appeared in El Jicote. In 1888, Posada went to the capital to try his luck. He found a job as an engraver [ grabador] at the Vanegas Arroyo publishing house. This publisher, the largest of its kind in Mexico, published cheap literature for the masses: prayers, stories of saints, descriptions of rare cases, accounts of lurid crimes, miracles, commentaries (sometimes humoristic) on events of the day, corridos [song sheets], and, for the Day of the Dead, the “calaveras.” [These were] single sheets, flyers [hojas volantes], in every color of the spectrum, for which the people paid one or two centavos. Posada became a great draw for the publisher. [As a result], he is the ideal artist for this public, who feel understood by him and, in turn, understand the clear and concise plastic language in which he speaks. For twenty-five years, until his death in 1913, that indefatigable worker made the illustrations that Vanegas Arroyo needed for his flyers and brochures, [and] made thousands and thousands of engravings, in which he found, intuitively, brilliantly, what is called “public opinion.”

The unique feature in Posada’s art—unique, too, within the boundaries of popular art—is not that his engravings are masterful descriptions of the world of impoverished people, of the different popular types, of destitute scenes, of the different popular types, of popular scenes from everyday life. The extraordinary [thing], the source of its social, its historical-cultural and also artistic importance, is that he has managed to show us that little world as seen by those who make it up: the man in the street and in the pulquería, the woman in the kitchen, the comadre of the markets. In those small-size engravings [ grabados] of his, the thoughts and feelings of the people are expressed. Of the Mexican people.

A very similar case is that of the Berlin cartoonist Heinrich Zille, his contemporary, as were Porfirio Díaz and Guillermo II. Keenly observant, as keen as Posada, he devoted his entire life to portraying the proletarian underworld of Berlin, the “fifth estate,” as it has been designated. “My medium,” Zille called it. Posada did nothing else. He also drew “his medium.”

But we do not do justice to Posada if we deal only with the documentary and traditional aspect of his work. This modest man, whom during his life no one considered an artist, who worked in his workshop as a craftsman, an old-fashioned craftsman, creating work after work without even suspecting that they were works of art, forged his own formal language, his own graphic style.

Only in his first years in León did he cultivate wood cuts [ grabado en madera], producing imagery [imaginería], cigarette packets, etc., in which he did not deviate from the style of the time. In the Posada catalog [produced for the exhibition] in Chicago, Fernando Gamboa affirms that “in Mexico wood engraving had practically been abandoned in the second half of the 19th century. Of the thousand original plates that have been preserved of Posada’s work, only a few are of this material. All the others are of the alloy that is used for printing type and which is soft enough to work with the gouge and hard enough to pull several thousand copies.”

But even this procedure is not quick enough to keep up with work at the publisher, [in terms of] the sheer number of flyers that must come out as soon as possible, before interest in the grisly case that just happened has disappeared. Posada has to renounce the gouge, [that is,] engraving in the strict sense of the word, just as Daumier abandoned the technique of woodcut in favor of lithography, a faster procedure, when in the political upheavals of the July Revolution his involvement with Caricature magazine imposed dizzying speeds on him.

Posada invents his own process for his express production. With a special chemical ink he draws directly on the zinc plates, gives them a bath of some corrosive, and the plate is ready for the press.

Posada’s starting point was the Mexican engravings of the 19th century, an instrument of propaganda for the Church and for political agitation. His concise and lapidary style, which has the energy and monumentality of a woodcut, is undoubtedly inspired by popular imagery. Many elements of his engravings come from there: the devil with horns, claws, and a tail; the jaws of hell that burn flames, etc. His entire repertoire of forms and figures is rooted in representations of the people. The way to report facts about him is never a mere report; it is concentration of the essential, the simplification, and enhancement of the essential to achieve the most intense plastic effect. His objectivity corresponds always to the imagined world of the masses. Next to the social aspect, this is its aspect, [which], let us say, is poetic.

And since he knows the thoughts and feelings of the people, he also knows that what would be enough for educated people, the succinct communication of the fact, is not enough for the man of the humble class. The people need emotion to understand. Hence the artistic expression of Posada. He always chooses the moment of the highest dramatic tension and finds the form that converts it into an optical and sensitive experience. He takes advantage of all the resources engraving offers to produce within the surface, though a great distribution of blacks and whites, dynamic movement, contrast, rhythm, and tension. Let us contemplate once from this point of view, that of the formal structure, the Zapatista Skull: the vigorous diagonal of the horse’s body, which vehemently crosses the surface, cuts the vertical of the rider, a structural stroke of slightly less energy, which starts from the tip of the foot and reaches the hat, [which goes] almost to the edge of the engraving. They accentuate the diagonal movement, while simultaneously interrupting it, the rifle and the skulls stacked below. The mass of the flag above balances the pile of skulls at the bottom right. Without doubt, the fundamental impact of Posada’s art, and precisely its effect on the crowds, is due to this artistic structure, which is not the product of chance but conscious creation. When Posada got his job at the Vanegas Arroyo publishing house in 1888, Manuel Manilla already had been working there for many years. In 1892, Manilla stopped working, [and] in 1895 he died, approximately at the age of sixty. Some hundreds of his prints are known, engraved on plates of an alloy of lead and zinc. That all those attributed to him are his is as doubtful as it is certain that many of the anonymous engravings of the second half of the century are his. Born during the peak of romanticism, he is romantic because his time is. But while much of his extensive output remains conventional, a considerable number of his works rise notably above the contemporary level. He manages to characterize with success, and many of his engravings [are] impactful because of their structure. Among them are his bullfighting and circus scenes and the sheet that we reproduce, one of his best engravings: a young man in love, holding on to the gate that blocks his way toward his beloved. The black and white masses are strongly contrasted; its gradation reveals a fine sensitivity. In his “skulls,” full of wit, he uses his own and personal writing. When Posada started working at the publisher, Manilla, [who was] much older, was for him the great master. [Posada] admired him, and it is very possible that pictures like the one in the love scene have taught him something.

* Paul Westheim, “El Nuevo Grabado en Madera mexicano,” in El grabado en madera, trans. Mariana Frenk, 4th ed., Breviarios del Fondo de Cultura Económica no. 95 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1954), 227–86.

1908/1930

Pages 40–41