“Posada’s legacy is perhaps the most influential of all Mexican artists… including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Rufino Tamayo.”
– Posada Art Foundation
During his lifetime, José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) created an enormous body of work which incorporated calaveras, or skeleton caricatures. While Posada did not invent the artistic or literary figure of the calavera, his have become the most iconic.
Many of Posado’s calaveras were published through the press of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, an editor of inexpensive broadsides popular with the masses. Working together, Vanegas Arroyo and Posado used calavera images and poems to satirize bourgeois life, the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, and politicians and celebrities of the day.
One of Posada’s most iconic calavera image is his catrina (catrin, elegant or dandy), a female figure wearing a fancy hat with flowers and feathers that nod to both the Mexican elite and European fashions.
By poking fun at the living, especially the wealthiest and most powerful, Posada’s satirical skeletons ridiculed social privilege. His calaveras imply that no one is immune to death.
After his death, and in the wake of the political and social upheaval caused by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), Posada’s artistic influence had permeated the culture but his name was nearly forgotten. Later, however, activist artists like Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and Leopoldo Méndez sought to delineate an authentically Mexican artistic tradition, and they held up Posada as a cultural hero. It was Diego Rivera himself who called the fashionable calavera la Calavera Catrina, the name she is well known by today.
Rooted deeply within the Mexican psyche, la Calavera Catrina is considered to be the personification of Día de Muertos.
José Guadalupe Posada: Legendary Printmaker of Mexico opens October 21 at the AMA. To learn more about Posada, visit the Posada Art Foundation website.
Sources: Posada Art Foundation, Google Arts & Culture, New York Public Library
