340
PARTISAN REVIEW
twenties, to judge from the strikingly presented, comprehensive exhibi–
tion of his work held at the Art Institute of Chicago this spring.
Posada was a simple man, a print-maker who spent all his life in
Mexico City and Aguascalientes, the town in which he was born. Due
to the political troubles in Mexico during his formative years religious
art was hidden away; even the magnificent colonial altars had been
replaced in the churches by others of white plaster following the Euro–
pean trend of the period. Posada may never have put a brush to canvas
in his life. Yet both Orozco and Rivera, the two foremost figures
in
twentieth-century Mexican art, acknowledge their profound debt to
Posada as a "determining influence in their career, esthetics and profes–
sional conduct."*
During his life Posada never assumed anvthing but
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attitude to his work. He was simply a printmaker to the people who
lived for his work and aspired to no greater material prosperity. He
began working as a child making pottery; as a boy he attended a draw–
ing academy for a very brief period. This was practically the extent of
his formal education. But he soon found he had a talent for engraving.
He was surrounded by a landscape of great natural beauty; he was
born into a period of social and political ferment that was molding a
new nation; and he lived all his life close to a people in whom the
anonymous and spontaneous manifestations of folk art had never died
out. Before he was twenty years old, Posada had mastered the art of
lithography and had become famous for his illustrations in the paper
El Jicote.
From lithography he turned to wood engraving; and from
wood, to burin engraving in type metal. He was an indefatigable worker.
During his forty-one years it is estimated that he produced more than
20,000 engravings. Yet for all his genius and popularity, Posada died
alone, January 20,
1913,
very poor, in that same humble atmosphere
which had produced his fertile and prodigious art. Three of his friends,
of whom "only one can read" as was recorded in the death certificate,
accompanied his remains to the Cemetery of Dolores "in which the civil
authorities had given them a ticket for a sixth class grave." Seven years
later, Posada's unclaimed remains were exhumed and tossed into a com–
mon grave.
Yet from the presentation by the Art Institute it was immediately
apparent why Posada's art had the influence it did on the younger men
who followed him. On the wall facing the entrance to the exhibition,
a tiny engraving,
Calauera of Huerta,
actually 5
9/16"
x 11 7
/16",
was
enlarged photographically into a panel roughly 6 ft. x 15 ft. The effect
was at once monumental, terrifying. Each line, each form, had its
*
Posada: Printmaker to the Mexican People-text
by Fernando Gamboa, cata–
logue by Carl 0. Schniewind and Hugh L. Edwards (Chicago: the Art Institute
of Chicago, 1944).
