Mexican artist who gave life to Day of the Dead skeletons on display in Glens Falls
Jul 20, 2022 —
You know those Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons? Well, there’s one artist that popularized them and his work is on display at the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls this summer.
Jose Guadalupe Posada’s skeletons - or calaveras - are re-purposed all the time in pop culture. They’re super fun. You can find them on candy and stickers.
They also feature in movies. Disney-Pixar’s kids movie “Coco” explores a whole world of calaveras when a young Mexican boy meets his dead ancestors on the Day of the Dead.
You might even spot one of these skeletons at the grocery store; Trader Joe's has a hot sauce featuring a calavera.
Jose Posada tapped into Mexico’s folk art tradition of using skeletons, which dates all the way back to the Aztecs.
He grew up very poor and worked at a small printing press. Posada’s lithographic work was ubiquitous, telling the stories of everyday Mexicans in any print media he could – wedding announcements, cigar papers, paperback books, penny presses.
He’s considered “the printmaker of the people". Mexican painter Diego Rivera said he captured the spirit of common Mexicans, illustrating daily life using the calaveras: skeletons bullfighting, cleaning streets, riding bicycles and horses, and playing guitars.
“When you add enough humor and when you look at what these calaveras are doing, it kinda makes you chuckle a little bit. It becomes disarming and allows the message to percolate through," said Jim Nikas, founder of the Posada Foundation in San Francisco, which is lending Posada's work to the Hyde Collection.
That message became Posada’s frustration with the threats against Mexican workers under the corruption of the oligarchical President Porfirio Diaz. He drew skeleton assassins, political cartoons and caricatures leading up to Diaz’s overthrow in the bloody Mexican Revolution of 1910.
After Posada died just three years later, the idea of him as a revolutionary started to grow in the Mexican consciousness. Nikas said artist Leopoldo Mendez helped plant that seed.
"In the early 1950s, he (Mendez) did this fabulous illustration of Posada in his workshop," Nikas explained. "He sticks in the image Ricardo Flores Magon, who was really an anarchist. In the distance, there's the law enforcement arm of Diaz (who) are chopping people up with their sabers in the street. Posada is looking at it and all these guys in the print shop are looking at Posada just waiting to see what he's going to create.
"This puts Posada in line with this very revolutionary element.”
Posada’s work was re-purposed in the Cuban Revolution under Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in the 1950s, even though there's no evidence he was an active revolutionary, Nikas said.
Besides illustrating revolution, Posada’s work was also valuable for its artistry.
He’s been called a “prophet” of modern Mexican art, though he never gained much name recognition.
In 1931, Frida Kahlo said she tacked up his artwork when she traveled because his illustrations helped her maintain her sanity.
In the gallery at the Hyde Collection, there’s a Frida Kahlo and a Posada hung next to each other.
The Kahlo piece is an illustration of the suicide of New York socialite, Dorothy Hale, who threw herself off a building.
"If you look at that and you look at the suicide image of Posada of the woman who threw herself off the Iglesias Metropolitania, they look almost the same and I dare anyone to say it doesn’t, so we put them together in the exhibition,” Nikas said.
He added that Posada put life into these skeletons and made them the ubiquitous part of Mexican culture they are today.
“It’s a universal image. We all have a calavera inside of us. That skeleton, once you take off all the clothes, it could be anyone. It can communicate anything. It just depends on what the words are that go with it.”
