Exhibitions 1
Posada: Messenger of Mortality (Camden Arts Centre, till 3 September, then touring)
Day of the Dead
John Henshall
It is rare to find an artist whose output seems to chronicle almost every event of his age, momentous or trivial, tragic or Joyous, someone who seems to have been on hand to record the lives and deaths of the people of his homeland almost as they happened. The Mexican Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) was such a man: he Was an artist of fairly rudimentary training but immense natural talent, who after his death became the idol of the Mexican artistic renaissance which followed the 1917 revolution, and of its leading figures — Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and the rest.
Posada was a printmaker, whose best Work appeared from about 1891 on, illus- trating the handbills, ballad sheets and canards produced by the popular pub- lisher, Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, for sale at fairs, public gatherings and religious festivities. He was a commercial tradesman who preferred the printer's apron to the artist's smock. He made the prints while Arroyo wrote the words for those purchas- ers able to read. A selection of this uniquely gifted artist's prodigious output now forms this touring exhibition orga- nised by the South Bank Centre in con- junction with the major Latin American show at the Hayward Gallery, London. The Mexico in which Posada lived was plagued by social and political unrest, and apparently by natural and man-made disas- ters too, from volcanic eruptions to train crashes. The country lurched from crisis to crisis under the dictatorship of President Porfirio Diaz, who was eventually ousted in 1917. It is as well that Posada's gifts were considerable: the annotation of this human melting pot was not for faint-hearts. He moved from lithography to wood and metal cuts and then to relief etching, and, as his powers reached their heights, he deliberately simplified his style to achieve memorable effects. His prints feature thick swathes of black, cut through with strong white lines, with all clogging detail discarded. They combine elements of cartoons and comic strips, presented in a striking, naive style which often crosses into surrealism. They are perfectly offset by Arroyo's sensationalist headlines: 'appalling event', 'horrible mur- der' or 'dreadful 'moral] lesson'. These piecemeal news bulletins record ungrateful sons who kill their parents because they will not let them frequent brothels, girls of 12 carried off by enormous humanoid demons for telling lies about neighbours with disastrous results, a man who ate his own child, hallucinating drunkards, im- paled toreadors, and sundry freaks, misfits and maniacs.
A Posada speciality was the calavera (`skull'), a handbill celebrating the Mex- ican Day of-the Dead — or All Souls' Day — on 2 November. This is a great national celebration, when people dress up as skeletons and hold parties in graveyards to commemorate their ancestors. Posada's skeletal figures do everything that living people do: they drink and dance, flirt and fight, ride bicycles and play guitars. Some- times they have messages for the living: we see a calavera of people who died because of the state of the drains — Mexico City was surrounded by swamps.
Most branches of Posada's compelling street art are well represented in this exhibition: the 'news reports' and the calaveras — these the more effective for Arroyo's use of garish green, yellow and magenta paper — the copious page head- ings and decorative motifs, and examples of his work from Mexican newspapers. He almost always signed his work, and it was this which allowed Jean Chariot, the French immigrant artist who joined the Mexican renaissance movement, to trace his material and show it to Rivera and others, who came to venerate him. Aptly, Chariot described the 1917 revolution as 'a Posada "still" come to life'. The exhibition is accompanied by an excellently made, large-format catalogue (Redstone Press/ South Bank Centre, £8.95) with an intro- duction by Peter Wollen.
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