Artist José Guadalupe Posada was born on 2 February 1852 in the city of Aguascalientes in central Mexico. Biographical details are scant. He produced over 20,000 engravings across his career, first using lithography, then wood- and metal-cuts, and finally relief etching, a technique most associated with William Blake. But when he died in January 1913, he was buried in a pauper’s grave.
It was only later that he was feted. Rediscovered by the artists of the Mexican Renaissance in the early 1920s, his calaveras – often elegantly-dressed skeletons that dance and fight and drink, and so on, much like their living counterparts – are now ubiquitous, particularly leading up to the Day of the Dead on 2 November.
Working for newspapers and magazines, and printers of broadsides and ballads, he used humour and a profound sense of the grotesque and the macabre, the humanity of which transcends its own horrors, to illuminate and satirise the political and social chaos of pre-revolutionary Mexico. He liked to recount how many members of his family had perished in the great flood that hit the city of Léon in 1887, how he saw them being carried past him by the churning waters crying, ‘Save us, Don José,’ until they sank. It’s not clear if there is any truth to the story, but it seems to look forward to the dark humour of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey in the next century. The story is grotesque, tender, and pitiful; but somehow in Posada’s hands something other than tragic. When the revolution finally came in 1910, another artist described it as “a Posada ‘still’ come to life”.
Posada’s workshop in Mexico City was near the zocalo and the Aztec temple of Tenochtitlan. His calaveras seem to draw life from both the art and sacrificial ritual culture of pre-Columbian Mexico and the medieval European traditions of the danse macabre.
Diego Rivera thought he was the equal of Goya. ““[His work] is the supreme achievement of classical Mexican art, by which I mean pre-Columbian art,” Rivera wrote. “Everything… is unique and masterly… He never allowed himself to be governed by the sub-reality of photographic realism; he always managed to turn people and objects into… constituent elements of the super-reality that is art.”
Forgotten in life, Posada’s dead have outlived him and taken on a life of their own.
This piece first appeared in the February 2022 issue of History Today. The image is used under a Creative Commons license: NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
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Mathew Lyons 
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