Posada’s skeleton crew

Skeletons poured from the closet of Jose Guadalupe Posada’s imagination. Cigar-chomping skeleton oligarchs and bloodied skeleton soldiers. Skeleton street sweepers and bowler-hatted businessmen, skeleton artists and skeleton musicians, plucking and banging their instruments in a hellish impromptu.

In one of Posada’s macabre engravings, a bony Catholic clergyman ominously tolls a bell. In another, a dozen grinning calaveras (skulls) symbolize the indiscriminate death unleashed by a cholera epidemic. It all adds up to a tragicomic vision of Mexican society as a giant funerary procession -- a perversely humorous group portrait of a country careering between a semi-feudal past and a precarious, pre-modern future.

That vision supplies one of the overarching themes behind the exhibition “Jose Guadalupe Posada: My Mexico,” through April 4 at the San Diego Museum of Art. Composed of more than 110 prints, the show draws on the holdings of the Jean Charlot Collection at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, among the most extensive outside Mexico. Although Posada died in virtual obscurity in 1913, his reputation was revived by Charlot, a French Mexican artist and scholar who discovered his work while visiting Mexico after World War I and helped bring it eventually to an international audience.

More than a century after Posada’s satirical engravings first showed up on penny broadsheets sold in Mexico City newsstands, his harrowing worldview and Goya-esque capacity for gallows humor still have the power to shock, amuse and repel. And the denizens of his skeletal netherworld have an Everyman quality that makes their frightening, sometimes grotesque human antics still feel relevant. His calaveras are “a kind of John Doe, I guess,” says Claudia Leos, an assistant curator at the San Diego Museum of Art. “It’s their [Mexicans’] Homer Simpson.”

Deploying a style of illustration that could vary from a soft, Victorian naturalism to a hard-edged, emotionally turbulent expressionism, Posada depicted natural disasters, executions, folk heroes, political leaders, homicides, suicides and bullfighting calamities. Image by image, he compiled a visual “ ‘people’s history’ of life in Mexico City during the years bracketing the turn of the twentieth century,” writes scholar Patrick Frank in “Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery, 1890-1910.”

At that time, Mexico City was awash in such imagery, but it is Posada’s that has become emblematic. “His work stands out because it’s so expressionistic, it’s dramatic, and the scale is so small,” Leos says. “He was able to capture the essence of an event.”

As an example, Leos cites Posada’s rendering of an earthquake that devastated the capital in November 1894. The compacted composition of teetering church steeples, a lightning-scorched sky and terrified people praying for help has the blocky abstraction of Modern art but packs the emotional wallop of a Baroque painting. “He needed to create an image that would be immediately understood by the public,” Leos says.

By collapsing a series of events into one concise narrative image, Posada transformed somber journalism into folkloric parable. Though some Mexican publications were already printing photographs, Posada’s lithographs had a visceral and descriptive power that early cameras were hard-pressed to match. And while the texts they accompanied were sometimes highly moralistic, the illustrations tended to adopt a more ambivalent tone.

His numerous images of skeletons, which draw on Indian “Day of the Dead” traditions along with the momento mori genre of Spanish Baroque art, combine humor with a stoic view of mortality and the vanity of all human endeavor. As the exhibition catalog puts it, the skeletons “formed a fleshless depiction of Mexican society -- a sort of X-ray of the collective soul of the people.”

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, the great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco would champion Posada as the godfather of modern Mexican art, as a sophisticated populist who fused pre-Columbian and Spanish-colonial design elements to a pulpy urban sensibility. Rivera paid him homage by depicting Posada in his famous mural “Sueno de Una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central” (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park), and the avant-garde Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein honored Posada in the Day of the Dead segment of his film “Que Viva Mexico.”

But it was Charlot, along with Posada’s longtime publisher Don Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, who established the artist’s reputation not only as a founder of Mexican modernism but as one of the country’s greatest storytellers and social chroniclers.

Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, likens Posada to a reporter. “He gives us a complete vision of that world. He absorbs all of the different values, every different social class, the mix, the religious ideas, what is newsworthy. So it’s difficult to find an artist who so completely reflects his era as Posada, not only in Mexico but in any country.”

Posada was among thousands of provincials who flooded into Mexico City in the late 19th century in search of work. As a journalist-illustrator, he couldn’t have arrived at a better time. In the late 1880s, penny broadsheets, the tabloids of their day, captivated the lower working classes. They bristled with sensationalistic, illustrated accounts of “Unprecedented Frightful Crime!” (about the abuse of a 6-year-old orphan girl by her aunt), “Horrible Assassination!” “Astonishing Event” and the like.

A deeply, often violently conflicted society, the turn-of-the-century Mexican capital was in a heady phase of modernization spurred by Mexico’s ruthlessly ambitious dictator-president, Porfirio Diaz.

But many lower-class mestizo (mixed-race) Mexicans, rooted in an agrarian past and steeped in folkways dating back before the Aztec Empire, resisted Diaz and rejected the Western socioeconomic values that he sought to impose. In illustration after illustration, Posada gave voice to this resistance, while mostly managing to steer clear of El Presidente’s periodic crackdowns on the press.

Posada’s sensibility was cosmopolitan and parochial, sanguine and sentimental. Born in 1852 in San Marcos, in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes, he showed an early talent for art, and by age 16 was apprenticed to master printer Jose Trinidad Pedroza. He began making lithographs for the satirical newspaper El Jicote and was drawn into the boisterous, competitive and aggressively partisan culture of the Mexican penny press. Eventually, he produced political caricatures as well as lithographs and other illustrations for periodicals, cigar box covers, religious materials, sheet music and board games.

Both stylistically and thematically, Luke says, Posada helped lay the groundwork for the Mexican muralist movement that flourished during the nationalistic period after the Mexican Revolution. “The painters in Mexico in Posada’s time and even in the early 20th century were very much influenced by the French and the Europeans and painted like them and did portraiture with the same European idea,” he says. “This idea of looking at the society was not something that was even considered interesting subject matter. So Posada gives them a vision of Mexico, which is what the muralists were looking for.”

Posada joined Vanegas Arroyo’s 10-year-old publishing house in 1890 and worked there until his death. But despite his popularity with the urban lower classes, the art critics of his day never took his work seriously as high art. There were no mourners at Posada’s burial, and he was interred in a pauper’s grave. That might’ve been the last the world knew of him.

But when Charlot arrived in Mexico in 1921 and came upon Posada’s illustrations still being sold on street corners, he tracked down Vanegas Arroyo and the rehabilitation was underway. In 1944, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted an exhibition devoted to Posada, curator Leos says, and by the 1960s there were major retrospectives in Mexico. It took a Frenchman’s critical endorsement, Luke observes, to gain Posada a place in the history of Mexican modern art, on par with contemporary European illustrators such as Honore Daumier. That’s a fate all too common among Mexican artists, Luke says, citing the composer Silvestre Revueltas, “the Mexican Stravinsky,” as another artist who required foreign intervention to resurrect his reputation.

Among many contemporary Mexican artists, the work of the muralist masters has now fallen out of favor, Luke says. But someday, he believes, its reputation will revive, just as Posada’s did. “Things tend to go back and forth, no?” Luke says. “And I think that we will see a new generation of Mexican artists who reconnect with the great social themes.”

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‘Jose Guadalupe Posada: My Mexico’

Where: San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park

When: Tuesdays-Wednesdays and Fridays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.

Ends: April 4

Price: Adults, $8; seniors (65+), young adults (18-24), students and military with I.D., $6; children (6-17), $3; children 5 and under, free.

Contact: (619) 232-7931