JOSE GUADALUPE POSADA
José Guadalupe Posada, 1852-1913, a celebrity for their drawings and engravings about the death, He made works of printing, advertisings and commercial works. He illustrated books and printed posters, historical characters and religious images portraits.
The political cartoons was their passion, he likes to registered the extraordinary events and the daily life in which he added humorous notes; their cartoons were adorned with ornaments, like arabesques and vegetables ornaments.
Preceded by their prestige with the lithograph and the engraving, he worked and found newspapers with nationalist and popular sense. Their imaginative gifts and ability in order to manage the engraving, led to him develop new technical of impression. This made possible enlarge their notable work that could calculate in about 20 thousand engravings. The same was happened with their editions of sentences, proverbs and verses, about 5 million copies. His work was knotweed for the entire Mexican republic.
Posada helps to consolidate celebration about the Day of Dead, because he was the artist that better interpreted the life and the social attitudes of the Mexican town. He represents this social attitude in their engravings skulls with elegance dressed, skulls in parties of towns, in streets of the cities, in the houses of the rich. He drew skulls mounted in horses and bicycles recreated in humorous macabre banquet. With them, he wants to show the penuries, the political errors, and the ambitious and tyrannical political people. So, for this cause he was many times being in the jail.
Posada died poor, equal how he was born. He was buried in Mexico City, in an unknowing sepulcher, "in company of other anonymous skulls."
Nevertheless this fact, their work influenced in posterior artists like José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Francisco Díaz de León and Leopoldo Méndez. Posada is considered as the first former of the nationalist movement in the plastic arts. Today, their work is presented in national and international exhibitions and many of their engravings are reproduced yet.
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