Viva Posada!

A Salute to the Great Printmaker of the Mexican Revolution

edited by Carlos Cortez

Publication date: January 2002
Paperback: $13.00

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“Mexico enjoys a continuity of artistic expression of more than six millennia, and despite the fact that the Spanish conquerors tried to enforce European styles on the Mexicans, that continuity persists into our own modern times. When modern technology such as the printing press was introduced into Mexico, artisans readily adapted their talents to the new medium while retaining their millennia-old values. . .

Because of the high quality and the quantity of his art, Jose Guadalupe Posada is the one Mexican printmaker who has acquired posthumous and inter-national fame. Posada was at his peak at the turn of the twentieth century, during the closing years of the Diaz dictatorship. He has long been recognized as one of the personifications of the ensuing Mexican Revolution, which he did not live to see completed. He illustrated many broadsides of revolutionary ballads, printed on cheap paper and sold for centavos in the streets.

Posada remains an important part of the great living tradition of radical popular art that continues to flourish in Mexico and throughout the world today.”
— From the Introduction by Carlos Cortez

Published on the 150th anniversary of Posada's birth (1852-2002), this book features 121 of the finest works by the great popular engraver and relief-etcher who inspired not only the Mexican muralists but also the international Surrealist movement as well as poster artists and radical cartoonists from all over the world. Also included here are excerpts from classic texts on the artist by Jean Charlot, Jose Clemente Orozco, Frida Kahlo, Andre Breton and others, as well as statements by poets and artists of our own time-Dennis Brutus, Rikki Ducornet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Franklin Rosemont, Joseph Jablonski, Ted Joans, Casandra Stark Mele, and many more-all published here for the first time.

“Posada, as great and prolific as Goya and Callot, was inexhaustibly inventive-a wellspring of creativity. He was the interpreter of the joys and sorrows, the anguish and aspirations of the Mexican people, a precursor of Zapata and Flores Magon.”
— Diego Rivera