Prints for Pennies: José Guadalupe Posada and Popular Prints, c. 1880–1910

Beginning in the 1880s, the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada (Mexican, 1852–1913) created hundreds of illustrations for works published by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo in Mexico City. Posada’s career coincided with a relatively peaceful period in Mexico’s history that was bookended by two major upheavals: the revolt against occupying French forces in 1867 and a popular revolution in 1910 against Porfirio Diaz, who had ruled Mexico as a dictator since the 1880s. Posada’s work reflects the legacy of Spanish and French occupation of Mexico as well as its burgeoning national identity at the turn of the twentieth century.

Arroyo’s Mexico City publishing house focused on producing inexpensive illustrated works collectively known as cuadernos (chapbooks), which were generally less than 20 pages long and ranged in subject from children’s stories, song collections, and craft manuals to melodramatic romances. Circulated throughout Mexico, these prints delivered Posada's compositions to a wide audience, and his work would become a touchstone for the following generation of Mexican painters, including Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. In 2022, the Zimmerli Art Museum acquired a group of chapbook covers by Posada, several of which are the focus of this exhibition.