"Help! Police! Art Exhibition ..."

The crowd which jammed the sedate portals of Chicago's Art Institute one evening last week caused the Chicago Daily News to headline: HELP! POLICE! ART EXHIBITION CALLS OUT COPS ! The headline was strictly factual: firemen as well as police were summoned to handle the overflow throng. What 6,500 art-lovers had come to see was the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition of the work of a 31-years-dead Mexican who has been called the greatest popular artist North America has ever produced. Few in the U.S. have ever heard of Jose Guadalupe Posada, "printmaker to the Mexican people." But in Mexico he has long been hailed as a prophet of revolution, ranked with Spain's Goya, France's Daumier.

What Chicago Art Institute first-nighters saw was hardly pleasant. Hanging in six main galleries were some 800 brutal black & white engravings depicting assassinations, street accidents, atrocities, nightmares, scandals and conflagrations. Eufemio Martinez Murdering His Sister showed a frenzied, popeyed peon withdrawing a knife from the neck of a screaming woman. In Collision Between a Streetcar and a Hearse, a small, gay trolley car was seen crashing into a funeral cart, stopping just short of running over a corpse in the splintered coffin. Zapatista Deathshead, a grisly political cartoon, chronicles Zapata's rebellion against Diaz (1910). There were revolting monstrosities, dire prophecies of the end of the world, dances of death, images of delirium. For in the main Jose Posada addressed an illiterate people who could best be reached with the imagery of sensational violence.

News for the Masses. Folk-artist Posada in fact practiced a kind of picture journalism. He worked most of his life as a salaried employe of a publishing house in Mexico City. His zinc engravings were printed on cheap colored paper sheets, sold throughout the Mexican countryside. Posada-illustrated broadsides, some with printed ballads (corridos), were often vended by street singers, mainly to peons who could not read. They described news events such as: "Sensational happening! Frightful murder and true example in Saltillo, the first day of the past month (Gentlemen, the criminal has already been shot. . . .)."

The Artist. Posada was born in 1852, of peasant stock, in Aguascalientes, Mexican provincial capital. Largely self-taught, he went to work in Mexico City in the late 1880s. Porfirio Diaz was ruling Mexico then as a dictator. The San Carlos Academy of Art, near Posada's workshop, was teaching a decadent, imported style to young artists. Posada ignored the Academy, attacked the Diaz regime with vitriolic cartoons. Among his admirers were today's top-ranking Mexican artists, Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, young students of the time whose work was strongly influenced by his. (Orozco: "Posada is the equal of the greatest artists. . . ." Rivera: "As great as Goya.")

But amiable, rotund Jose Posada had no artistic pretensions whatever. He was reaching and moving masses of his countrymen who would never see a "fine art" picture. Some of his prints were run off as many as five million times. The Diaz regime came to an end in 1911. Posada continued his work, living simply, in direct touch with simple people. He died a poor man, in his little room in a Mexico City tenement house. Three friends carried his body on their shoulders to the cemetery where, after seven years of neglect, it was exhumed and tossed with those of other paupers into a common grave.

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