Homenaje a José Guadalupe Posada

Date: c. 1956

Medium: Linocut

Dimensions (cm.): 35.3 x 78.3

Alternate titles: Posada en su taller; Homenaje a Posada

Published edition: Unknown

Contemporary publication: Information to be added

References: Information to be added

Commentary:  Méndez’s Homenaje a Posada (Homage to Posada), made around 1956, is as much a summation of Méndez’s artistic and political career as his 1945 self-portrait, Amenaza Sobre México. Though ostensibly a realistic portrayal of the artist at work, the print is actually an imaginative reconstruction of Posada’s working environment before the Mexican Revolution. 

Posada sits at his table, holding an engraving tool like a dagger. He looks thoughtfully out his window at a scene of mounted policemen attacking white-clothed peasants. Inside, the revolutionary theorists Ricardo Flores Magón and Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara stand to one side of Posada. They were among the first to resist the Díaz regime, from as early the turn of the twentieth century. The workshop’s type-setter looks on from the background, and the calendar on the wall gives the date, 1902, the year of Méndez’ birth, and also the year Flores Magón briefly worked as the editor of the satirical newspaper, El Hijo del Ahuizote, a paper which Posada illustrated with his caricatures. Thus the room is most likely the workshop of the newspaper. Flores Magón holds a document which declaims, “There will be no draft, the pretext with which the present-day caciques [political bosses] drag from their homes those whom they hate.” The incident outside the window, can thus be seen as a scene of forced conscription of workers and campesinos. The Díaz regime drafted the poor into the army and the rurales (the rural militias) as a method of social control. 

Like Russia, which almost had a revolution in 1905, Mexico had a long period of social unrest before the actual Revolution erupted in 1910. Though there is no evidence that this exact moment ever occurred, Méndez, in this image, situated Posada directly into the heart of the revolutionary tradition of Mexico, as a precursor of the Revolution, along with Flores Magón and Gutiérrez de Lara, two of the most important revolutionary thinkers of the time. Méndez furthermore portrayed Posada as reacting to immediate events just as Méndez and the members of the TGP did, depicting Posada’s instantaneous response in the most literal fashion, as Posada is shown engraving on the plate what he saw outside the window as it was happening. 

American artist Lucienne Bloch, who worked on the Rockefeller Center Murals with Rivera in 1933, reported a similar scene, which she recorded in her diary at the time: Diego was now working on the extreme left side of the main wall, painting a group of young people listening to a professor…The students would gaze through a huge lens, and toward the center they would, according to the sketch, see a scene of unemployment. But on the day Diego was to begin the scene, a violent demonstration took place on Wall Street in desperate response to the conditions of the Depression; Ben Shahn brought in newspaper photos showing the commotion, and Diego painted the scene directly from those clippings, with the police on their horses holding clubs, ready to strike. Here Bloch describes Rivera’s interest in portraying topical political subject matter, in this case an event quite similar to the one outside Posada’s workshop in the print. In the cases of Posada and Rivera, the artists were illustrating history as it happened, focusing on the violent repression of political demonstrations. 

Méndez’s portrayal of this theme in Homage to Posada signifies that he considered the engaged, instantaneous response to injustice and oppression to be one of the most important aspects of Posada’s work and, by extension, his own. However, Méndez’s Homage to Posada, like his self-portrait of 1945, Amenaza Sobre México and his 1953 Verdi, also examines the existential role of the politically concerned artist. Posada, although here portrayed as a revolutionary artist, is also experiencing a moment of contemplation, working on a print of the violence outside. He has stopped working to observe and absorb. And the street scene outside was literally a creation of Posada’s imagination, as Méndez quoted it directly from one of Posada’s own prints of a political demonstration, Continuación de las Manifestaciones Anti-Reeleccionistas (Continuation of the Anti-Reelection Demonstrations) of 1892. Posada also treated the theme of the press gang in his 1903 print, Casa de Enganches (Recruitment Office), which depicts the forced conscription of men and women to work on plantations during the Díaz regime. 

In addition to the direct quote of the subject matter of the Posada print, Méndez’s print, a brilliant piece of printmaking as such, is practically a catalogue of the graphic lines used by both Posada and Méndez, an homage to Posada both in form and content. It is fitting that Méndez produced this masterpiece after a lifetime of dedication to graphic art, and it is proof and acknowledgment of his debt to Posada. (Deborah Caplow)

Cataloging note: A reduced-size reproduction of this print was included in the 1960 TGP portfolio 450 años de lucha: Homenaje al pueblo mexicano. The TGP also issued a photomechanical reproduction (date unknown) with printed text: Homenaje a José Guadalupe Posada   Linoleografía de Leopoldo Méndez    Taller de Gráfica Popular A.C.   Netzahualcoyotl 9, 1er. Piso 578-94-78, lower left, and Dr. Carmona y Valle No. 135 Tel. 578-94-78 Mexico 7, D.F., lower right.

Catalogue record number: 147