The first thing you learn from “Mexican Prints at the Vanguard” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is that printmaking has been central to Mexico’s art and media since Spanish colonists arrived with devotional woodcuts in the 1500s. Three centuries later, letterpress madonnas and skeletons traveled to every corner of the vast, multicultural new nation on broadsheets and newspapers; during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), it was eye-grabbing posters of menacing plutocrats that incited the peasants.
After the Revolution, the French-born artist Jean Charlot, who spent decades in Mexico, donated prints to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and eventually, acting on the institution’s behalf, bought more than 2,000 works by artists like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Julio Ruelas and José Guadalupe Posada.
Nearly every one of the 130 lithographs, screen prints and woodcuts on display in “Mexican Prints,” the curator Mark McDonald says, comes from this collection that Charlot built. They range from an 18th-century Virgin of Guadalupe on white silk to a series of colorful silk-screens by the Guatemalan-born artist Carlos Mérida that document regional costumes and dances. But the largest share of the exhibition, and its real impact, come in two bursts — one in the late 19th century, when Posada introduced the strangely charming skeleton that came to serve every purpose, from cartoon to caricature, and another in the early 20th, when artists like Rivera worked for a Communist Party-aligned newspaper called El Machete.
From a stylistic point of view, the work in the show is almost overwhelmingly various. There’s the unflinching vigor of El Machete, the serene polish of Rivera’s lithographed peasant heroes, the rich texture of a linocut by Elizabeth Catlett, who spent much of her life in Mexico. But historically the story is just as complicated, so I called Patricia Escárcega, a journalist and critic who often writes about Mexican and Chicano art, to discuss. These are excerpts from the conversation.
WILL HEINRICH Very close to the beginning of the show is a whole series of prints by José Guadalupe Posada, including an 1895 broadsheet in which he satirized mainstream Mexican newspapers by depicting them as skeletons riding bicycles. The skeletons are an amazing formal device that Posada returned to again and again, and they became a kind of emblem of Mexican culture, at least around the Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos), celebrated next week, when families remember and celebrate deceased loved ones. But where did they come from? Are they Aztec? Are they Catholic? Were they even a thing before Posada?
PATRICIA ESCÁRCEGA In that broadsheet, the big Mexican newspapers of the day are represented by Posada as skeletons, or calaveras, racing on bicycles around a circular track to criticize their association with the corrupt regime of Porfirio Díaz.
Posada was almost certainly influenced by the 19th-century Mexican graphic artist Manuel Manilla, a contemporary whose work also featured skeleton imagery. Archaeological sites like the famous Aztec “skull racks” hadn’t been excavated yet, though it’s reasonable to assume he would have been exposed to Mexican Indigenous representations of death. But he would also have been familiar with how skeletons appeared in European graphic traditions like the “danse macabre,” transmitted to Mexico over three centuries of Spanish colonial rule.
HEINRICH Did Posada live to see the success of his calaveras?
ESCÁRCEGA Sadly, he died penniless and obscure, buried in a mass grave. There’s a lot we don’t know about him. But we know that he had a profound influence on modern Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico and the U.S. “La Catrina” costume contests and fashion shows, based on Posada’s famous etching of a female skeleton wearing an oversized feathered hat, have become common at these celebrations.
HEINRICH It’s hard to find an artist who fuses pure propaganda with fully realized art better than Diego Rivera. His 1932 lithograph “Emiliano Zapata,” which recaps a section of a mural of his in Cuernavaca, is as lush as a Renaissance Madonna: There’s so much open-ended symbolism, so much more detail than you strictly need.
ESCÁRCEGA During the Mexican Revolution, Zapata was the main leader of a peasant revolt in Morelos, in south-central Mexico. The Zapatistas were fighting to restore lands and resources swallowed up by haciendas, which were essentially plantations that wiped out Indigenous villages and created a system of peonage.
Rivera both humanizes and mythologizes Zapata, who isn’t shown in a fancy charro suit, but in the white clothes and huarache sandals of campesinos, or farmworkers. He’s a man of the people, but he’s also an enigmatic figure with an otherworldly white horse, like a creature from a book of children’s fables. It’s a seductive and powerful image.
HEINRICH In a way, Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) is Rivera’s opposite. Even in a woodcut like “The Revolutionist,” made around 1930, you can tell that he’s sort of halfhearted about politics. It’s a deeply idiosyncratic work, faux-naïf but eerie, seemingly all about the artist’s personal expression.
ESCÁRCEGA Tamayo wasn’t concerned with using art to make political or didactic statements. He was more concerned with things like color and form. It’s not that he was uninterested in exploring Mexican culture or history. He was Oaxacan and Zapotec by birth, and much of his work draws from this heritage. But he was also interested in having a conversation with the world at large: He spent large chunks of his career working in New York and Paris, and during his New York period he was deeply influenced by the modernist works of Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Picasso.
HEINRICH What were his feelings on the revolution, though?
ESCÁRCEGA He wasn’t as overtly in favor of it as his contemporaries. He worried about, you know, the violence and instability.
HEINRICH Something like Ángel Bracho’s “Poster Celebrating the Allied Victory,” on the other hand, is totally forthright with its politics. It includes British and American flags, a burning swastika, a glowing red star, Soviet-style red block letters. It also struck me that, as with other work coming out of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, there’s an egalitarian quality to the composition of the piece — every element, whether text or image, is given room to speak for itself.
ESCÁRCEGA In its postwar heyday, the TGP, an influential printmaking collective founded in Mexico City in the late 1930s and still active today, published hundreds of posters, handbills and other ephemera supporting leftist and progressive causes. In a full-circle kind of way, the TGP helped resuscitate Posada’s legacy by printing some of the first limited-edition, high-quality prints of his plates and blocks. And initially, at least, their artistic production was guided by a democratic process: Members collaborated on designs and prints, which generally didn’t bear any one artist’s name. So you can feel the weight of a lot of minds working on these prints; you can feel the contributions of a lot of people.
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