The following is excerpted from The Story of Printmaking: A Global History of Art by Holly EJ Black (© 2026), which will be released by Yale University Press on April 28, 2026. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

During a trip to New York in 1933, Frida Kahlo was feeling homesick. After several years touring the United States with her husband, the revered muralist Diego Rivera, she longed for the sights and sounds of Mexico City and set about creating her own colourful haven in their hotel room. She covered the walls with a series of brightly pigmented pieces of paper, which were printed with sensational news stories, scurrilous gossip, and satirical political imagery.

These broadsides were the work of José Guadalupe Posada, a prolific printmaker who enjoyed modest success during his lifetime, only to be heralded as a hero of revolutionary Mexican aesthetics a decade after his death. His calaveras (skeletons) have become synonymous with a form of vernacular cultural identity known as mexicanidad, which renounces colonial Spanish influences and embraces indigenous tradition to articulate a distinct form of “Mexicanness.” These motifs shared a close association with Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a holy festival that briefly reunites the living with the souls of the deceased.

José Guadalupe Posada, Calaveras from the Heap, Number 1, published by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, 1910. Relief engraving or photo-relief etching with letterpress. Courtesy The Library of Congress as dicussed in Holly Black’s book The Story of Printmaking

Posada was born in the city of Aguascalientes, the son of a baker and a homemaker who were both of indigenous heritage. He studied at the Municipal Academy of Drawing before embarking on a career as a lithographer in the workshop of José Trinidad Pedroza, in the early 1870s. This was a healthy trade for a young man of considerable artistic talents, and employment was practically guaranteed thanks to a strong commercial printing tradition that championed ‘popular prints’ among a litany of other visual ephemera.

Posada was originally tasked with creating cartoons for Pedroza’s political periodical El Jicote (The Wasp), which often criticised the government and ruling class. Such critique came with considerable risk, as growing authoritarianism gradually eroded the liberal promises of President Benito Juárez’s La Reforma. Political pressures might well have encouraged Posada to follow his employer to the city of León, where he eventually took over the newly established workshop and produced all kinds of printed material, including flyers, religious devotional cards, and catalogues. He also tutored lithography at a local high school.

By 1888, he had relocated to Mexico City in search of new commercial opportunities and to foster connections with like-minded printmakers. The vibrant metropolis was fertile ground for revolutionary sentiment amid the discontent of Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship, which took hold after his second successful presidential election in 1884. It was in this milieu that Posada found his signature style, thanks in no small part to Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, an influential and prolific publisher who specialised in cheap gazettes and broadsides that catered to the popular imagination. His imprint produced tales of lurid crimes, devastating disasters, and celebrated folk heroes, as well as political discourse and a variety of hobbyist books. An advertisement for the business reads as follows:

Founded in the year 1830 of the nineteenth century,
this ancient firm stocks a wide choice:
Collections of Greetings, Tricks, Puzzles, Games, Cookbooks,
Recipes for Making Candies and Pastries,
Models of Speeches, Scripts for Clowns, Patriotic Exhortations,
Playlets Meant for Children or Puppets, Pleasant Tales,
Also: the Novel Oracle, Rules for Telling the Cards,
a  New Set of Mexican Prognostications, Books of Magic, Both
Brown and White,
a Handbook for Witches.

Arroyo employed Posada as his chief illustrator, capitalising on his inherent wit and eye for graphic simplicity, which was soon dominated by crowds of skeletal figures. Although the symbol of the calavera was not original (another employee, Manuel Manilla, had already executed plenty of designs in this fashion), Posada’s dynamic compositions and vivid imagination set him apart. Among his most famed examples is a depiction of the literary hero Don Quixote, who appears astride a cadaverous, galloping horse. Perhaps even better known is ‘La Catrina’, a much beloved yet darkly humorous take on the affectations of the bourgeois Mexicans who adopted European airs. This figure wears an elaborate feathered— and obviously foreign—bonnet, as well as a wide grin. These popular motifs were continually reused with new texts and reimagined layouts, on colourful sheets ranging from red and yellow to purple and green. Although the artistry of these prints is undeniable, Arroyo was chiefly concerned with production and profits.

José Guadalupe Posada (top) and Manuel Manilla (bottom), This is Don Quixote, the First, the Matchless, the Giant Calavera Without Equal, published by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo (1872–1913). Relief engraving or photo-relief etching with letterpress. Courtesy The Library of Congress

Rather than attempting to disguise the flaws born from hasty and relentless production, his workshop embraced them. Cracks from worn-down plates were used for emphasis, heightening the drama of a knife attack or a flash flood. Inky blotches caused by nails used to reassemble broken blocks were incorporated into scenes of fatal rail crashes and other calamities, while mismatched typography served dynamic exclamations that conveyed a sense of urgency, even to those viewers who could not read.

Although Posada’s visual style is instantly recognisable, exactly how he went about creating his plates is more complicated. Early accounts suggest that he engraved directly into metal blocks used for typesetting, creating a relief as opposed to an intaglio plate. José Clemente Orozco, who was one of the stars of the Mexican muralist movement and formed one third of Los Tres Grandes (The Big Three) alongside Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, recalled passing Posada’s workshop on the way to school. He stated in his 1945 autobiography:

Posada worked in full view of the public behind the shop window
. . . where I used to stop enchanted for a few minutes on my way
to and from school to observe the printmaker. . . . Sometimes,
I was bold enough to filch a few of the metal shavings that fell
as the maestro moved his burin over the typemetal plate coated
with red lead. . . .

The number of skilled engravers required to keep up with such arduous production surely became prohibitive as his workload increased, which might well explain why researchers have found evidence of acid processes on original Posada plates. It seems he used a form of photo-relief etching, in which a design was drawn onto white card with black ink, before being photographed to produce a high-contrast negative. This image could then be exposed onto a zinc plate that had been covered in light-sensitive gelatin, effectively producing stopped-out lines that were protected from a subsequent dip in the acid bath. The result is a metal relief block akin to a traditional woodcut, produced without the need for the time-consuming expertise of artisan cutters.

Photomechanical printing was commonplace in Mexico by the 1870s. By coating a copper plate in a light-sensitive gelatin, a negative could be exposed onto its surface and etched, allowing for an accurate reproduction that could be printed. With such technology available, there is no reason to suggest that both illustrator and publisher would not have harnessed its cost-effective utilities. However, the mythology surrounding Posada’s “authentic” style has led to the prevailing idea of a more vernacular craftsmanship, which continues to permeate today. Much of this has to do with his veneration by Los Tres Grandes, who sought to rescue his legacy after an unassuming death in 1913, when he was buried in a pauper’s grave. Despite him not living to see the outcome of the Mexican Revolution (which spanned from 1910 to 1920), his legacy was soon painted as one that could define the visual force of a new, modern republic.

Rivera’s spurious claims that he both knew and was taught how to print by Posada do not diminish his observations concerning this printmaker’s brilliance. As he reveals in this critique from his autobiography My Art, My Life (first published in 1960):

It was he who revealed to me the inherent beauty in the Mexican people, their struggle and aspirations. And it was he who taught me the supreme lesson of all art: that nothing can be expressed except through the force of feeling, that the soul of every masterpiece is powerful emotion.

Rivera went on to immortalize the artist in his 1948 mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, which presents the figure of “La Catrina” with her creator to one side and a childlike depiction of Rivera on the other. Kahlo, in her preferred traditional dress, stands behind the skeleton’s shoulder. This enormous 15-meter fresco chronicles the key events of recent Mexican history, and places Posada at the indisputable artistic center.