“The metal shavings that fell from his plates”:
José Guadalupe Posada as Regional and (A)political Context for Leopoldo Méndez’s 1945 Art Institute Exhibition

Beth Matusoff Merfish
University of Colorado, Denver 

In 1945, as the era of the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy came to a decisive end and anti- Communist fears characterizing the Cold War heated up, the Art Institute of Chicago exhibited Mexican printmaker Leopoldo Méndez’s work in a monographic exhibition, the artist’s first solo show in the US and the first time since the 1936 American Artists’ Congress that his work had been displayed in the US at all.  In the intervening years, Méndez had made his Communist-party membership known through poster series supporting the party and public affiliation with well-known leftists such as Anna Seghers, the German novelist exiled in Mexico, and the Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano.  All were members of a highly active leftist community under constant surveillance by the FBI which turned a particularly suspicious eye toward Mexico in the wake of the 1938 Oil Expropriation, contributing to what historian Fredrick Pike calls a “superheated atmosphere” in relations between the US and Mexico which persisted through the rise of McCarthyism.

Why then, would the Art Institute choose to exhibit the work of Méndez in 1945, and how is it that the exhibition proceeded with no apparent negative publicity?  I propose that the exhibition and its positive reception were due almost entirely to the manner in which Méndez’s work was framed historically, particularly in regard to the work of the artist José Guadalupe Posada, the subject of a highly popular 1944 exhibition at the museum.  The catalogue for “Posada: Printmaker to the Mexican People” was a joint project of Mexican and Chicago-based curators; its main essay represented the first major English-language text on the artist.

In an examination of the dialogue between these monographic exhibitions, with evidence including catalogues, objects shown, and press releases, I argue that, by positioning Méndez and his work within an artistic genealogy founded by Posada, the curators of the Méndez exhibition made the artist more palatable to their public at the expense of a close examination of the ways in which Méndez’s work and career differed greatly from those of Posada. This successful though fallacious historical elision separated Méndez’s work from its specific political contexts and encouraged the exhibition viewer to classify Méndez within a set of Mexican Revolution-era ethnic stereotypes, which severely de-radicalized the artist’s oeuvre but also allowed for its display despite the highly-politicized cultural relations of that time.