Gran Calavera Eléctrica — José Guadalupe Posada, c.1905

Posada’s large group broadside "Gran Calavera Eléctrica" — a crowd of skeletons on bicycles and in the street, electric lighting worked into the joke. Where the Catrina satirizes one figure’s vanity, this piece satirizes an entire modernizing society at once — a wider, busier composition than Posada’s single-figure calaveras. The composition is dense with incident — dozens of small scenes rather than one central figure. Progress, and the same old ending, in one crowded frame.

Maker

José Guadalupe Posada

Date

1905

Medium of the original

Broadside

Original held by

Wikimedia Commons

Credit

Wikimedia Commons · via Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Cleared for print

Catalogue number

PA-00899