La Calavera Catrina  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 18:47, 15 January 2008; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

La Calavera de la Catrina is a 1913 zinc etching by Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada. The image has since become a staple of Mexican imagery, and is often incorporated into artistic manifestations of the Day of the Dead such as altars and calavera costumes. It was part of his series of calaveras, which were humorous images of contemporary figures depicted as skeletons, often accompanied by a poem.

The word "catrina" is the feminine form of the word "catrín", which means "dandy". The figure, depicted in an ornate hat fashionable at the time, is intended to show that the rich and fashionable, despite their pretensions to importance, are just as susceptible to death as anyone else.

La Catrina, as it is commonly known, was a popular print in Posada's day, but soon faded from the popular memory. It, like the rest of Posada's prints, was revived by a French artist and art historian Jean Charlot shortly after the Mexican Revolution. La Catrina soon gained iconic status as a symbol of a uniquely Mexican art, and was reproduced en masse. The image was incorporated into Diego Rivera's mural Dream of a Sunday in Alameda Park, which also includes images of Posada, Rivera himself, and his wife Frida Kahlo. In addition to its use as a holiday symbol for the Day of the Dead, it has also been reinterpreted in numerous forms, including sculpture.

In the animated series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, Sartana of the Death design was inspired on Catrina.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "La Calavera Catrina" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools