Monografie over leven en werk van de Mexicaanse prentkunstenaar (1902-1969), met de nadruk op de jaren dertig en veertig waarin hij politiek zeer actief was. Ook de invloeden van en naar andere kunstenaars uit zijn tijd komen aan bod.

Established in Mexico City in 1937, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphic Art Workshop) sought to create prints, posters, and illustrated publications that were popular and affordable, accessible and politically topical, and above all formally compelling. Founded by the printmakers Luís Arenal, Leopoldo Méndez, and American-born Pablo O'Higgins, the TGP ultimately became the most influential and enduring leftist printmaking collective of its time. The workshop was admired for its prolific and varied output and for its creation of some of the most memorable images in midcentury printmaking. Although its core membership was Mexican, the TGP welcomed foreign members and guest artists as diverse as Josef Albers and Elizabeth Catlett. The collective enjoyed international influence and renown and inspired the establishment of similar print collectives around the world. This bilingual publication features twenty-four works representing the finest linocuts and lithographs from the heyday of this important workshop. These arresting images are drawn from the significant holdings of TGP works in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This collection contains 25 wood engraving prints by Leopoldo Méndez, published in a limited edition by La Estampa Mexicana in 1943. This is No. 51 of the 100 copies produced. The prints are with their original woven fiber portfolio which includes an introduction by Juan de la Cabada and an index. Each print is signed by the artists. The subject of the prints are largely images of Mexican laborers engaged in their various tasks, such as horsemen, newsboys, weavers, chicle gathers, and Fascism and Nazisim, and popular resistance in Mexico. Some prints were created before 1943. The folio is a compilation of works by Méndez. The collection includes one extra print which was a bookplate created by Méndez for Harold Leonard (also signed by the artist). There is a brief biography of the artist in Spanish and English by Juan de la Cabada.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sept. 13, 2011-Mar. 4, 2012.

Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together, chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals, some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians. Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Mendez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began to appropriate the artists' nationalistic visual images as weapons in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting took place between the two camps as they sparred over the production of generally accepted notions and representations of the revolution's legacy—and what it meant to be authentically Mexican.

Presents a collection of historical engravings depicting costumed skeletons representing the Mexican celebration of of Dia de los Muertos.