Following the Mexican Revolution, in the 1920s Mexico experienced a remarkable cultural renaissance. The government commissioned artists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others to paint murals in public buildings; embraced the goal of creating a national imagery to educate and inspire the masses and fashion a Mexican identity distinct from European traditions. They looked to Mexican art and culture for inspiration and decided that artists should work for laborers’ wages. Printmakers began to play a significant role in Mexican art and politics, working collectively and establishing a tradition of politically motivated graphic art that continues to this day.

Leopoldo Méndez was perhaps the most significant of these printmakers, playing an active role in a number of artistic and political groups in Mexico. From a working-class background, Méndez showed early artistic talent and entered Academia de San Carlos (Academy of San Carlos) at the age of fifteen. As a member of the avant-garde Movimiento Estridentista (Stridentist Movement) from 1921 to 1928, he contributed prints to publications such as German List Arzubide’s Zapata Exaltación, the first biography of Revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata, and Horizonte, a Stridentist magazine, that was also an official publication of the State of Veracruz. In the early 1930s, Méndez illustrated El Sembrador and El Maestro Rural, magazines published by the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Education, SEP) and took part in the SEP’s Misiones Culturales. He taught art in Mexico City schools and promoted puppetry as an educational art form. In addition, in the early 1930s, he was one of the first graphic artists to incorporate influences from the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, and has been called the “heir of Posada.”

Méndez was one of the most active members of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, LEAR), from 1933 to 1937.  In 1937 he and other artists from LEAR, including Pablo O’Higgins and Luis Arenal, founded the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People's Graphic Workshop, TGP) and he worked collectively with the TGP until he left at the group at the end of the 1950s. In both LEAR and the TGP Méndez and his associates made images to combat Nazism and fascism in Mexico, and when the Second World War began, they turned their attention to the war in Europe, working with the community of European political exiles in Mexico on anti-fascist projects. In 1959 Méndez established the Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana, the first art book publishing company in Mexico. He held fast to his ideals throughout his life, working with his fellow printmakers to promote leftist causes and social justice, focusing on Mexican and international political and historical events. He also created numerous prints that focused on the people and traditions of Mexico portraying positive aspects of Mexican life.

Deborah Caplow, 2023