Resumen

BONILLA REYNA, Helia Emma. El Telégrafo y la introducción de la caricatura francesa en la prensa mexicana. An. Inst. Investig. Estét [online]. 2002, vol.24, n.81, pp.53-121. ISSN 0185-1276.

El Telégrafo, an innovatory publication with cartoons that circulated between 1852 and 1853, represented the definitive introduction into Mexico of a type of illustration that had long been extraordinarily successful in France (with artists such as Daumier, Vernier, Cham, Tràvies, Gavarni, Pigal, Phillipon, Doré, Monnier, etc.). Its caricaturist H. Méndez, who had passed fleetingly through the Academy, was thus the pioneer -antedating Constantino Escalante- of a more up-to-date and synthetic style, which was to become generalized during the decade of the 1860s. The decision to introduce the French cartoon into Mexico was probably due to Alfredo Bablot, the magazine's young creator, who, being himself of French origin, was familiar with the vitality of the genre in Europe. Bablot's interests were, in fact, often to determine the subject matter and the sense of the cartoons, in which he subtly managed to introduce his opinions regarding various aspects of the situation in Mexico. It is important to note how this kind of image of an essentially ephemeral nature could embrace a degree of complexity which makes them intelligible to anyone who is immersed in the peculiar language of the cartoon, but also to people familiar with the political and cultural context of the Mexico of those years; it is also striking how the adaptation of the political cartoon to Mexican political conditions -irrespective of its obvious dependence on French models- imbued in it new life with the incorporation, at least on occasions, of allusions lacking in the originals.