Fischgrund Art Postcards

1. Murals and frescoes by prominent artists Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and Alfaro Siqueiros.  The photographs of art work by these and other artists were printed on heavy rag paper stock that gave the images the look of canvas in soft, rich color tones. Later printings were done on slick white paper stock.

2.  Popular arts and state pictorials by Miguel Gomez Medina.  Besides the three regional crafts shown below, the postcard series also includes hand blown glass, hand carved leather, hand made silver, Oaxacan sarapes, pottery of Tlaquepaque, Uruapan lacquer and Yucatan embroideries.

3.  Amate paintings in a Mexican art series entitled "Coleccion Primitiva "Naif".  The series includes paintings by anonymous artists on paper made of tree bark:

4.  Illustrations by Miguel Gomez Medina, with descriptions by Ruth Poyo, of regional folk dances:

5.  Watercolors by Charles X. Carlson, F. Lugo and Rafael Martinez.  A few examples are shown in rows one, two and three respectively:

6.  Drawings by Betanzos in a series called "Mexico Tipico", and watercolors of ten stages of the bullfight by a person  -- I. Fumella (?) -- whose signature is difficult to read:

7.  Caricatures of the bullfight and of persons by another artist whose signature cannot be read:

8.  Humorous drawings by Jaime Fernandez K., with English captions that could be enjoyed by the tourists and their friends and family back home.   Postcards like these were wildly popular in the United States during the 1940s:

9.  Mechanical cards with drawings by Miguel Gomez Medina.  Under the imprint of "Fischgrund Art & Novelty Publishers" in the mid-1940s, Fischgrund even experimented with novelty cards.  Between the front and back layers of a double-thick card, a disc revolves to position individual views:

10.  A map of Mexico and "pictorials" by Margaret M. Crane.  The postcards of all 31 states and one federal district, pieced together, will form a large map of the Republic of Mexico.  The thumbnails in rows two and three below can be clicked to view larger images of the postcard versions.  Shown on the second row of postcards below are (left to right) the states of Guerrero, Jalisco and Yucatan.   When it was published as a whole, the map measured 40" by 24" and the pictorials were placed to the sides. 

Crane's map appears on the cover of "Picturesque Mexico City by LIFE's Photographer", which contains 20 black and white images, but oddly, doesn't identify the photographer by name!

Fischgrund issued several such souvenir booklets, which open to a string of images folded accordion style, with space on the cover for an address and stamp.  Unlike the booklets with postcards that could be removed and mailed individually, the folders were mailed as an entire unit, with views printed on both sides of the folding paper inside.

"Souvenir Art-Folder of the Americas" features the watercolors of C. X. Carlson, and "Views of Mexico" includes watercolors by both Carlson and Rafael Martinez.  "Mexico's Folk Dances" has a descriptive text by Ruth Poyo, with designs by Miguel Gomez Medina.  "Mexico's Popular Arts" also features Gomez Medina's designs, with a descriptive text by Manuel Calderon, Director of Mexico's Popular Art Museum at Bellas Artes.

Most of the images in all of the folders found so far have been also found as separate postcards -- the rest are remaining to be discovered!