Stylogeny combining Mexican Calendar Chromo × Shanghai Modern

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Style combination · Contrasts

Mexican Calendar Chromo × Shanghai Modern

Both are tobacco-sponsored calendar pictures of beauties, but yuefenpai set softly rubbed watercolour women inside decorative borders with the products alongside, while the Mexican chromo is an oil painting of a whole scene that fills the sheet, with the pad pasted at its foot.

From the research on Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Mix them and make something Mexican Calendar Chromo Shanghai Modern

ReverieMexican Calendar × Shanghai Modern1930 · 1910
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Shanghai Modern, their arrangement from Mexican Calendar Chromo, the finish from Mexican Calendar Chromo. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai

Type from Shanghai Modern
Colour from Mexican Calendar Chromo
Form from Shanghai Modern
Composition from Mexican Calendar Chromo
Surface from Mexican Calendar Chromo

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The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Shanghai Modern

Reverie

Limelight; Shanghai Modern used Meishuzi and Songti

Text · Mexican Calendar Chromo

Mexico's give-away advertising calendars, at their height from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Printers led by Galas de México kept studios of painters, among them Jesús Helguera, Eduardo Cataño, Jorge González Camarena and Josep Renau, whose large oil paintings were printed by offset above a sponsor's name and a small calendar pad. In an idealising academic realism touched by Hollywood glamour they staged Aztec legends as melodrama, charros and chinas poblanas, saints, film stars and pin-ups, and hung all year in homes, shops and workshops.

Archivo; Mexican Calendar Chromo used The sponsor's name and address overprinted in the band left blank below the picture and Brand logotypes painted into the picture or carried on the product

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The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Mexican Calendar Chromo, with a counter-accent from Shanghai Modern. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai

  • #f0c4a8 ground · 36%
  • #1f4e8c ink · 14%
  • #c8372d accent · 18%
  • #a8693f accent · 14%
  • #c8a24a accent · 10%
  • #3d8b4f accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0c4a8;
  --ink: #1f4e8c;
  --accent-1: #c8372d;
  --accent-2: #a8693f;
  --accent-3: #c8a24a;
  --accent-4: #3d8b4f;
  --font-display: "Limelight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos): The Aztec scenes are a nationalist fantasy of the pre-Hispanic past painted by academically trained artists, several of them born or raised in Spain, not Indigenous art: do not present them as Nahua or Mexica tradition or copy their feathered costumes as if they were ethnography. The saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe are devotional images that many owners pray before, so do not parody them, and the pin-ups were painted, as a UNAM study of the Galas archive puts it, to satisfy male longing and promote the sponsors' brands, carrying old and new stereotypes of women. The paintings are still in copyright (Helguera died in 1971) and Grupo Carso holds the rights to the Galas archive, while Alta reported in 2023 that Calendarios Landin owns the rights to Helguera, so paint new pictures in the manner rather than retouching old chromos.

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The two styles

A painted-style poster shows a smiling woman in a floral embroidered blouse and blue skirt seated beside wicker baskets of harvested agave hearts. Agave plants, a town with a domed church, and distant mountains fill the background beneath the red and gold word “Agave.” 1930–1970 · Latin America & Caribbean Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Mexico's give-away advertising calendars, at their height from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Printers led by Galas de México kept studios of painters, among them Jesús Helguera, Eduardo Cataño, Jorge González Camarena and Josep Renau, whose large oil paintings were printed by offset above a sponsor's name and a small calendar pad. In an idealising academic realism touched by Hollywood glamour they staged Aztec legends as melodrama, charros and chinas poblanas, saints, film stars and pin-ups, and hung all year in homes, shops and workshops. An ornate vintage-style illustration shows a woman in a floral qipao resting her chin on her hand beside a teacup and a vase of blossoms, with a waterfront city and Chinese pavilion behind her. Floral borders, birds, geometric corner ornaments, a small landscape panel, and the Chinese heading “春曉” surround the portrait. 1910–1949 · East Asia Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai The commercial art of treaty-port Shanghai. Calendar posters (yuefenpai) given away by tobacco, pharmaceutical and cosmetics firms took over the New Year print's place on the wall, pairing glamorous women in qipao, softly modelled in Zheng Mantuo's rubbed-brush watercolour technique, with ornamental borders, calendars and products. In the 1920s–30s pictorials, cartoons and 'art lettering' (meishuzi) absorbed Art Deco geometry into a cosmopolitan Chinese modernism.

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More combinations

With Mexican Calendar Chromo

All 13 combinations with Mexican Calendar Chromo

With Shanghai Modern

All 12 combinations with Shanghai Modern

Every style combination