José Clemente Orozco

Mexican muralist

• Born: November 23, 1883
• Birthplace: Ciudad Guzmán, Mexico
• Died: September 7, 1949
• Place of death: Mexico City, Mexico

Orozco was one of the greatest muralists of the twentieth century and was considered foremost among those who worked in fresco. He was among the earliest Mexican artists to break away from European conventionalism and treat purely Mexican themes: The silent, suffering masses became a recurring interest in his art, reflecting his deep humanitarian concern and empathy for his people.

Early Life

José Clemente Orozco (hoh-ZAY klah-MEHN-tay oh-ROHZ-koh) was born into a respected middle-class family. When he was two, the family moved to Guadalajara and then in 1890 to Mexico City, where he would grow up with his sister, Rosa, and brother, Luis. While attending primary school, Orozco passed by the workshop of Mexico’s finest engraver, José Guadalupe Posada, and frequently stopped to watch as Posada produced caricatures for news stories, illustrations for children’s books, and traditional Mexican folk art. By Orozco’s own admission, it was Posada’s work that first awakened his own artistic talents and taught him his earliest lessons about using color. He began to sketch and soon was enrolled in night classes in drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos, but Orozco’s art studies were interrupted in 1897 when his family sent him to the School of Agriculture in San Jacinto.

Orozco was bored with his agrarian training, but it did give him some practical experience, and he was able to earn money drawing topographical maps. During this period, an accident damaged his eyes (he wore thick glasses), and his left hand became a fingerless stump (probably the reason for his preoccupation with hands in his paintings). He next entered the National Preparatory School, where he studied architecture for four years, but his obsession with painting eventually led him back to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1905. Since his father had died, Orozco earned his way by working as a draftsman and doing architectural drawings. At the academy, he had only a brief introduction to the methods of Antonio Fabrés, a masterful academic Spanish painter, but embraced wholeheartedly the latter’s insistence on intense training, discipline, and photolike exactness in reproducing nature.

While at the academy, Orozco met Gerardo Murillo, recently returned from studies in Rome and Paris. A radical student who rejected conventional artistic views and Mexican subservience to Spain and Europe, Murillo had taken an Aztec name, calling himself “Dr. Atl.” Atl’s violent anticolonial views began to sway Orozco and other students away from dependence on a European style and toward Mexican-oriented themes in art. For the first time, Mexican painters began to look to their own country for inspiration, and a purely Mexican style of art began to emerge. For Orozco, a strong, dramatic style began to overwhelm his earlier traditionalist training.

Life’s Work

In 1910, with Atl as their leader, Orozco and other emerging “Mexican” artists gave their first exhibit at a state exhibition to celebrate the first hundred years of Mexican independence. Originally, the exhibit was to feature only Spanish artists, but Atl objected and conducted negotiations that enabled the group to show their art also. The exhibit the first of Mexican artists met with unexpected success. The group next formed a society called the Artistic Center and secured wall space from the government to paint murals. Just as work was beginning at the amphitheater of the National Preparatory School, the Revolution of 1910 began on November 20, and the project was necessarily shelved.

Orozco showed little interest in the new government of Francisco Madero, believing it offered nothing new. When student strikes closed the academy, he spent the winter of 1911-1912 doing anti-Madero caricatures for an opposition newspaper, claiming he was an artist and had no political convictions. When the academy reopened in 1913, Orozco gave the new curriculum a try but soon left, unimpressed, disliking the emphasis on French Impressionists. He began to find inspiration for his developing expressionist style in the brothels and dark streets of the Mexico City counterculture and produced a series of watercolors of prostitutes who became a major symbol in his art and their environs known collectively as the House of Tears .

Civil war erupted in 1914. Orozco’s damaged hand foiled every attempt to draft him, but he produced satirical caricatures for La Vanguardia, a pro-revolutionary newspaper, which supported the cause of General Venustiano Carranza and was edited by Dr. Atl. There were moments when Orozco could not help but be amused by the confused antics of the dissident generals, but the violence, bloodshed, terror, and mutilated and mangled bodies he personally observed were what he remembered and what affected his art. In 1916, Orozco had his first one-man exhibit, which included House of Tears, and, the following year, he produced a series of watercolors called Sorrows of War .

Critics and moralists did not react favorably to his work, and insecure politicians winced at his earlier published cartoons and caricatures. Orozco found it opportune to spend several years in the United States. He lived in San Francisco and New York, where he had a brief meeting with David Siqueiros, another of Mexico’s emerging artistic giants. These years were not happy ones for Orozco, but what he observed was not lost on his artist’s eye.

In 1920, Orozco returned to Mexico, where he found the new government of Álvaro Obregón sympathetic with the old ideas of the Artistic Center. The “Mexican Muralist” movement began in 1922 when Orozco, Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, and others were commissioned by the minister of education to adorn the walls of the National Preparatory School. Lacking experience, the artists’ first results were disappointing, and much in the murals betrayed a European rather than Mexican style of execution. The murals were disliked and defaced by students, who drove Orozco and Siqueiros out. In 1926, Orozco was invited back to complete his frescoes. He gradually developed his own personal, distinctive style, exemplified in the finest of his early work, The Trench , and also in Cortes and Malinche. During this period, Orozco also completed Omniscience (1925) in the House of Tiles, and Social Revolution (1926) in Orizaba at the Industrial School.

The agitation caused at home by the unpopular art and views of Orozco and his fellow artists, as well as a growing family (he had married Margarita Valladares on November 23, 1923) that was becoming more difficult to support (his third child had just been born), prompted him to leave for New York, where he arrived in December, 1927. He was promised a three-month subsidy by the secretary of foreign relations. While in New York, he met Alma Reed and Madame Sikelianos, whose spacious house on Fifth Avenue had become an international salon for intellectuals, poets, artists, and revolutionaries. The women were interested in Orozco’s paintings and sketches of revolution and exhibited them in their house; they also influenced him with their own interest in Greek culture and classical scholarship. Through their patronage, Orozco became better known. An exhibition at the Marie Sterner Gallery (1928) was followed by a showing of his earlier fresco studies for the National Preparatory School by the Art Students’ League (1929). Reed dedicated her new Delphic Studios to Orozco and exhibited his paintings of New York and Mexico.

In 1930, Orozco received his first commission to do a mural in the United States from Pomona College in Claremont, California, which wanted a Mexican artist to decorate the student refectory. There he would execute his Prometheus , departing temporarily from Mexican subjects and social criticism in favor of a classical and more universal theme (reflecting the influence of Reed’s salon). The colossal figure of the immortal, self-sacrificing Titan, leaning on one knee, his curved body and muscular shoulders stretching upward with their burden, recalls Michelangelo and El Greco. Holding it aloft in his hands, the bright gift of fire emerges from the browns and grays of the lower mural to offer liberation, enlightenment, and purification. Yet, fire can also destroy. Fire became a major symbol in Orozoco’s work. The Prometheus is less stylized and more expressionistic than earlier frescoes. At the time, only his sponsors were pleased with the result, and Orozco earned little money for his efforts.

Unfortunately, Orozco became overly technical in his next set of murals at the New School for Social Research (1930-1931) in New York City. Influenced by a then-current theory known as “dynamic symmetry,” his execution of themes concerned with universal brotherhood, world revolution, and arts and sciences was rigid and mechanical, a disappointing sequel to the Prometheus. Orozco followed this project with a brief trip to Europe to see the great paintings in the museums and churches of England, France, Italy, and Spain. When he returned, he began decorating the library at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire (1932-1934), where he incorporated much of what he had recently observed overseas, presenting his worldview in two main scenes entitled The Coming of Quetzalcoatl and The Return of Quetzalcoatl. The Mexican Revolution, the Great Depression, and an impersonal, industrialized urban society had provoked Orozco to contrast a primitive, non-Christian paradise of the past with a modern-day, Christian, capitalist hell.

By 1934, Orozco’s reputation had been firmly established. He triumphantly returned to Mexico and painted a huge single mural, Catharsis , in the Palace of Fine Arts. In 1936, he was in Guadalajara, where he executed what most consider his greatest murals at the University of Guadalajara, the Governor’s Palace (1937), and in the chapel at the orphanage of Hospicio Cabañas (1938-1939). Historical themes illustrating inhumanity developed in earlier works are repeated here, with greater negativity. In the Hospicio dome, Orozco painted the Man of Fire , the logical culmination of his art and thought, and a composition some regard as unique in the history of art. Here is represented a figure engulfed in flame with light radiating all about him embodying hope, salvation, and creativity, it is a meditation on human existence itself.

No later murals match the emotional intensity of the Guadalajara group, and universal themes took a second place to nationalistic ones, perhaps because of World War II and contemporary events in Mexico. Orozco painted frescoes in the Ortíz Library (in Jiquílpan) in 1940 and, during the same year, painted a mural for the New York Museum of Modern Art, which he entitled Dive Bomber , a work not as powerful in form as his others, more abstract and with delicate colors. Returning to Mexico City in 1941, he adorned the walls of the Supreme Court Building. He never finished his project in the Chapel of Jesus Nazarene (1942-1944). His last murals were at the National School of Teachers (1947-1948), the Museum of History at Chapultepec (1948), and in the Government Palace in Guadalajara (1948-1949). In 1947, he received his government’s highest award for cultural achievement during the preceding five-year period. While Orozco’s murals constitute the heart of his work, his easel paintings alone would have established his reputation as a great artist. His Zapatistas, for example, captures some of the essence of his murals but lacks the grandeur that only a large-scale painting can convey. The abstract quality and hint of mysticism in his work toward the end of his life suggest to some that he was on the verge of an artistic breakthrough when he died on September 7, 1949, at the age of sixty-five.

Significance

José Clemente Orozco was one of the monumental painters of the twentieth century and was foremost in reviving and perfecting the art of the mural, especially frescoes. He was one of the small group of Mexican artists who were the first to break with European colonial tradition and produce a purely Mexican, nationalistic art. Orozco believed that his paintings should convey ideas rather than stories. The bold form, social content, mordant colors, and revolutionary nature of his paintings made him unpopular in his own country, but Orozco persevered, developing his own expressionistic style. He finally found fame in the United States, where his work took on a more mature and international flavor, represented best in his work at Pomona College and, especially, the Dartmouth murals. His genius was finally recognized internationally.

A sensitive man who was deeply disturbed by the Mexican Revolution, the Great Depression, World War II, and other less traumatic but nevertheless horrifying aspects of the human condition, Orozco empathized with the suffering masses, decried inhumanity, and viewed modern industrial society as a seemingly godless, capitalistic wasteland compared to the paradise of primordial, non-Christian times. Yet in his paintings there is usually a glimmer of hope if humankind will recognize and be guided by it. His greatest work was produced in Guadalajara from 1936 to 1939, culminating in what is perhaps his most representative painting, the Man of Fire in the dome of the Hospicio Cabañas. Few artists have had such an impact on their craft, yet because of Orozco’s Mexican origins and socialistic tendencies, his name is not as well known as that of other artistic giants of this century, who are from Europe and the United States.

Bibliography

Ades, Dawn, et al. José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934. New York: Hood Museum of Art, 2002. This book, which accompanied an exhibition, contains eleven essays analyzing various aspects of the art Orozco created during the years he lived in the United States. Also contains many full-color reproductions.

Anreus, Alejandro. Orozco in Gringoland: The Years in New York. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Analyzes the murals, lithographs, drawings, and other works Orozco created in New York City, where he was in a self-imposed exile from 1927 until 1934.

Charlot, Jean. The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920-1925. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979. Contains two chapters on Orozco and some illustrations. Good brief survey of his role in Mexican mural painting by a French muralist who knew him.

Edwards, Emily. Painted Walls of Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. A survey from prehistoric to modern times. Includes a general discussion of Orozco’s life, highlighting the major events and contributions. Contains some illustrations.

Fernandez, Justino. A Guide to Mexican Art from Its Beginnings to the Present. Translated by Joshua C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Under the section on “Contemporary Art,” this work devotes pages 161-170 to Orozco’s life and work. Contains some illustrations. Good for a quick summary.

Harth, Marjorie L., ed. José Clemente Orozco: Prometheus. Claremont, Calif.: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2001. Contains four scholarly essays analyzing Prometheus, the mural Orozco painted at Pomona College and the first Mexican mural in the United States. Also features numerous illustrations of Orozco’s work.

Helm, MacKinley. Man of Fire: J. C. Orozco. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971. An interpretive memoir by a person who knew Orozco. The earliest major work on the artist, Helm’s book attempts to understand the man and his art.

Orozco, José Clemente. An Autobiography. Translated by Robert C. Stephenson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962. Orozco’s own account of his life to 1936. Indispensable but lacking pertinent detail.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. José Clemente Orozco. Introduction by Alma Reed. Mt. Vernon, N.Y.: William Edwin Rudge, 1932. An illustrated collection of Orozco’s work to 1932. Minimal textual matter.

Reed, Alma M. Orozco. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. A biography written by Orozco’s New York patron and friend, who first introduced him to American art circles and was largely responsible for launching his international career.