We explain who José Clemente Orozco was, what his main works are and why he is considered one of the greatest exponents of the muralist school in Mexico.
Who was José Clemente Orozco?
José Clemente Orozco was a renowned Mexican visual artist of the 20th century, famous for his contribution to the Mexican muralist movementtogether with his colleagues Diego Rivera (1886-1957), David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) and Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), with whom he founded the Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors (SOTPE) in 1922.
Apart from mural painting, Orozco cultivated other artistic techniques, such as lithography, drawing and etching, and through them He created a work of notable commitment to the history of Mexico and strong criticism of contemporary society.His murals are examples of Latin American protest art.
In recognition of his artistic career, Orozco received the National Fine Arts Award of Mexico and was considered a national hero as part of an artistic movement highly appreciated abroad. He was also a founding member of the Colegio Nacional and held various cultural positions in the Mexican state structure.
Birth and youth of José Clemente Orozco
Jose Clemente Orozco Born in Ciudad Guzman (Zapotlán el Grande, at that time), in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, on November 23, 1883. His childhood, however, was spent in Mexico City, where his family moved around 1890, after a brief stay in Guadalajara. His parents were Ireneo Orozco and María Rosa Flores, who had three other children besides him.
In the capital, he began his studies at a school in the city center, on the same street where the famous Mexican illustrator and caricaturist José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) printed his engravingsThere, on his way to school, young José Clemente Orozco would stop to watch him work, behind a glass window that looked out onto the street. According to his autobiography (published in 1945), Orozco found a source of inspiration in those few minutes: “The first stimulus that awakened my imagination and prompted me to scribble on paper with my own dolls” (1999, p. 14).
Those early inclinations towards art and illustration led Orozco to enroll in the evening drawing courses at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos.where he devoted enormous efforts to copying the hyperrealistic lithographs of the French cartoonist Bernard Romain Julien, as required by the tutelage of the Catalan painter Antonio Fabrés.
However, His artistic studies were interrupted towards the end of the 1890s.due to his family’s demand that he begin training as an agricultural expert at the San Jacinto School of Agriculture. Although this did not interest Orozco and he never graduated, his ability to draw up topographical maps was very useful for his later survival.
His father died in 1903, a victim of typhus. The following year, at just seventeen years of age, The young Orozco suffered an accident with gunpowder that left him with serious injuries to his left hand.Lack of medical attention led to gangrene and the immediate amputation of the hand at the wrist.
Nevertheless, in 1905, Orozco re-enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts. He was determined to pursue his calling as a painter. There he met one of his first teachers: Gerardo Murillo Coronado (1875-1964), better known by his nickname, Dr. Atla term that means “water” in the Nahuatl language.
Painter, caricaturist, writer, explorer and philosopher, Atl encouraged his students to abandon the European artistic imaginary and cultivate more local, indigenous aspects. Under his guidance, Orozco drew his first illustrations, everyday scenes of Mexican life.and when his teacher retired to live near the Popocatépetl volcano, Orozco decided to explore and paint the most marginal neighborhoods of Mexico City.
Thus he produced his first work, a set of watercolors on the life of the city’s prostitutes, which he would later exhibit under the name The House of Tears.
The years of the Revolution
Orozco was also a prominent cartoonist, whose beginnings date back to various publications critical of the government of Porfirio Díaz.
In November 1910, the insurgency against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915) broke out and, shortly after, the Mexican Revolution. Orozco and his fellow painters had had a very successful first exhibition in September of that year, and were preparing for another very similar one, in which Orozco planned to exhibit his first mural works. The exhibition, however, was postponed indefinitely due to the social and political context.
The state of national disorder also spread to art students, who between 1911 and 1913 began a strike against the French teaching system used in Mexico at the time (the “Pillet system”). Orozco took part in this strike.
In addition, eager to participate in the national debate, he joined opposition publications as a cartoonist. The Ahuizote and The Impartialand later in The vanguarda journal edited by Dr. Atl and Francisco Valladares.
Although these publications sympathized with the side of the caudillo Venustiano Carranza (1859-1920), Orozco managed to stay out of the conflict as much as possible. Even in times of forced recruitment, his call-up was often rejected because of his missing hand.
In his autobiography, Orozco describes his stance towards the Revolution in the following terms:
“I took no part in the revolution, nothing bad ever happened to me and I was not in any kind of danger. The revolution was for me the most joyful and fun of carnivals, that is, as they say carnivals are, since I have never seen them. I only knew the great leaders by sight, when they paraded through the streets at the head of their troops and followed by their general staffs. That is why I find the numerous articles that appeared in American newspapers about my military exploits very funny.”
Taken from Autobiography (1999), p. 34.
Orozco’s first solo exhibition took place in 1916, at the Biblos bookstore in Mexico City.. At that time, the public received his watercolors with particular intensity. The House of Tearsand indignant responses were not long in coming from the moralistic sectors of society.
The following year, Orozco decided to spend some time in the United States. He lived there for three years, between San Francisco and New York City, and survived by painting posters and murals for different educational institutions, such as Pomona College in California, Dartmouth College and the New School for Social Research in New York. In this last institution, he created a real fresco: he painted the mural on plaster, a very novel technique for the time..
When General Álvaro Obregón (1880-1928) took over the government in Mexico, Orozco felt called back to his homeland. He discovered that there was the possibility of being sponsored by the government to paint different muralsgiven that one of the main national intellectuals, José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), had assumed functions as Secretary of Public Education.
It was thus that Orozco came into contact with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, With whom he participated in the founding, in 1922, of the Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, and at the same time initiated the muralist movement in Mexico..
Beginnings of the muralist movement
David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera were the initiators and greatest exponents of the Mexican muralist movement.
Beginning in 1923, Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros dedicated themselves to painting murals in various public buildings and educational institutions in Mexico City, such as the National Preparatory School.
Many of these murals did not survive the passage of time, and others did not survive the criteria of perfection of Orozco himself, who destroyed with his own hand those that were unsatisfactory to him, those that seemed too attached to the European style and imagery, lacking the essence of what is Mexican. However, they already portrayed the daily struggle of the working and popular classes.
That same year, Orozco married Margarita Valladares, whom he had known since 1916. The marriage produced three children: Alfredo, Clemente and Lucrecia. Until 1926 Orozco produced some of the most famous mural works of his early period.as Reconstruction in the Municipal Palace of Orizaba, or Cortes and Malinche at the San Ildefonso National Preparatory School in Mexico City.
During this first stage of his work, Orozco strengthened his talent for muralism and found his own pictorial style, for which he was later recognized internationally. His political leanings ranged from anarchism to anarcho-syndicalism, and the line of the Mexican Communist Party.
In a manifesto of the Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors published in The Machete In 1924 and signed by Siqueiros, Rivera, Orozco and also Xavier Guerrero, Fermin Revueltas, Ramon Alva Guadarrama, German Gueto and Carlos Merida, you can read the following:
“We make a general appeal to all revolutionary intellectuals in Mexico to forget their proverbial sentimentality and laziness for more than a century and join us in the social and aesthetic-educational struggle that we are carrying out.
“In the name of all the blood shed by the people in ten years of struggle and in the face of the reactionary coup, we make an urgent call to all peasants, workers and revolutionary soldiers of Mexico, so that, understanding the vital importance of the coming struggle, and forgetting differences in tactics, we form a united front to combat the common enemy.”
Taken from the ICAA digital archive (https://icaa.mfah.org/).
However, in 1927, the then president Plutarco Elías Calles (1877-1945) was facing the Cristero War, and his new Secretary of Culture, JM Puig Casauranc, withdrew protection and patronage from muralism. Commissions ceased and, thus, The muralists’ work was once again the target of conservative attacks.
At that time, Orozco left again for the United States, to escape pressure from conservative sectors. Humiliated and resentful, He decided to forge an international reputation that would force his compatriots to open their doors to him without reservation.. His colleagues Rivera and Siqueiros soon followed.
Orozco’s second muralist stage
During his second stay in the United States, Orozco found his definitive vision and style.
While his family remained in Mexico, Orozco settled in New York and led a solitary life, very focused on his work, except for the correspondence that…