José Clemente Orozco, 1883-1949

By Zachary Vincent

Zapata, 1930, oil on canvas

Can art ever really reflect the lives and concerns of the public?

This week’s artist biography looks intimately at this question, as it pertains to a movement associated deeply with bridging the gap between government sponsorship and real resonance with people from all classes, pertaining to all manner of popular issues. Mexican Muralism, pioneered by José Clemente Orozco, as well as the other artists of the ‘Big Three’, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, represented a profound shift in the professional artistic production in Mexico at the start of the twentieth century. And yet art historians have often been critical of the extent to which the movement actually stood for populist ideals as opposed to a government-sanctioned aesthetic language without ideas to back it up.

Perhaps Orozco can be a guide for the twenty-first century onlooker and help to lend context to complicate the question at hand and provide some answers. The Mexican artist was born in Ciudad Guzmán, Jalisco, on 23rd November 1883. Orozco moved to Mexico City and was present during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 when progressive reformist ideas about the redistribution of land and civic rights came up against opposition from conservative forces within the country. It was this power struggle, and the shaky consensus built after the cessation of the violence, which most informed the artist’s view on relationships between governments and the people.

Orozco’s position as a link between people and voice was first established by the artist’s role as a political commentator in wartime sketching and cartoon-drawing for the publication La Ahuizote. It was at this time that his style began to develop, heavily influenced by Mesoamerican artistic traditions, especially public murals, with an exaggerated limited dimensionality and primacy of the human form in the composition of the work. It was after the war that Orozco was able to move to larger-scale undertakings and begin utilising the visual language he had helped to develop as it was always intended: as murals in public spaces.

El Requiem, 1928, lithograph

El Requiem (1928) is a lithographic study for the type of mural for which Orozco was to become famed, and which sits at the heart of the debate about the genuine populist intention in the Muralists’ work. The work’s depiction of figures facing away from the viewer, meditating upon candles for the titular act of requiem, or mass for the dead, is sombre and restrained. The lack of specific human features contrasts with the monumentality of the figures, who take up the vast majority of the work’s space. There is a sense that specificity is not the aim – rather, the piece seeks to capture the mourning which was similar for so many families impacted by political violence in Mexico at the start of the twentieth century. While it would be easy to focus on overtly political figures, Orozco instead honours the everyday suffering of Mexicans, regardless of their political affiliations.

Even when dealing with political figures, Orozco presents a view of Mexican history which is surprising in its ambivalence. Zapata (1930) is a depiction of a populist military commander who fought for many of the ideals Orozco was so interested in. And yet the treatment of the figure feels neither triumphant nor hagiographical; rather, Zapata is shown tired, expressionless, pushed up against a scene of grief and violence, expressed in a very muted colour palette, and looking on in a manner which gives no comfort to viewers. It points to Orozco as a figure far from simply an idealogue happy to fight against a conservative government and complacent as a pet artist of the leftist regime which eventually emerged in Mexico. Instead, Orozco sees the lionization of anyone above the common people to be feckless.

While the debate will continue to rage about Orozco’s place in art history and the history of Mexican politics, a number of his works suggest a strong attachment to the side of the people over any government, cause, or ideology. This capacity for extending sympathy, even empathy, to all of Mexico’s people is great part of what has made José Clemente Orozco such a profoundly important artist through to this day.

Bibliography

Bailey, Joyce Waddell. ‘José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949): Formative Years in the Narrative Graphic Tradition’. Latin American Research Review 15: 3 (1980), 73-93.

Beshty, Walead. ‘Unsung Heroes: José Clemente Orozco’. Tate. 20th March 2019. José Clemente Orozco – Tate Etc | Tate.

‘Colección José Clemente Orozco’. Museo Cabanas. Accessed 14th November 2024. COLECCIÓN JOSÉ CLEMENTE OROZCO – MUSEO CABAÑAS.

‘El Requiem – José Clemente Orozco’. MoMA. Accessed 14th November 2024. José Clemente Orozco. The Requiem (El Requiem). 1928 | MoMA.

‘José Clemente Orozco’. Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed 14th November 2024. José Clemente Orozco | The Art Institute of Chicago.

‘Zapata’. Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed 14th November 2024. Zapata | The Art Institute of Chicago.