Jose Clemente Orozco

Jose Clemente Orozco was born November 23, 1883, in Zapotlan, Jalisco, a state from which many of Mexico's artists have come. When he was a child the family moved to Guadalajara and afterward to Mexico City . The parents planned that Jose should be an agricultural engineer, and he successfully completed his training for such a career before he felt the call of art. He began to paint in 1909.

Three influences shaped his style in art-the stiff, academic training in perspective and anatomy which he received at San Carlos ; the dramatic, ebullient folk engravings which Posada displayed in penny sheets; and classes and conversations with Dr. Atl.

Although Jose Clemente Orozco began painting when he was twenty-six, it was late in life, past his fortieth year, that he became widely known. His later life contrasted sharply with the hard days of his youth when he made a living as a cartoonist. With his wife and three children, he spent his last years in Mexico City , living near the Monument to the Revolution in a modern home built to his own design. Here he kept strictly apart the several activities of his life. The ground floor was reserved for the reception of guests and admirers, the second floor for family life, and the third floor for work. In his large, well-lighted studio the bare expanse of whitewashed walls is relieved by one old master-a version of El Greco's "Lady with Fur" on an unstretched canvas tacked to the wall.

Official honors, too, came late to Jose Clemente Orozco. His sprightly autobiography appeared on Mexico City bookstands in 1945. The National Retrospective Exhibition of Jose Clemente Orozco, at the Palace of Fine Arts in 1947, was the first public exhibition of his innumerable sketches for murals. In the same year he received from the hands of the President of the Republic the twenty-thousand-peso prize given to the nation's outstanding cultural exponent in all areas of art and science for the preceding five years. The acolade from the President on this occasion proved that Orozco's days of struggle were past and that his old age would prove less tempestuous than his youth.

Not content to sit back and let younger men take over, Jose Clemente Orozco interested himself in new materials and techniques. His mural decoration of the Teachers College-La Escuela Normal de Maestros-in 1948, was the first completed example of this new direction. Here his method was to dig into the concrete walls and insert encrustations of metals painted with synthetic silicon emulsion. He directed the execution of this large decoration from the bottom of the scaffold. Mario Pani, architect, and Maestro Jose Gutierrez, laboratory researcher, were collaborators in the project and technique.

Time and the critics will settle the relative merits of this and his other murals. When Jose Clemente Orozco died in 1949, one heard people in the United States call him "the El Greco of Mexico " and "one of the truly great artists of our time." But in 1930 opinions were divergent.

Writing for the Mexican magazine Forma in 1928, Jean Chariot had remarked:

"Every valid artist lives ahead of his era, connives with and enriches those not yet born. Pitted against contemporary taste he remains alive when his epoch dies. The artist of today, terrified of the spirit, remains bogged in the letter. Cubism dictates his output, clamps onto art an inflexible carcan. Lone rebel, Orozco maintains the supremacy of the spirit, unafraid of describing and raising issues... Compared with orthodox moderns Orozco appears romantic. This dubious dubbing comes from the lips of those who idolize geometry in paint, devotees of the golden section and priests of dynamic symmetry. They are right for this instant of time, but in a few years, when cubism and neocubism will have receded into the past, the romantic label will wash off, a more essential quality will appear, Orozco's work will be called monumental."