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THE MURALS OF JOSE CLEMENTE OROZCO AT THE
HOSPICIO CABANAS INSTITUTE: A
PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE AND THE HISTORICAL
DIALECTIC

presented by

Jeremy Hockett

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we GJCIRCIDIbDquS-p.“

THE MURAL~S OF JOSE CLEMENTE OROZCO AT THE HOSPICIO
CABANAS INSTITUTE: A PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE
AND THE HISTORICAL DIALECTIC
By

Jeremy Hockett

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of

MASTER OF ART

Department of Art

1 999

ABSTRACT

THE MURALS OF JOSE CLEMENTE OROZCO AT THE HOSPICIO
CABANAS INSTITUTE: A PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE
AND THE HISTORICAL DIALECTIC
By

Jeremy Hockett

The work of J ose’ Clemente Orozco, like no other twentieth century artist, displays
a comprehensive philosophic system of dialectical thought. The murals of Guadalajara,
especially those of the Cabanas Institute, represent a visual treatise of his mature personal
philosophy. Little has been done in the scholarship on Orozco to compare the conceptual
vision of history and freedom as seen in his work to specific dialectical philosophies,
even when an association is explicitly stated.

Orozco articulated in his Cabafias Institute murals a borderlands between art and
philosophy, individual and society, past and present. His murals represent a type of
philosophical artistry that is transparent and sublime, historic and prophetic, cynical and
yet full of hope. This thesis seeks not only to extend fuller recognition to and a deeper
understanding of the work undertaken by artist José Clemente Orozco, but to also explore

the power of art to reveal, to inspire and to communicate.

Copyright by
JEREMY T. HOCKE'I'I‘
1999

This paper is dedicated to those who seek to make the past a living part of the present.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I feel extremely fortunate to have spent seven wonderful years at Michigan State
University. In that time I have taken courses that still linger in my thoughts. I want to
take this opportunity to thank those faculty members at Michigan State who have left a
marked impression on my experience there, for without these exceptional teachers my
education would have been much the poorer. I want to sincerely express my gratitude for
the three-member committee overseeing this project. I deeply appreciate their
instruction, their guidance, and their flexibility. I thank Professor Ray Silverman for his
patience and his faith in my somewhat unorthodox approach to this subject. His input
and enthusiasm were the most important factors in the successful completion of this
thesis. Professor Eldon Van Liere has been a role model and mentor for several years,
perhaps unbeknownst to him. His sophisticated sense of humor and personal style made
his classes inspiring and unforgettable. To Professor Richard Peterson I owe an immense
debt for my personal and intellectual growth. His course on Race and Philosophy was the

single most influential class I have had to date.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vii
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ..................................................................................... 8

CHAPTER 2

THE MURALS OF THE HOSPICIO CABAN AS INSTITUTE ...................................... 13
The Conquest and Conversion: A Master/Slave Dialectic ............................................ 14
Ideology in the Wake of Revolution .............................................................................. 24
The Will to Improve ....................................................................................................... 29

CHAPTER 3

THE SEEDS OF GENIUS ................................................................................................ 34
Childhood and Revolution ............................................................................................. 36
The Inception of Public Muralism ................................................................................. 41
Orozco in New York ...................................................................................................... 46
Triumphal Return ........................................................................................................... 55

CHAPTER 4 *

THE SHAPING OF IDENTITY ....................................................................................... 58
Intellect and Intuition: The inner dialectic .................................................................... 60
A Philosophy of History: The outer dialectic ................................................................ 69
Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic ...................................................................................... 74

CHAPTER 5

OROZCO: ART AND AUTHENTICITY ....................................................................... 79
Marx and Hegel .............................................................................................................. 80
The “Tres Grandes” ....................................................................................................... 83
Orozco’s Politics ............................................................................................................ 86

CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 94

APPENDICES ................................................................................................................. 100
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 139

vi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Interior of the Cabanas Institute ...................................................................... 100
Figure 2. The Indigenous World .................................................................................... 101
Figure 3. Coatlique ......................................................................................................... 101
Figure 4. The Conversion ............................................................................................... 102
Figure 5. The Confusion of Religions ............................................................................ 103
Figure 6. Cortés .............................................................................................................. 104
Figure 7. Conquistadors Fighting Amongst Themselves ............................................... 105
Figure 8. The Two-Headed Horse .................................................................................. 105
Figure 9. The Mechanized Horse ................................................................................... 106
Figure 10. Triumph of Death .......................................................................................... 107
Figure 11. Triumph of Death .......................................................................................... 108
Figure 12. Triumph of Death, Pieter Breughal ............................................................... 108
Figure 13. Philip II ......................................................................................................... 109
Figure 14. The Militarized Masses ................................................................................. 110
Figure 15. The Military Parade ...................................................................................... 111
Figure 16. The Demagogues .......................................................................................... 112
Figure 17. The Human Spirit .......................................................................................... 113
Figure 18. The Human Spirit .......................................................................................... 114
Figure 19. Elemental Man ........... 115
Figure 20. Dome ............................................................................................................. 115
Figure 21. The Wounded ................................................................................................ 116
Figure 22. The National Preparatory School .................................................................. 116
Figure 23. Driftwood ...................................................................................................... 117
Figure 24. Omniscience ................................................. . ................................................. 1 18
Figure 25. Murals of Orizaba ......................................................................................... 119
Figure 26. Cortés and Malinche ..................................................................................... 120
Figure 27. The Rich Banquet While the Workers Quarrel ............................................. 121
Figure 28. Maternity ....................................................................................................... 122
Figure 29. The Trench .................................................................................................... 123
Figure 30. The Revolutionary Trinity ............................................................................ 124
Figure 31. Prometheus .................................................................................................... 125
Figure 32. Dartmouth College Murals ........................................................................... 126
Figure 33. University of Guadalajara Murals ................................................................. 127
Figure 34. Father I-Iidalgo .............................................................................................. 128
Figure 35. The Carnival of Ideologies ........................................................................... 129

vii

INTRODUCTION

There is no truth without a past, and no truth without consequence. History, the
story of what and who we are, is a struggle to achieve truth—truth of the past and truth of
the moment. History is civilization’s most precious possession, the definer peoples and
the forge of nations. Bound within the web of time, mankind seeks to discover its own
origin, to discover what it is by revealing what it has been, for a people who knows not its
history knows not what it truly is, or is to become. With this paper I hope not only to
extend fuller recognition to and a deeper understanding of the work undertaken by artist
José Clemente Orozco, but to also explore the power of art to reveal, to inspire and to
communicate, to discover what Adorno called the “truth content” of art.1 In addition, I
wish to display how philosophy can help to interpret art and penetrate its contextual and
causal factors, to discover its universal nature. Adorno believed in the idea of
“conceptual mediation,” that:

There is only one way in which aesthetics can hope to understand art today, and

that is through critical self-reflection. What art needs is an aesthetics that is able

to generate the kind of reflection art is unable to marshal by itself. . .Only
philosophy can find that truth content, and it is here that art and aesthetics
converge. On its way to this point, philosophy is engaged not in some external
application of philosophical tenets, but in the immanent reflection of works of

art. . .The supreme task of aesthetics is to determine the Spiritual essence of

individual works of art: in this endeavor aesthetics cannot resort to some concept
of spirit lifted ready-made from philosophy.2

 

lAdorno argues that a work of art has its own spiritual essence that can be immanently apprehended
through aesthetic reflection, that the work of art endures in its own right distinct from the artist and his
intentions. He also argues that such reflection must be rooted in historico-philosophical theory because the
apprehension of the spiritual essence of a work of art changes and develops over time.

2Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London and Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1983), 468.

The writings of G.F.W. Hegel and Henri Bergson, will be discussed in order to
provide a working conceptual vocabulary and the organizing ideas with which to
elucidate the relationship of the function, form, and content of Orozco’s art to history and
progress. The philosophies of Bergson and Hegel can be described as philosophies of
freedom, identity, and change. As such, they present detailed and comprehensive
comparisons for the murals of Orozco. Although Orozco stated (see Appendix B) that
painting “should not connote any theory,” the intention of this thesis echoes the words of
Salvador Echavarria, who writes,

. . .to translate Orozco—or any plastic artist—into words, is always a treachery...

But it is necessary for a better understanding of the work. . .This little study has no

intention of translating images into words, but only tries to expose Orozco’s

creative idea. Needless to say that the only thing that matters is the direct contact
with the murals. The rest is just mental scaffolds, which have to be removed as
soon as the have fulfilled their modest purpose. Deprived of its garments of
forms, reduced to the bareness of conceptions, to the shabby dress of words,

Orozco’s idea shivers. It is necessary to dress it again with images, symbols and

allegories. But perhaps the effort to understand it was not useless, and should it

succeed, the idea would appear in all its magnificence.3

The work of Orozco bursts forth from a solid personal philosophic formulation.
A man of immense experience and erudition, Orozco bore witness to a dialectic struggle
of racial proportions played out through the Mexican Revolution. Orozco’s vision of the
struggle in Mexico envelopes the entire planet in its universal implication and
importance. Throughout human history only an exceptional few have harnessed and
honed the ability to take in the world around them, mediate this reality within themselves

and let it then flow from the mind back into the world of things, transformed by the

human spirit into a unique portrait of reality. Orozco’s is a vision that yet today resonates

 

3Salvador Echavarria, Orozco, Hospicio Cabanas (Guadalajara: J alisco en el Arte, Jose Rogelio
Alvarez, 1959), 10.

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and persists in the minds of viewers because of its universal nature. My discussion will
begin with an analysis of Orozco’s most impressive fresco series in the Cabanas Institute
of Guadalajara, Mexico followed by a biographical investigation of his life and work.

As Orozco’s art is mediated by his philosophy, it is imperative to consider what
makes the mind of the artist capable of producing works which unify the particular with
the universal, which express the universal will of mankind to improve and the
consequences of that will. In the analysis of Orozco and his works, one must be fully
prepared to delve into the manninto the history of his time, his nation and his art-—if one
is to understand the seemingly obscure, but rich messages they contain. All of these .
aspects have something to teach us, something to contribute to the further understanding
of the whole.

Using Hegel’s Philosophy of History to form an analogous impression of the
underlying ideas of both men I hope to shed light on Orozco’s shadowy and distorted
artistic contribution. Because his murals are philosophically derived they reflect both the
historic development of themestizo identity and the immediate demand on the individual
to act. Orozco builds up a unifying theme of eternal conflict between the outer social
condition and the inner struggle to reconcile the relationship of oneself to it. To address
these concepts I have chosen also to utilize the philosophy of Henri Bergson in order to
further explain what Orozco’s murals convey.

The murals Orozco painted at the hospice are a grand historic narrative, a

chronology of the mestizo existential crisis in which it is overcome by a philosophy of
individual will asserting itself through self-consciousness and renewal. He maintains the

integrity of the Classical tradition imported from Spain while addressing directly the

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condition of modern humanity and simultaneously presents to the modern world-—where
the sacred and the profane mingle incessantly--a philosophic response to the existential
ambiguity confounding modern man. His murals represent a new stage in the narrative
tradition, extending from the murals of the Renaissance to the canvases of the French
Republic, to the English romantic landscape painters, but infused with modern
consciousness and clarity. This new modern consciousness equates to, and is in a real
way, the product of a new era of human existence, one in which we are potentially no
longer trapped by the immediacy or tradition of our world. J ustino Fernandez, who wrote
extensively on the life and works of Orozco, provides this characterization,

Orozco is the one who sees modern times with full conscience, fully, for neither is

he saint with eyes on the past, nor unsatisfied, nor does he swear by a possible or

impossible further beyond; but decides to be consumed by fire here, in the reality
of what this is as well as in the very fire of his own creative activity.4

Certain elements of Orozco’s work, especially his murals, are impossible to
ignore. Themes of Mexican history--of revolution, fire and catharsis, violence and
misery permeate every work--were fashioned by this master dialectician to expose
hypocrisy, the paradox and the polarity perpetuating human suffering. His work is ironic
in this sense precisely because it was mirroring the reality around him, not because he
was himself confused or self-contradictory, as is often stated. AS an artist and
dialectician, Orozco sought to reconcile this duplicity of existence. Scholar Desmond
Rochfort explains that:

In his examination of freedom as an ideal in his work, Orozco expressed himself

in ways which many found to say the least, contradictory, but the contradictions
are dialectical and calculated.5

 

4Justino Fernandez, “Orozco, Genius of America,” College Art Journal (Winter, 1949-50): 147.
sDesmond Rochfort, “A Terrible Beauty: Orozco’s Murals in Guadalajara 1936-1939,” in Orozco!
1883-1949 (Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1980), 74.

Alma Reed writes in Orozco,

The apparent contradictions in some of Orozco’s spoken and written statements in
regard to his ideologic motivations were seldom due to confusion or moodiness.
They were more often the result of his rare integrity, his complete intellectual
honesty. From beginning to end, as has been well said, he reserved the right to
erect and destroy his own platforms. His evaluation of persons, events, and ideas
was determined solely by the immediate promptings of his own intuitive
[emphasis mine] faculties—never by fixed standards of partisan politics or the
rigid concepts of orthodox creeds.6

We, as products and producers of our world, fight an inner and outer battle
struggling to achieve an awareness of our selves in relation to those things that provide
the acknowledgement of our conscious existence and a basis for growth and elaboration,
i.e. other beings and our phenomenal environment. No one has so eloquently described
the life and work of Orozco as has scholar Justino Fernandez. It seems no one has put
forth so much effort to articulate the more sublime ideas encoded in the painting of
Orozco. In a eulogizing homage shortly after Orozco’s death in 1949, Fernandez wrote,

However, in the presence of the death of a genius, there can be no wailing; we

' must keep watch in the hushed silence of our inner self, out of respect for our
great friend, the man who really leaves an empty space. The greatness of his work
will not let the spirit retreat, but drives it forward without rest. Such was his life,
his art, and his example. . .Rare indeed is genius for rare are the men who achieve
its essential yet unstable balance. For some, genius is random force, a divine
madness; for others, genius is calmness and serenity, absolute balance attained
and lost and reattained. There is no better example of this than that cupola at

Guadalajara, within whose compass—essential and limited like all things

human—all the possibilities of being are before you, and in its center the greatest

possibility of man’s greatness, to live, consumed by the fire, a symbol for
consciousness.7

Fernandez describes Orozco’s work as “historico-philosophic mural painting.” Much of
this paper is devoted to qualifying this statement by establishing to what extent the

Cabafias Institute murals constitute a visual representation of a philosophic system.

 

6Alma Reed, Orozco (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 48.
7Fernandez, “Orozco, Genius of America,” 142.

When I was first introduced to the Cabafias murals in Guadalajara I was struck by
the idea of how well the story of Mexico exemplified the dialectical theories of history
put forth by German philosopher Friedrich Hegel. I believed then and still believe today
that art works and philosophy are incomplete in themselves. It is difficult to find in
world tradition philosophy or ideology (I include religion as a form of philosophic
thought) standing alone from art. As philosophy is the history of human thought, art is
the history of human expression, the former lives through words and the latter through
images. One can artificially compartmentalize and separate them for the sake of study,
but it impossible to keep them segregated indefinitely. Ultimately an artwork is the
product of an individual who has constructed for him— or her-self a way of looking at the
world, of understanding the world. This is essentially what philosophers do, they
construct theories which attempt to explain human existence and human action. For the
individual a personal philosophy of life, conscious or unconscious, is to a greater or lesser
extent a required act of living.

The philosophy of every individual is unique, as even the most orthodox and
ardent Christians will have varying interpretations of scripture. In the same way that we
might distinguish, for example, the philosophies of St. Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon
by first understanding their common origins in Christian doctrine, we might likewise
compare the world of personal secular philosophies, as in those of Orozco and Hegel, to
establish a deeper understanding of each by first finding a source of common ground.
Through the works of Friedrich Hegel and Henri Bergson Orozco’s murals might be seen

as a visual philosophic treatise. They represent the accumulated knowledge, experience,

and wisdom of one man developed into a system of imagery that expresses an individual

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life philosophy derived from the particular events of Mexican history. Insofar as
Orozco’s work is philosophically conceived, a comparison between his ideas and the
ideas of other philos0phers is necessary. I have chosen to focus on the work of Hegel for
its dialectical process of history and of Bergson for its metaphysical and spiritual theories
concerning the dichotomy between intellect and intuition in the human mind. Because
Orozco offers little by way of interpretation for his work I feel it is necessary to have a
reference in written philosophy to more fully explain what his paintings might convey to
us today. I present these philosophic ideas as a vehicle toward better understanding the
mind of the artist, for to analyze the surface meanings of Orozco’s murals leaves their
richer aspects in a cloud of darkness, and it is in this darkness that Orozco might seem
apocalyptic, pessimistic, bitter, laconic or contradictory.

Orozco’s reputation has suffered under the stigma of such accusations. His
influence and importance on twentieth-century art has yet to be adequately acknowledged
or investigated. He remains a figure of obscurity, a master awaiting recognition and
interpretation. This thesis is but one minor attempt at reviving interest in a grand
tradition of the Americas, the public mural, and one of the movement’s titans, J osé

Clemente Orozco.

Chapter 1

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

The task of tracing the impact and influence of José Clemente Orozco on Western
art history, as well as the sources from which he drew his vision, has remained largely
untouched by scholars outside of Mexico. Much of the literature dealing with the art and
life of Orozco is in Spanish. However, due to my limited knowledge of the Spanish
language, I have relied only on those sources written in English. Fortunately, a number
of the critical writings of several important scholars who have written on Orozco have
been translated into English.

Two writers in particular have provided inspirational confirmation as to the
philosophic basis of Orozco’s work. J ustino Fernandez and Octavio Paz, in brief but
exceptionally insightful essays, offer a deeper look into Orozco the man and his
underlying ideas, his sincerity and authenticity. In his Essays on Mexican Art (1986),
Octavio Paz has written an enlightening piece on the Mexican Muralist Movement,
highlighting its origin and the key players in its development, particularly Orozco, Diego
Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. It is an especially articulate description of the
differences that distinguish the Tres Grandes, their philosophies and their art. Another
book by Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude explores the development of the Mexican psyche,

and is a seminal work in the understanding of Mexican character and identity.

Although the majority of the Orozco literature is in Spanish, two important issues
of the journal series Jalisco en el Arte focussed on the artist, one by Salvador Echavarria
and the other by Justino Fernandez, were published in both English and Spanish. Each
was highly informative and helpful in organizing an interpretation Of Orozco’s
philosophical imagery. In 1983, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Orozco’s
birth, the Cabafias Cultural Institute published a book of his works called J. C. OrOZCo. It
includes two introductory essays by Luis Cardoza y AragOn and Teresa del Conde, both
noted Orozco scholars who have written extensively on various aspects of the artist’s life.
Three concurrent chronologies of Orozco’s life, of Mexico and of world events during his
lifetime are appended at the end of this book. The Orozco chronology has been
reproduced in Appendix C of this thesis.

Several works in English are devoted to the Tres Grandes, Orozco, Siqueiros and
Rivera, notably those of MacKinley Helm, Modern Mexican Painters (1941), and
Bernard Myers, Mexican Painting in Our Time (1956). Helm’s Man of F ire: J. C.
Orozco (1953) and Myers’ Jose Clemente Orozco (1960) also present apt, but traditional
art historical perspectives, tracing Orozco’s life and artistic development juxtaposed with
that of Rivera and Siqueiros. And although both give cursory treatment to its historico-
philosophic aspects, neither explores the relationship between Orozco’s work and
specific philosophies.

Artist Jean Charlot, a French ex-patriot living in Mexico, corresponded with
Orozco while he was in the U. S. for several years before traveling to New York himself
in October, 1929. The letters written by Orozco during the first two years of his stay

yield important insights chronicling his frame of mind, his experiences, and his

10

interaction with those of the New York intelligentsia. Ruth L. C. Simms translated and
reprinted these letters in 1974 in the book The Artist in New York along with a foreword
by Charlot and three previously unpublished writings by Orozco.

A 1993 master’s thesis by Adam David Wilensky, Orozco "s Conception of
Prometheus as Redemptor of Humanity, follows the steps leading up to Orozco’s Pomona
College fresco, Prometheus especially through his contact with “the Ashram” and
Delphic Studios, where discussions of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound inspired its subject.
Shifra Goldman, in her 1977 book Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change,
and Wilensky both speak of a relationship between N ietsche and Orozco’s art, however,
no English texts have been found which relate the visual philosophy of Orozco
extensively to that of any Western dialectical philosopher. Hegel, in particular, is rarely
if ever mentioned in regard to Orozco’s work, although it is nearly always discussed to
various degrees as dialectical painting.

In 1980 a collection of essays accompanied an exhibit at the Oxford Museum of
Modern Art. It is a seminal resource documenting the man and his work. In it
contributors David Elliot and Desmond Rochfort each emphasize the dialectical nature of
Orozco’s work at the San Ildefonso Preparatory School murals in Mexico City and
Guadalajara cycle respectively. Another essay by Olav Munzberg and Micheal
Nungesser looks at Orozco’s first murals at the Preparatory School and their reworking,
which is central in the understanding of Orozco’s transition from graphic artist to
muralist. And Laurence Hurlburt analyzes the work of Orozco while in New York.
Hurlburt is also the author of The Mexican Muralists in the United States, published in

1991. Taken as a whole it represents a long overdue compendium of an under-esteemed

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American master. Several of Orozco’s most important writings are also here reprinted.
A triple chronology, like that of the 1983 Cabanas Institute publication, is also included,
however there are some minor discrepancies in certain event dates.8 I have chosen to
append the 1983 timeline, which is the most recent and comprehensive of the two.

An article written in 1992 by scholar Stephen Polcari presents a definitive
argument linking the work of Jackson Pollack to Orozco’s. It also serves as a model for
the type of stylistic investigation of Orozco’s influence that seems to be lacking in studies
of his artistic achievement and formidable sway on later artists. This is the only article
that focuses exclusively on the direct affect of Orozco’s work on another artist outside
Mexico. In so doing Polcari helps to articulate the intensive interaction between artists of
Mexico and the United States during the thirties and forties, in particular between Orozco
and Thomas Hart Benton, one of Pollack’s teachers.

Of course, Alma Reed’s 1956 biography Orozco and Orozco’s own modest
Autobiography provide a necessary basis for understanding the underlying philosophical
development of his work. Reed also authored the 1932 introduction to the artist, with her
book José Clemente Orozco. Although Alma Reed’s biography has been characterized
for its sentimental bias, her important documentation of Orozco in New York can hardly
be disregarded or avoided.

We know much about the character and veracity of Orozco the man and artist,
that Orozco was keenly adept at harnessing the sublime and mysterious power of art, a
power he consciously wielded, weaving it discreetly into the fabric of his murals. The

universality of his vision is embedded philosophically into these images and bears

k

8For example, the Oxford timeline gives 1911 as the year Orozco’s father died, while Cabaiias
publication lists 1907 as the year.

12

heavily on present conceptions of freedom, truth, justice, and self-consciousness. This
thesis explores the connection between aesthetics and philosophy in the art of an
exceptional man. Orozco’s works reveal a man shaped by his experience, and reveal a
man personally liberated through the very process of expressing it'on the walls of

Mexico.

Chapter 2

THE MURALS OF THE HOSPICIO CABANAS INSTITUTE

The walls and ceilings of the Hospicio Cabanas (Fig. 1) thematically depict the
images of the Conquest. They are primarily concerned with the Spanish imagery of
Cortes, the Conquistadors, and the mission of conversion undertaken by the Catholic
Church, specifically the Franciscan friars. It is furthermore a portrait of Western
Despotism, its force, its genius and most importantly, its destructive and inherently
oppressive nature. Graphic and penetrating, this series illustrates to humanity the
undeniable evidence of the tyranny of the Spanish, the unsavory aspects of indigenous
tradition, and of the nature of mankind. This is, however, done not for the sake of
condemnation, but for parity, to show there is no single source of blame for Mexico’s
troubles. It serves as a foil for expressing the positive potential of mestizos to overcome
the hatred and divisiveness of the past. Orozco's murals plead for reason and rationality
to intervene, with self-consciousness finally halting the cycle of human self-destruction.

Many of the panels are arranged in thematic series and will therefore be most
easily discussed together as such. The themes of pre-Columbian Mexico, the
Conversion, the Conquest, the Revolution, and Resolution are the order of discussion for

this analysis.

13

14

The Conquest and Conversion: A Master/Slave Dialectic

One last great structure remained to be painted as Orozco returned from his
successes in the United States in 1936. The city of Guadalajara asked Orozco, the “son
of Jalisco,” to decorate perhaps its finest chapel, designed by Mexico’s greatest Neo-
Classical architect, Manuel Tolsa. Buildings of Tolsa’s design are found in Mexico City
and other major Mexican cities. Tolsa had been sent to Mexico by the Spanish king
Carlos III to aid in the establishment of an art academy that Opened in 1785, later
renamed San Carlos Fine Arts Academy. His official duty and likewise the purpose of
the academy, was to bring the recently adopted court style of Italian neO-classicism to
New World artists, the style that would dominate the academy in Mexico City until the
first decade of the twentieth century. Work was interrupted by the 1810 Revolution and
finally completed in 1845 under architect Manuel GOmez Ibarra, who designed the
chapel’s dome.

The chapel originally served the Hospicio de Ninos built under the patronage of
Father Juan Cruz Ruiz de Cabar'ias and sits in the center courtyard of the complex. When
Orozco painted there, the hospice had been turned into a state-run orphanage during the
anti-clerical post-Revolution years; its chapel was de-Consecrated and intended as a
reading room and library for the orphaned children. When Helm discusses this mural in
his book on Orozco, he laments that the artist simply forgot the audience he was painting
for, that he had ignored in some way the function the chapel served. Children were
actually banned from seeing the images for decades after the murals’ completion, as they
were deemed too frightening. However, the function of Orozco’s art is perfectly adapted

to the function Of an orphanage; it is, after all, the story of orphans, the orphaned mestizos

15

of Mexico. Salvador Echavarria on the other hand sees things differently than Helm, he
writes,

The Chapel of the Cabar‘ias Hospice is a symphony, the symphony of the History

of Mexico. In the same way that Tolstoy wrote tales for the children, Orozco

abandons here his crude bold realism to talk to the little orphans, in the House of

Mercy. His expression becomes simple and clear, as is the case when adults tell

fairy tales. The history he relates is also meant for adults, and is terrible. And

unfortunately, there is no happy end, as in all fairy tales.9
Octavio Paz has stated that, Orozco’s work, though ostensibly “public art”, is a personal
vision. It did not speak for the popular sentiment but in many ways spoke out against it.
So we may forgive the often “adult” content of his works, and understand why they have
always been plagued with controversy. '0

As one enters the hospice the viewer is met in each end of the transept of Manuel

Tolsa's Neo-Classical structure with representations of the indigenous Aztec religion.
Four scenes setin four arches made by two vaults convey visually that the El Mundo
Indigena, “The Indigenous World” (Fig. 2), is not a world that any modem-day MexiCan
would wish a return to. Ritual dance and human sacrifice, justified by tradition, render
the idealized Indian past impotent. This is not a denigration of this heritage, however.
Orozco is merely exposing a reality that was brutal, and equally as barbaric as the period
of Conquest, yet important and necessary for development of a mestizo identity. The
Mesoamerican world was not liberated by reason. Rather, it was based upon an

incomplete human identity which was built upon a religious system that placed human

existence a step below the gods they themselves had created; they became victims of their

 

“Echavarria, Orozco, Hospicio Cabanas, 12.

loPublic controversy of some form or another surrounded many of Orozco’s major murals, beginning
with those at San Ildefonso. The murals produced in the U. S. were variously attacked because he was
Mexican or because of their perceived negativity. This fact lends to his authentic artistic nature in contrast
to the pleasing and amiable images produced by Rivera, which rarely caused negative reactions in Mexico
and were only seen as controversial in the US. because of the anti-Communist atmosphere of the times.

l6

own ideological demons. This is contrasted starkly by the one-sided images Rivera
created of indigenous virtue in his murals at the Government Palace in Mexico City.

In the first vault we see an image of the mother deity “She of the Serpent Skirt”
(Fig. 3), Coatlique, in whose name countless were killed. The image closely resembles
the statue that once stood atop the T emplo Mayor (The Great Pyramid) of Tenochtitlan in
the modem-day center of Mexico City. When the statue was first found it was glistening
with the blood of recent sacrifices. Unearthed in 1803 by Baron Friedrich Heinrich
Alexander von Humboldt, it had been buried by Franciscan priests during the Conquest to
save it from certain destruction. Coatlique holds the implements of war, a bow and
arrow, and wears around her neck the trophy necklace of hearts taken from the breasts of
still living victims. For the sake of appeasing a god of their own imagination, villages
were plundered, even wars waged--as with so-called Flowery Wars--in the search for
fresh life to be taken at a sacrificial Slaughter.

No less absurd is the fallacy of Christianity, which, in the name of Jesus, justified
the oppression and systematic destruction of an entire culture, robbing its riches,
dismantling its institutions, and murdering its people. The next series of frescoes depicts
in haunting images the facade of the Catholic Church as an instrument of the Conquest.
Orozco reveals the contradiction in a religion that preaches humility, equality of all
people in the sight of God, and self-sacrifice while simultaneously being used to
legitimize the vitiation of the indigenous identity.

Three scenes of evangelization depict the spiritual conquest of the Indios. The
two smaller images mirror one another in composition and in message. In each is seen a

standing (or kneeling), hooded monk, hands clasped, eyes and face turned to the floor in

l7

prayer and sympathy. Lying on the floor next to the priest is a nude, dark, faceless
figure; one still and flat, the other seems to writhe and struggle as if having a tortured
nightmare. His face is agonized and distorted in mental anguish, having been stripped of
his cultural identity. The irony is that as these men of God pray fOr the pagan savages,
they seem completely unaware that they themselves, as instruments of the Conquest,
torment and shred the very souls they intend to save.
On the ceiling of the nave is painted the third picture of the conversion campaign.

Here again stands the monk (Fig. 4), a Franciscan, towering above a dark, nude, kneeling
figure who holds his hands to his face which is completely hidden from view, the gesture
of a helpless, hopeless submission. In the right hand of the priest is a large cross that
seems to be made of four sword blades. This is contrasted with the left hand blessing the
Indian, suggesting the conVersion was not one in which the people's hearts were simply
won over by the gentleness and persuasion of the Christian doctrine. They took the only
choice left to them under threat of alienation, violence and brutality to find their sole
spiritual haven against the destructive nature of the newly imposed tyrannical order
within the confineS'of the Catholic Church. Positioned horizontally above the
Franciscan, a mechanized, armored angel hovers while holding in her hands a cloth with

“a b c (1” written on it, symbolic of the Catholic church’s dual role as educator and
vanquisher of the spirit. As we will see with Cortés, it is the machine that is in control,
the mechanical intellect, the machine of war, commerce, and conquest. It is technology
and industry that have governed the swift pace towards modern life, not the words of
Christ. Man is but an unaware collaborator, ideologically intoxicated by the process of

industrial progression. Just as Coatlique ostensibly dictates the actions of the Aztecs, a

18

cult of industry drives Western civilization, like a team of draft horses, down a bloody
unknown trail, a civilization so technologically obsessed even their angels are armored.
It is not the promise of missionary salvation, but the machinery of imperialism that is
ultimately responsible for justification of the conquest.

The culmination of this series is “The Confusion of Religions” (Fig. 5) which
faces Coatlique, in the opposite end of the transept. Orozco has imagined a stele, an
amalgamation, made of fused icons from Indigenous and Catholic faith. At the center Of
the composition is a human torso from which extend arms and legs, into the corners of
the vault, forming an ‘X’. He seems to seethe in a churning cauldron of religious
ambiguity. The varied religious imagery appear to be crudely interlaced by a series with
wire mesh revealing a monstrosity, a freakish Frankenstein monster of artificially
connected limbs and parts sewn together in an attempt to hide its hideous origin. It
describes the emotional and psychic struggle to rewire and rebuild the connections
between the mind and body, to link sensation with the mind in a desperate mental effort
to re-affirm the self in an alien world. Lying crushed under the weight of the massive
stele one can discern the leg of an Indian which seems to have been stripped of its skin
exposing raw bone, muscle and tendon. This same treatment was given to the images of
“The Indigenous World.” I believe that Orozco may be referring these images to the
ritual flaying of skin in Mesoamerica, which was then worn by a priest and left to rot
away from the body in a symbolic gesture of rebirth. The fleshless bodies represent the
assimilation of the indigenous world, its outer world consumed by the imposition of
Spanish culture. Thus, the body in the center is the mestizo emerging anew from the heat

of forced transition. That world is impossible to return to; it cannot again exist because

19

what it was has been engulfed, merged into a now monolithic synthesis awaiting
realization.

Directly opposite Le Evangelizacion de America stands the emblem of the
physical conquest of Mexico, Hernan Cortés (Fig. 6). In La Conq'uista de America,
Cortes is a monumental cyborg, part man, part machine. He looms over a scene of
bloody carnage in which we see hacked Off body parts strewn about as if freshly-mowed
grass. His features are strong and proud, his gaze determined, resolved and cold. He
seems very aware of his role in history as the leader of an invasion of grave implication,
yet he seems completely ignorant of the dark influential presence above. Another false
angel, as seen in the image of the Franciscan, wraps an arm around his neck and whispers
in his ear, dictating his actions wholly by filling his ego with ideas of immortality.
Orozco painted his torso as an empty dark hole, with no heart, no mercy, no sympathy, a
mere instrument of despotism, blinded by that ideology of imperialism and seemingly
completely ignorant of his Christian religious philosophy.

La Belicosidad (Fig. 7), known as “Conquistadors Fighting Amongst
Themselves,” also on the vaulted nave, depicts the soldiers commanded by Cortés as a
mass of swords, helmets and out-stretched arms moving, as one destructive juggernaut
bent on the annihilation of everything that lies in its path; a murderous bulk of armament
against which the Aztecs had no hope. These scenes serve to show the viewer the
overwhelming military superiority of the Spanish military over the severely outrnatched
Aztecs and the haphazard and indiscriminate deployment of violence they perpetrated.
Seeing the balance of physical might as unquestioningly resting on the side of the

Conquistadors, Orozco remarks upon savagery heightened to a demonic level by the

20

gross disparity. This is the same idea one observes directly in the next panel called Los
Caballos en la Conquista.

The Spanish Conquest spread swiftly across Mesoamerica, like the Black Death
of Europe, but carried on the backs of horses rather than rats. Orozco regarded the horse
as key to the successful Spanish invasion. The next images are, I believe, clearly taken
from medieval plague paintings of Europe. The artist and teacher at the San Carlos
Academy, Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo), had been a great admirer of Italian fresco and
extolled its virtue as a medium to his students at the Academy before the outbreak of the
Revolution. Although I have found no direct evidence that Orozco studied these
particular murals, we know that he sought to learn everything he could about the art of
fresco, including studies of European fresco masters. Certainly Orozco could have seen
reproductions of either Baffelmacco’s frescoes in the Camposanto at Pisa or those of the
Palazzo Sclafani at Palermo while studying at San Carlos or witnessed them first hand
while visiting Italy. Orozco saw the horse as the defining factor in Spain’s easily won
victory over the Aztecs and other peoples of Mesoamerica and chose the defining symbol
of European domination to relate its impact and intensity. Helm believed:

Of all the elements of European culture introduced by the Spaniards to Mexico,

horses had seemed to Orozco the most picturesque and steel the most frightful,

and as an imaginative student of Mexican history, he was able to make of
horseflesh and metal some of the most striking particulars of his mural

conceptions. 1 1

Los Caballos (Fig. 8) is translated as “The Horses.” A Conquistador takes up the

central focus of this painting, riding a two-headed horse. He holds a sword that points to

the pile of human parts below him. Flanking the central figure on the right is another

21

horse and rider striding across dead, dismembered bodies. The viewer senses the sweep
of the rider's sword flailing effortlessly through the flesh of the relatively unarmed and
naked victims, their bodies falling heavily to the blood saturated earth. The other end of
this vault, left of the central horseman, presents a mechanized soldier who has pounced
upon a naked figure, crushing the pelvis with bent knee and strangling the Indians neck
with his mechanical hands. The helpless martyr, dying in heroic defense of his people
and his culture, can only stretch his arms toward the sky in a futile defensive gesture.
Los Caballos is meant to underscore the clear advantage of the Spanish might. In
doing so, Orozco reveals an elevated, sadistic brutality on the part of the Conquistadors,
who must have been keenly aware of their superiority. The double-headed horse may
also allude to the dual nature of the word caballo meaning a “stupid or brutal person” in
American Spanish. Similar assertions relating to language-in-image have been made
about two panels of the later murals he painted at Jiquilpan (1940). Helm parenthetically
refers to this in his book Man of Fire. He asserts that in “calling those twin panels La
Masa, Orozco has been suspected of double-entendre, for masa means dough as well as
crowd, and the masses of Mexicans, drawn with gaping mouths instead of heads on their
shoulders, are being offered stones for food in place of'the bread they require.”12
Although I do not agree with the interpretation, I do believe Orozco employed a double-
entendre, but referring to both “dough” and the “masses” in the sense that the masses are
easily manipulated and moldable. It seems more likely that having mouths instead of
heads refers to the fact that no one was listening, nor was anyone using their brain, but

everyone had something to say.

 

llMacKinley Helm, Man of Fire, J. C. Orozco (Harcourt, Brace and Company. New York, NY, 1953),
25.

22

In one last portrait of the Conquest, one of the strongest images at the Cabaiias
Institute, Orozco once again employs the dramatic effect of pitting machines against
humans in the panel of La Espana de Carlos V, also known as the “Mechanized Horse”
(Fig. 9). Carlos Merida has described this image as a “war-tank.” Likewise, Desmond
Rochfort asserts that the image “creates a visual metaphor for the conquistadorial horse
as a modern battle tank. Upon its grotesquely mechanical back and body appears, in a
banner, the image of the heraldic lion and tower of Castile. Its position is precisely that
of a battle tank turret.”l3 The association made between this image and the coming of the
“Age of Machines” is an appropriate one, however I do not believe it represents a tank.
A tank by definition does not ride on rails. Racing across the scene, resembling more a
locomotive than a horse, a Conquistador is fastened to his steed fornring a single
mechanical unit-running on two I-beam rails. The “iron-horse” is fitted with gears, hoses
and chains; chains that in fact seem to be spilling out of its underbelly leaving a trail of
bondage in its wake. Its legs function not as propulsion but instead as mechanical
pincers, like wickedly hooked talons. The rider holds a huge flag with a Spanish crest in
his left hand, and extends a sword from his right which acts as a plow blade ready to rip a
furrow through the field of Aztecs before him.

I would like to offer an alternative interpretation to those of Merida and Rochfort
that implies a deeper meaning, relating to both the past and future. This image closely
resembles a personification of the plague in the fresco panels of the Sclafani Palace in
Palermo and the “Triumph of Death” of the Camposanto in Pisa, by Francesco Traini

(Figs. 10, 11), as well as Pieter Brueghal’s “Triumph of Death” (Fig. 12). It appears as if

 

’2Ibid., 83.
”Rochfort, “A Terrible Beauty,” 86.

23

Orozco refitted an old motif, brought it up-to-date. Orozco’s two caballos panels can be
seen as symbolically representing both the biological plague brought by the Spanish, but
also the ideological diseases of pigmentocracy and blind technological advance, a
“triumph of modern death.”14 In these images he is able to sum up the overall alliance of
forces working against the indigenous population. On another level, these images as a
whole give an impression of how the Aztecs perceived the armored Spanish and their
horses as they stormed Tenochtitlan like alien monsters, while, with them, he also puts
into perspective for the modem—day viewer what a true massacre the Conquest was.

The Conquest series penetrates deeply into the core of Mexican history. These
panels are filled with multiple layers of interpretation, as is typical of Orozco’s work.
Western culture, the machine worshipping technophiles, believing themselves largely
emancipated from the dictates of the natural world through their role as “masters,” has
evolved an ego of extreme proportions. It has so completely occluded itself from the
world in which it lives that it no longer has the capacity to feel itself part of the whole.
Perceiving itself as elevated above the ostensibly uncivilized and backward peoples they
conquer, it justifies the ruthless subjugation and exploitation of the earth and all other
cultures as divine fiat, for God has given them these powers as a gift for their devotion
and their righteous mission. This idea is exemplified in the panel of “Philip II” (Fig. 13)
embracing a huge wooden cross in one hand and clutching a Bible in the other; the crown
is separated from Philip’s head by the horizontal. beam of the cross as if to indemnify his
role in Mexico’s suffering. He is simply following the divine will of God. These images

portray an invasion of armored machines, an invasion of technological superiority guided

 

1"The Spanish Obsession with racial types, as seen in the numerous paintings of the “castes,” established
a hierarchy of racial superiority, at the top of which were full-blooded Spanish. This has been a source of

24

by a corrupted religious doctrine at the service of personal greed and self-satisfaction.
Many have suggested that these images represent a critique of technology, but within the
framework of this paper it is not so simple. It is technology at the service of ideology
that is being critiqued; it is the way in which it is employed, and to what end. In her
biography on Orozco, Alma Reed relates the artist’s response to critics who charged
Orozco with attacking the “machine.” He responded, she said, that his representation was
directed not “against the dynamo, but against man’s abject worship of it.”15 Again, this
runs in opposition to the view and art of Rivera, who glorified the machine-best
exemplified by his mural series at the Detroit Institute of Art--as the catalyst for the

material well-being necessary to establish the coming Communist “utopia.”

Ideology in the Wake of Revolution

The topic addressed in the next set of frescoes revolves around the myriad of
potentialities, both good and bad, stemming from colonialism, the Conquest, and human
conflict in general. These paintings reveal what lies in the wake of tyranny as a critique
of the imperialistic nature of the West. They all share the theme Of human conflict
retarding the progress of mankind by perpetuating oppression and poignantly prophesizes
the Gulags of Stalin, the concentration camps of Hitler, and the Cold War iron curtain.

“Despotism,” “The Militarized Masses,” (Fig. 14) and “The Dictators” (Fig. 15)
paint a portrait of Western despotism. The first panel depicts a scene of rigid order. Rank
and file stretch infinitely into the background under a huge imposing uniformed figure

holding a whip, whose head has been purposely severed by the top of the framing arch.

The rows of homogenous automatons march as if one solid curtain welded together--

 

entrenched prejudice ever since.

25

assembled as so many pieces of machinery, controlled by a “headless” authority. The
next scene is nearly the same image, but here Orozco paints the military and ideology
necessary to maintain oppressive control over the people. The same rows of mechanized
human beings as we saw above, march this time with flags and banners, implements of
ideological control and divisive isolation. Barely recognizable as people, their geometric
rendering provides stimulating emotional reaction as the awareness of what they are
slowly rises in the viewer.

Flags billowing out like sails on a boat, echoing the previous panel, are held by a
horizontal band of marching soldiers in the Los Dictadores panel. Above them, as if
situated on a viewing stand, is a dictator in hieratic scale, posed sternly, head turned up
slightly. He is surrounded by a group of generals and military types who seemingly await
patiently for their chance at the “crown.” This panel has also been called “The Labor
Parade,” in which case we are seeing rows of marching strikers as the labor bosses rally
them into partisan bickering. I am inclined towards the first title, however, as with most
of Orozco’s images, they have multiple levels of meaning. Although it may depict
organized striking workers marching in the streets of Mexico City, the type Rivera could
often be seen leading, they also conjure images of Soviet and Nazi military parades.

A common thread runs through all three panels. From scene to scene, along the
bottom of each mural, extends a register made up of several strands of barbed wire which
serve to prevent any outside or foreign influence from disrupting the state of
totalitarianism within, while confining the victims to a life of solitude and subjection.
Ideology equals oppression. Oppression of the masses inevitably turns to eventual revolt.

The modern world is essentially based upon revolution, not only in the sense of physical

 

lsAlrna Reed, Orozco, 100.

26

uprising, but of a transcendent step of human consciousness that establishes freedom as
the supreme goal of our existence.

Orozco saw in the Mexican revolution as much misery, destruction, stupidity, and
brutality as ever had come before. Various factions, supposedly striving for a common
goal, became caught up in the fervor of war, neglecting their purpose and squandering
their united powers for self-interest, losing all sight of their dream. In the middle of it all,
the innocent still suffered.

The last set of panels to be treated, before analyzing the theme of resolution in the
dome, is another triptych situated opposite the portrait of despotism on the ground floor
in the right side of the nave. The central panel represents human suffering, La
Humanidad Doliente in Spanish. The viewer sees what appears to be the interior of a
church housing countless victims of the Mexican past. Huddled together, seated on the
floor, resigned to their fate, a lost people awaits a true leader to usher them into a
liberated human existence. The flanking companion pieces point out elements that
perpetuate the exploitation of the distressed populace.

On the left is La Caridad, or “Charity.” Orozco paints a traditional portrait of the
benefactor responsible for the construction of the hospice itself, Father Juan Cruz Ruiz de
Cabar‘ias. He is, however, also symbolic of the Catholic Church and the negative impact
of its “charity,” which only temporarily alleviates suffering, houses it, and in the long run
actually sustains an atmosphere in utter opposition to its intent. Charity can often work
against those it purports to help by contributing to an image of inferiorin and
hopelessness sending a message to mestizos that they cannot succeed on their own, that

they are dependent on the generosity of a Spanish religious institution.

27

The other factor counterproductive to the fulfillment of the revolution is the
disunity of the leaders. In Los Demagogos (Fig. 16), Orozco places a dozen or so figures
standing on a square monument one can assume is at the center of a zocalo, the plazas
found in the heart of every Mexican city. Each figure preaches to. his followers the merits
of his ideas, ignoring completely what is being espoused by those around him, refusing to
relinquish the seat of his position of power, and inciting vengeance for historic injustice.
Those who listen are led to their deaths fighting their brothers for the sake of one man's
arrogance. Orozco wrote this in his autobiography:

In the political field another war without quarter, another struggle for power and

wealth. Subdivisions ad infinitum of the factions, unrestrained desire for

vengeance, underground intrigues between the friends of today, the enemies of
tomorrow, mutually eager to exterminate one another when the opportunity
arises.16

Revenge, war, and hatred preclude the transcendence of the Cosmic Race. The
ideal is unattainable and out of reach to those mired in past iniquity. Nothing is to be
gained by needless bloodshed; it only exacerbates the misery of all. Orozco depicts this
as universal truth on the pendentives supporting the dome. On each one is a dark-souled,
solitary man clinging to a rocky slope. Dubbed El Esfuerzo Humano (Figs. 17, 18), the
“Human Spirit,” this reflects on the nature of man. The four figures strive to climb the
ledge hoping to reach the ideal, the realization of the absolute, true human freedom, but
they carry with them the burdensome weapons of war, the weight of the past, that keep
them immobile. Two of the men, one of whom looks Spanish and the other indigenous,

stare up as if squinting to bring into focus the object of their quest. The other two men

ascend facing the wall apparently unaware of exactly where they are going. They are all

 

"’Ibid., 141.

 

altar r a
§

‘p
I

 

-n- .

28

at a point of impasse, unable to shed the toxic skin preventing their progress into the
spiritual heights of the dome representing ideal man.

Just above the revolutionaries are the true sources of transfiguration. Rebirth into
freedom is contingent upon truth and knowledge, and requires culture, inspiration, and
expression, in short, human labor and endeavor. These ensure the potential to rise above,
to transcend and to learn. But, they can also conceal truth, trapping the unsuspecting in a
circle of meaninglessness and complexity, unable to reconcile and distinguish their unity.
This echoes Bergson’s sentiment, addressed below, when describing how atrophy and
conflict occur within and amongst various philosophical schools. In discussing Orozco’s
“The Carnival of Ideologies” (1936 Government Palace, Guadalajara), Octavio Paz has
this to say,

The. ..fresco shows us the political and spiritual reality of the modern world,

divided into ferocious sects, each the possessor of a book in which the adept finds

an answer to all the enigmas of history. In [the mural] there is a band of
grotesque beings, cruel clowns, clever and stubborn madmen, sadistic men of
learning each armed with a sign the crucifix, the hammer and sickle, the swastika,
the fasces[sic], the keys of this world or those of the world to come. It is not
difficult to recognize in these rag dolls the faces of many of the doctrinaries and
masters of our century, all of them possessed by theological hatred. Each sect
believes itself the possessor of the total truth and 1s ready to impose it on the other
sects by force and extermination.

This is very similar to what Neil Postman calls an “information glut.” When an
individual intellect is bombarded by so much information for inforrnation’s sake, it bogs
him down in a flood of rushing facts and trivia, distracting him from the minute portion
which is truly valuable and necessary to sustain personal growth. It hides from him the
truth of his reality much like the Hindu concept of mayo. Thus, though they are tools for

transcendence, they are also traps of ideology, and it is ideology, wrote Paz,

 

l7Octavio Paz, Essays on Mexican Art (New York: Hardcourt Brace and J ovanovich, 1993), 192-193.

29

which dehumanizes us because it makes us believe that its shadows are realities

and that realties, including the reality of our own being, are nothing but shadows.

It is a series of mirrors that hides reality from us, that steals our faces and our free

will from us so as to turn us into reflections.18
The Will to Improve

Towering above, in the dome of the Hospicio Cabanas, a 500 year long epic has
finally driven the consciousness of Mexico to a state in which their goal is clearly
evident, the goal to achieve an authentic mestizo identity, the synthesis of the Spanish and
Indigenous. J osé Clemente Orozco bestows upon the viewer a priceless treasure, a piece
of himself, a moving expression of Mexico's history, and an eternal faith in the spirit of
mankind.

The focus of the building sweeps the viewer Skyward, like a window to the divine,
to a modern form of one of the oldest human ritual symbols, the mandala. Earth, Air,
Water and Fire (Fig. 19) spin round the dome in an endless cycle of life, death and
rebirth. Elemental man occupies the four-comers of the earth, and is a personification of
the four races, the resolution of Nature and Man, the nature in and of man. As is typical
with Orozco's painting, there exists many levels of interpretation, which is his true
genius. On one level the Man of F ire symbolizes Orozco’s own synthesis, of a man
borne of two cultures. But it is also the promise of an end to the torment of any Mexican
in whose soul the battle still rages. And its meaning can be extended from the particular
individual to the more universal realm of peoples, of the Mexican Volkgeist, the cultural
backdrop. Edward Wilson, in his book Consilience (1997), illustrates the point I wish to

make,

 

'slbid., 192.

30

Pascal had compared the human race to a man who never dies, always gaining
knowledge, while Leibniz spoke of the Present big with the Future. Turgot
[wrote] that ‘all epochs are fastened together by a sequence of causes and effects,
linking the condition of the world to all the conditions which have gone before it.’
In consequence, ‘the human race, observed from its first beginning, seems in the
eyes of the philosopher to be one vast whole, which, like each individual in it, has
its own infancy and its own conditions of growth.’ 19
Earth, Water and Air form an almost complete circle to surround the Man of Fire.
The first two can be interpreted as allegories of the Indians and Spanish respectively.
The features of the Man of Earth are clearly indigenous. As Pre-Columbian religion was
based on an intimate knowledge of the earth and the cyclic nature of the universe, cultural
traditions evolved in response to the relationship of Native American man to the natural
environment. This relation was so strong that their culture was dominated by its deep
connection with the earth. Though the Man of Air seems to be given little attention and
easily goes unnoticed, it serves as a fundamental bridge linking Water and Earth, for it is
the winds of the Atlantic that brought them together. He reaches out to touch the
shoulder of the Man of Earth in a gesture of solidarity, but is squelched by the right arm
Of the Man of Water who stands in stark dialectical contrast with the Man of Earth, and
has a decidedly classic Spanish physiognomy. His culture has been given domain over
the earth by decree of their Christian God and their mastery of the seas. This preordained
meeting set in motion a cleansing confrontation which, tempered in the fires of violent
conflict, forges a new race, an alloy of infinitely stronger constitution, the mestizo.
Symbolically the two races extend a hand as an almost disingenuous, yet
imminent, gesture of embracing one another, of assirrrilating the past into the present, of

a transforming synthesis, that the burden borne for so long might be lifted. This idea

is further illustrated in Orozco’s philosophy of art:

 

19Edmond O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998), 20.

31

The art of the New World cannot take root in the old traditions of the Old World,

nor in aboriginal traditions represented by the remains of our ancient Indian

peoples. Although the art of all races and of all times has a common value--
human, universal--each newcycle must work for itself, must create, must yield its
own production, its individual share to the common good ... If new races have
appeared upon the lands of the New World, such races have the unavoidable duty
to produce a new art in a new spiritual and physical medium. Any other road is
plain cowardice.20

The labor of this exceptional visionary artist penetrates the heart and soul
revealing to us a glimpse of the divine in man. It begs our attention and yearns to speak a
mystical truth to those willing to listen. Within Orozco was a united heritage, a synthesis
of races. His ability to grasp this state of being and extend it to his people so that they
too might assume their proper identity as strong, proud Mexicans remains the most
convincing evidence of his genius.

The sensual forms Of fresco painting express like no other medium the power of
artistic endeavor to describe the essence of a people. Given the walls of one structure
Orozco was able to raise the level of Mexican consciousness, to awaken the awareness of
their identity. Like the art of the Greeks, highly revered by both Hegel and Orozco,
Mexico now had an aesthetic that valorized human existence. Greek society realized a
human centered world and reached a self-consciousness in which the human mind and
human form were the highest states of being. Greek art was a celebration of human
excellence; their art glorified man as the highest earthly achievement. Likewise, modern
Mexican art, especially the works of Orozco, focuses directly on the human condition and

its ideal state. Orozco offers us a look inside Mexico to gain further understanding of the

universal self and the intricate web that links everything inextricably together.

 

20Reed, Orozco, 87.

32

This remarkable fresco series offers us an amplified view of Mexico’s past or at
least a vivid interpretation of this past. As is often the case in historical teaching, the
lessons learned from past experience are best absorbed when incorporated into the psyche
of the student. By this, I mean to say, when the individual is able to connect in some way
the experiences of others or other nations to his or her own experience and incorporate
them solidly into helping direct action in their own life; when history and art become
powerful tools to unite and guide people across the world, helping them to empathize
with the histories of other peoples. To fully understand and appreciate the universality of
the dialectic, one must compare and contrast these experiences with those of ones own
culture, digging deeply into them both in order to draw out their existential lessons.
Fernandez believed Orozco,

thought about and expressed the idea of the Conquest in terms of all mankind, not

in terms of likes and dislikes, of equally disaccredited ideas of Spain or of the

Indian; he saw from the meeting of diverse cultures as a form of painful birth,
there emerged a new world.21

Orozco’s fresco series clearly depicts the particular forces that have shaped the
modern Mexican, but it is in the final analysis a portrait of those historical forces that
shape all of humanity and individual identity. The idea encoded in this fresco is itself
cyclic; it flows from the individual (the artist himselD--the particular-~and expands to the
universal, the Mexican collective identity, to coalesce into a vision of the dependent
relationship between individuals and the wider universal sphere; it reveals that the true
source of transcendence dwells in each of us. Indeed, as one looks into the swirling dome

of the Cabafias Institute, an individual stands in the fire of life. Surrounding him are the

 

2|Fernandez, “Orozco, Genius of America,” 143.

33

widening spheres of his reality which are constantly bombarding his sensual perception
(Fig. 20). He is a product of his culture, a product of man’s creativity and genius. The
radiating concentric circles, pulsing a continuous flow of the life’s blood, reinforce this
notion, while reminding him that he is still ascending, he rises abOve if he chooses, or, he
will be dragged along behind; active or passive. Echavarria believed that in “fact, there is
no end. It opens widely into the future. And its conclusion is not a perfect chord: it
reflects the double mystery of Universe and Man, of the Man of Fire, the living spiritual

torch, in its infinite ascension."22

 

22Echavarria, Orozco, Hospicio Cabanas, 12.

Chapter 3

THE SEEDS OF GENIUS

That an artist acts in response to a particular sphere of historical experience
reveals a paradoxical dilemma in the understanding of humanity and its evolution.
Humans are both formed by and formers of their world (to widely varying degrees), a
concept far too few have clearly sought to comprehend. A self-conscious awareness of
this relationship between the individual and society, between the particular and the
universal, is the crux of most idealist philosophies. Works of art created during times of
great conflict, strife, and violence often generate the most powerful expressions, not only
of the relationship itself, but also of an intimate understanding of that relationship on the
part of the artist. It is misery, suffering, and chaos that most acutely focus an artist’s
vision. This most sobering of environments presents artists with the opportunity to
enhance their role as re-formers, not simply as reformers, of their environment. In this
blinding clarity an artist has the potential to transform apparent chaos into order, as noted
by T. E. Hulme,

Great painters are men in whom has originated a certain vision of things which

has become or will become the vision of everybody. Once the painter has seen it,

it becomes easy for all of us to see it. A mould has been made. But the creative
activity came in the effort which was necessary to disentangle this particular type

of vision from the general haze, the effort, that is, which is necessary to break
moulds and to make new ones.23

 

73T. E. Hulme in Christopher Perricone, “Art and the Metamorphosis of Art into History” British
Journal of Aesthetics 31; 4 (October, 1991): 313.

34

35

Orozco likewise believed, that art “is the creating by man of order in the universe.
When an art does not properly create order; when it degenerates to a mere formula or a
mere system: then it is decadent. When this comes about a new mode of synthesis is

evolved as a medicine for what has come before.”24

This theme is ever—present in the
later art of Orozco, the theme of the revolutionary (or artist) as creator and destroyer,
proactively contributing to the destruction of the old ideological order while helping to
shape the new. This applies equally to art as it would to political, philosophic, or
scientific ideology. When any of these social facets fails to properly create order, the
formulas and systems dry up into puddles of stagnation, and in a pool of putrid water
decadence is inevitable. Thus, the world is in constant need of revolutionary figures that
re-order the universe and synthesize that which has come before into an antidote for the
decadence of the present.

One of the major precepts to come from Orozco’s work is that of continuous
reinvention, thus is derived his employment of the revolutionary theme. He believes
there is a duty on the part of humanity to revolutionize itself as a way of ensuring growth,
as a means towards greater understanding of ourselves. This is a demand set down in
Orozco’s art, that reinterpretation is mandatory, that all which has come before will be
synthesized as a medicine. Thus, here today, we must continue to look at our cultural
past and reexamine what it means to us now. This is especially important in times of
tremendous change, so that the new emerging order will not continue its old habits under

“new management.”

Although an exhaustive biography of J osé Clemente Orozco is not the goal of this

 

"David w Scott, “Orozco’s Prometheus" College Art Journal 17, no. 1 (Fall, 1957): 15.

36

paper, it is impossible to separate Orozco the man from Orozco the artist, as Justino
Fernandez asserts, “in Orozco are united the thinker and the artist.”25 Highlighting some
of the seminal experiences in his life is essential to frame the analysis of his most
successful mural series at the Cabafias Institute. (See Appendix C for a detailed

chronology of Orozco’s life.)

Childhood and Revolution

Orozco was born in 1883 near Guadalajara in the state of J alisco to prosperous
middle-class parents. His father was involved in several entrepreneurial businesses
including printing and book-binding, as well as the manufacture of soaps, inks and dyes.
Rosa Flores, Orozco’s mother, came from a wealthy family in Guadalajara. She was a
strong, independent-minded Catholic whom Orozco adored. His family moved in 1885
to the city of Guadalajara, which requested some fifty years later that he, the son of
J alisco, return to decorate their public buildings. From the time of his birth until his '
twenty-eighth year, he, and all Mexicans, lived under the rule of one man, Portfirio Diaz.
This period contrasts starkly with the Mexico he knew in his thirties. The relatively
calm, albeit tyrannical, Portfiriato--the so-named era of the Diaz regime--was shattered
in 1910 with the onset of the Revolution.

Several major events in Orozco’s life provide us with an understanding of how he
came to choose his life’s work. In 1890, the Orozco family moved to Mexico City due to
financial difficulties. During the years that followed, Orozco quickly became entranced
by the work of printrnaker J osé Guadalupe Posada, who worked in the famous Arroyo

printshop near his school. The impact of this experience slowly emerged to

 

25Fernandez, “Orozco, Genius of America,” 143.

37

spark his passionate faith in the magic of art, which led him to a career in the graphic arts,
involved him deeply in the revolution, and eventually turned him into the most significant
muralist of the twentieth century. Polcari states that from “Posada, Orozco partially drew
his view of the two-sided nature of humanity and its corruption and pathos, regardless of
class.”26 Beyond this very direct impact of Posada on Orozco’s work is the atmosphere
of the capital city itself.

Like all major cities Mexico City exemplifies the best and worst of humanity.
The Orozco household was within sight of the San Carlos Fine Arts Academy. Orozco
was surrounded by the splendor of Mexican culture, by the grandeur of colonial
architecture, the wealth of museums and theaters, and its magnificent music. Here, too,
were houses of prostitution, pulque bars, and of course, regular episodes of violence.
Orozco’s mother was highly creative and active in painting and especially music. She
had recognized early on that José Clemente was a precocious child, particularly in his
artistic ability. So convinced was she of her son’s talent, that when J osé insiSted on art
lessons she went straight to the academy and persuaded the director to enroll him
unofficially when he began primary school at the Escuela de Maestros. In the Alma
Reed biography of Orozco, his sister, Rosa, attests to José’s diligent studies and the
impression he made on the teachers and students of San Carlos.

Two more events in Orozco’s life cemented his choice to become an artist. The
first occurred in 1900, while simultaneously attending the National Preparatory School,
studying architecture, and the Agricultural School of San Jacinto. A lab experiment

caused an explosion in which he lost his left hand and permanently damaged both his

 

2“Stephen Polcari, “Orozco and Pollock: Epic Transfigurations,” American Art
6, no. 3 (Summer, 1992): 41. Beyond

It”

QM

38

hearing and sight. This physical disfigurement was once used by a critic of Orozco’s first
exhibit to cast him as physically and morally degenerate. The psychological impact of -
his handicaps undoubtedly increased the depth of empathy with humanity he was able to
achieve. Helm notes how prevalent the iconographical imagery Of hands is in Orozco’s
work, from the early revolutionary scenes of dismemberment, the hands at San Ildefonso
and the Omniscience mural, to the hands of Prometheus, Hidal go, and Cortés, “his

baroque emphasis of the hand is no less moving than Greco’s.”27

The most exemplary
image is “The Wounded” (Fig. 21), a drawing done between 1913 and 1917, which was
once owned by Orozco patron and devotee, Alma Reed. In her 1956 biography Orozco,
she relates her feelings about its meaning,
Here a railroad station, such as the Autobiography describes, has been hastily
converted into a field hospital. Its floor is strewn with the dead, the dying, and
the mutilated. Sitting upright in the foreground is a quadruple amputee, a nude
youth with his stumps of arms and legs swathed in bandages. His eyes, too, are
bandaged, but their accusing gaze seems to burn through the cloth to direct a
curse upon an insane world that can find no better use for his virile young
manhood than to hack it to pieces even before he is given a chance to live, to
mate, to contribute his unique link in the evolutionary chain that leads from
savage hate to fraternal love.28
Surprisingly, it appears that Orozco was never bitter abOut this experience. It was
common during the revolution for the warring armies to forcefully draft civilians as
needed. Able men of all ages would be rounded up in towns and villages and taken
against their will. Orozco, on more than one occasion, had been excused because of his
missing hand and came to see it rather as an asset. His handicap was however an

accident, an event which should naturally befall but a few. The revolution made it

commonplace.

 

2‘IHelm, Man of F ire, 10.
28Reed, Orozco, 40.

at.-

.11..

39

By 1904, having committed himself to the idea of becoming an artist, Orozco
abandons his architectural studies at the National Preparatory School. His father’s death
in 1907 brought his modest financial support to an end and forced Orozco to begin
working as an illustrator in order to continue his education. In that same year he took a
job as a draftsman with the Mexico City newspaper El Imparcial. In these events, the
accident and his father’s death, Orozco was released from a life course he did not want to
follow. Studying agriculture had been the wish of his father, while architecture had been
but a compromise between that and his own desire to become a painter. Because he had
lost patriarchal pressure and support, he was thus finally able to enter the San Carlos
Academy full-time in 1908 to study painting. This was the year when he first met Diego
Rivera. In 1907 Gerardo Murillo, also know as Dr. Atl, came back from Europe to teach
at San Carlos. He was the first to plant the seed of the muralist movement that emerged a
decade later. He had a strong impact on Orozco’s art and “encouraged the young
students to strive for expressive exaggeration.”29 Atl had begun experimentation with
mural media by 1910, and the group of students who followed him never lost the
inspiration to reinvent Mexican art on the walls of their country’s architecture. However,
the Revolution halted for a time any further development.

The ideal in contrast to the real has been adapted endlessly by artists, and in this
sense Orozco’s work is an extension of the Western tradition, of the tension between the
sacred and the profane. In those times of immense struggle, perhaps it is the disparity
between the ideal and the real that invests their art with such timeless potency. In

Mexico, Orozco witnessed some of the most deplorable acts of humanity, a people

 

29Scott, “Orozco’s Prometheus,” 9.

40

frenzied by ideological rhetoric, espoused by men who had become consumed by their
own ideological hatred for those who were not of precisely the same persuasion. After
five hundred years of seepage the thick walls erected to contain the rage of the mestizo
became saturated until these weakened levies suddenly burst unleashing in a flood of
bloodshed and brutality. In the decade from 1910 to 1920 some two million people were
killed in Mexico as a direct result of the Revolution. Although Orozco did not personally
take part in the physical revolution, he did participate in the propaganda machine built by
Dr. Atl for the pro-Carranza movement. As the Revolution broke, factions groups were
forced to retreat to safety. Orozco and several other artists followed Atl to the capital city
of Veracruz, Orizaba, and set up a printshop for the newspaper La Vanguardia.

During his tenure with La Vanguardia in Orizaba, some of the fiercest fighting of
the revolution took place confronting him and everyone with a daily barrage of violence
issuing from a people stricken mad by the emotional hemorrhage of a war without
meaning. Orozco’s friend and confidante Jean Charlot, the French ex-patriot and artist,
wrote in a 1949 article, that by “1914 Huerta was in flight; Carranza, Villa and Zapata
were engaged in a royal melee around the vacant presidential chair. Channeled into
politics by his friend and exalted mentor, Dr. Atl, Orozco sided with Carranza, following
him into hasty retreat when enemy hordes overran the capital.”30 This period of civil war
was the most important experience in Orozco’s life and for his work. Its impact on this
man in his thirties was absolute. The seeds had been planted from which grew an epic
expression of one man’s life philosophy rooted in the historic struggle of a newly

emerging people. “Even at this stage Orozco combined opposites both in irony and as a

 

30Jean Charlot, “Orozco’s stylistic evolution.” College Art Journal IX;2 (Winter, 1949-1950): 149.

41

form of dialectic. An appreciation of this methodology is crucial to an understanding of
his mature murals.”3 1 It is indeed crucial, and the point of this paper is to further that
understanding. The murals of Guadalajara represent a coalescence of insight and
expertise. His keen ability to absorb the world around him as an individual spectator, not
so much as participant--observing, reflecting and recording-within the context of the
Mexican Revolution, provided Orozco with the ideas which later filled his murals.
It seems that it was the process of turning to Revolutionary themes that Orozco
found the inspiration that enabled him to fuse the particular and the general in his
murals In form and subject, Orozco now began with what he felt personally and
intimately: this he simplified until he achieved a statement that combined the
poignancy of the immediate with the significance of the universal.. .In developing

the Revolution theme Orozco moved toward a fuller understanding of himself, of
mankind, and of art.32

The Inception of the Public Mural

Orozco began his artistic development with caricatures and cartoons during the
second decade of the century. In them he records the reality of the Revolution--the
prostitutes, the poor, the peasants, the revolutionaries and the demagogues--as he saw it.
During this period Orozco began an observation of movement, the fluidity of reality
rather than the stability of tradition. At San Carlos there had been tedious repetition,
constant copying and recopying of the Western masters. The Revolution provided a
source for the warehousing of experiences and imagery, a period of observation. Slowly,
through his first murals at the Preparatory School (1923-26) (Fig. 22), but especially with
those at Pomona College (1930), the New York School of Social Research (1930-31),

and Dartmouth College (1932), Orozco began rooting out the sources of this reality in the

 

”David Elliot, “Orozco: a Beginning,” in Orozco! 1883-1949 (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1980),
14

32Fernandez, “Orozco, Genius of America,” 143.

42

history of Mexico and North America. He found in it a mechanism for transcendence,
the creation of a visual philosophy of history in which the thesis and antithesis have
created the mestizo or American synthesis, which is no longer bound to the racial tensions
of the past, beholden to neither the prejudices of Indio nor Spaniard. Orozco also
discovered in that history the relationship of Master and Servant.

With Orozco, one can trace in the evolution of his work much more than a simple
maturing of style. His artistic development represents mental snapshots of a man
accumulating personal wisdom, turning thought into action, translating what he could not
promulgate in words into painting... “What I have to say, I say in painting.”33 Beginning
then with his prostitute watercolors we can discern the employment of an archetype to
convey a symbolic or metaphoric meaning, the prostitute as a symbol of suffering.
Scholar Bernard Myers has said, “That throughout his career he returns to the prostitute
theme, not in any cynical metropolitan sense but rather as a Dostoyevskian symbol of the
corruption and weakness, the sadness and isolation of the individual."34 (Fig. 23)

In 1920 the history of Mexican art changed forever with the election of President
Alvaro Obregon whose stated goal was to “liberate the country from its liberators.”35
Obregon was decidedly against ideological radicalism,.and instead prescribed to a
conservative vision of government not far removed from that of Diaz, but more open and

free. Shortly after taking office Obregon appointed J osé Vasconcelos as of Minister of

Public Education, he embarked on a crusade to educate rural Mexicans in cultivation,

 

33Orozco was wary Of stating what his painting was all about. His philosophy of freedom demanded that
definitions and interpretations of his art be open—ended and not specified which reveals a conscious
understanding on the changing nature of an art work as it exists through time. Orozco did not want to lock
the interpretation of his works into his own time or place. He saw art as an evolving process of
understanding and analysis.

”Bernard S. Myers, Mexican Painting in Our Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 43.

3 5 Enrique Krauze, Mexico Biography of Power (New York: Harper Collins Books 1997), 391.

is
“1.:-

MA

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I.

43

hygiene, crafts, and skills by building schools in their communities. Beyond his
revolutionary ideas about public education, however, Vasconcelos implemented the
program of didactic public muralism in 1921 . Although Vasconcelos resigned two years
later, public muralism is his most enduring legacy. This proved to be most beneficial to
Mexican artists who began to organize and receive state sponsored commissions for the
painting of public spaces. Among the artists involved at its inception were Orozco,
Diego Rivera, Alfaro Siqueriros, Jean Charlot, and Roberto Montenegro, “who took over
the walls of venerable colonial buildings to express the social gospel of the

Revolution.”36

Mexican historian Enrique Krauze believes that; “During Obregon’s term,
Mexico experienced a true rebirth of national values, a varied and broad-based return to
its origins: the indigenous and Spanish past, the colonial and provincial traditions.”37 As
the artists developed their ideas around the philosophy of Vasconcelos, a manifesto was
written by Siqueiros and signed by the members of the Syndicate of Technical Workers,
Painters and Sculptors. The initial excitement and cohesion of this collective was soon
stalled as political change once again thrust artists into a state of instability which forced
an unhealthy competition amongst them. Orozco began to consciously distance himself
from members of the group, especially Siquerios and Rivera. The relationship between
the Tres Grandes, as they are known, will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 5.

The great mural experiment began in earnest on the walls of San Ildefonso in
1922. Space was allotted to each artist and after an intensive study of the fresco

technique Orozco started his first murals. “From the beginning, Orozco was interested in

the rediscovery and the development of fresco. After long research and experiment he

 

“rind
”Ind, 394

worked out with the help of native masons, a technique which proved to be so efficient
and so complete as to compare favorably with that of European and the aboriginal
American fresco painters.”38 With the election of Plutarco Calles in 1924, the entire
mural movement was in jeopardy. Calles’ desire to “eradicate the Catholic faith from
Mexico” created a violent backlash against the government. Tens of thousands were
killed in bloody clashes during this four-year term from 1924 to 1928. When Orozco’s
unfinished murals were attacked as anti-Catholic, federal funds for their completion dried
up in the face of harsh criticism. In the meantime, Orozco completed two other murals
before being asked by the Calles regime to return to his work in 1926.

In the mural “Omniscience” (Casa de Los Azuelos, Mexico City, 1925) (Fig. 24)
Orozco again used a monumental figure as an allegorical message. Here we see a
precursor to the Prometheus mural in California. Two hands extend from the heavens to
give the flame of knowledge to the world. This mural was probably his first truly
philosophical representation. He would add to his idiom the historical focus, with the
murals of Orizaba (Orizaba Industrial School, 1926) (Fig. 25). Here Orozco pierces the
skin of the revolution--in a style we have come to expect--to reveal the ambiguity of its
intent. The symbols of prostitutes are replaced by grieving soldaderas, the feminine form
of soldier in Spanish. We can see in these murals a period of reflection on the events of
the Revolution and the genesis of Orozco’s stylistic idiom to come. The theme of the
Revolution gave Orozco a way to visually express his historical philosophy of freedom.

Although the Calles government wanted to exclude Orozco from continued public

support, other artists involved in the mural program insisted that Orozco be retained. In

 

38Alma Reed, Jose Clemente Orozco: An Introduction by Alma Reed (New York: Delphic Studios,
1932), 3.

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45

1926 his commission was reinstated and he began work once again at San Ildefonso. The
reworking of the Preparatory School (Fig. 22) murals refines his vision of the Revolution.
These murals had been defaced in the 1924 student riots after the Calles presidency began
and after Orozco had been dismissed from his work as well as his teaching position.
Taken as a whole, this series is a tremendous effort on the part of Orozco to sort out and
summarize Mexico’s pre-revolutionary history, its indigenous and colonial heritage.

The 1926 mural of “Cortes and Malinche” (Fig. 26), represents the fateful
meeting of the Old and New Worlds. It can also be seen as the initial stage of the
Master/Servant dialectic, the victorious Cortes in a gesture of his dominance over the ,
submissive Malinche. Cortés, personifying the Spanish culture, presses his foot onto the
legs of a lifeless figure at their feet while restraining Malinche, the personified Indian
peoples, from apprOaching it. This prone figure, which can be read as the mestizo
offspring of this cultural collision, represents the suppression of the indigenous cultures
by Spanish dominance, by Spanish social institutions, and Spanish cultural hegemony.
'And it is this that lies at the root of the existential crisis of Mexico as manifested in the
Revolution.

Although Orozco and the other initiators of the muralist movement had completed
much of the decoration of the Preparatory School, many thought it was too reliant on
Christian themes and European tradition. Upon his return in 1926, he chose to rework
those images on the ground floor, keeping only the two on each end. The first panel is
“The Rich Banquet while the Workers Quarrel” (Fig. 27) while the last panel is a
Botticelli-like image of “Maternity” (Fig. 28). These images represent the two extremes

of Orozco’s artistic style, the former, a Mexican graphic tradition of penetrating sarcasm

LJ

EJ'

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“D3 I:
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46

the latter, a product of Spanish and European painting tradition which he continued to
reconcile as he matured. The former shows Orozco’s masterful command of caricature at
the service of criticism. Orozco often reverts to caricature when dealing with the elite.
For Orozco only caricature best expressed the true nature of this exclusive class of self-
absorbed personages. Between these he recreates the series in his newly emerging linear
and expressionistic style, a synthesis of these extremes. His figures, taking on their
quintessential Orozco characteristics, have become complex allegories and are some of
his most celebrated images, including “The Trench” (Fig. 29), “The Revolutionary
Trinity” (Fig. 30), “The Strike and The Destruction of the Old Order.”

During this time he was also given additional space including one of the
monumental stone stairwells, in which he explored his missionary themes of the
Franciscan monk and the naked convert. These Franciscan images are further developed
in the Cabanas Institute. Taken as a whole Orozco’s work here may be viewed as a grand

series of studies, a study of themes, but also of the medium itself.

Orozco in New York

The artists stay in New York proved the second significant period of his life, after
the revolution. Here he acquired the language with which to give a visual voice to the
Mexican historic struggle for identity, and simultaneously presented a philosophy for the
individual, one of change, adaptation and elaboration--a philosophy of life as an aesthetic
pursuit in which you are your own work of art. In those years from 1927 to 1934, Orozco
began a process of assimilation. His early Expressionistic style as seen in his graphic
work--cartoons, caricatures and watercolors of prostitutes--merged with his classical

process learned from training at San Carlos. Like Delacroix or Gericault, who both found

fr!

47

ways to reinvent the allegories of the Neo-Classicists of the Davidian school in early
nineteenth century France, Orozco could not wholly separate himself from that mold he
was trying to change. Instead, he took advantage of all the traditions he was a product of,
neglecting neither his indigenous nor his Spanish heritage, broke them down, took what
he needed and refashioned them into a uniquely American art form.39
The political situation in Mexico at the end of 1927 peaked with the execution of
a Jesuit priest carried out by the Calles regime. As he had in 1917, Orozco decided to
move to the United States in order to continue his artistic career. Mexican artists, like
Miguel Covarrubias, had found modest success in New York City’s thriving art scene.
On December 11, 1927 Orozco headed North to an unknown and alien world. Jean
Charlot recounts the mood and disposition of the dejected artist;
Orozco left Mexico an embittered and lonely man. He had concluded his cycle of
frescoes at the Preparatory School despite the jeers of a majority of teachers and
students, and the physical destruction of much that he had previously painted.
Painful had been to him the defection of Rivera, a fellow muralist, in his hour of
need. Rivera’s friend, Salvador Novo, published an article that all but justified the
vandalism. In it, Orozco was referred to as a pupil of Rivera, and a quite unworthy
one at that.40
Orozco’s first months in New York were truly miserable, especially for an artist
who had witnessed the destruction of some of his first murals at the hands of conservative
students just two years before. With no hope of state sponsored commissions in Mexico
he was forced to travel to New York as a matter of financial and artistic necessity. It is

during these months of poverty, solitude and loneliness that Orozco began a period of

self-reflection from which evolved his philosophic system of imagery and direct

 

39When I use the term American, I am referring to all Americans, from both North and South. I am
arguing here that there is a peculiar philosophical and cultural link between those of the Americas,
especially between the US. and Mexico. As all Americans are products of the colonial age, there exists
solidarity in perspective and development.

.«wlw

New

48

expression. In a letter to Jean Charlot from June 3rd, 1928, Orozco wrote; “You must not
think that I have done anything new, I have limited myself to looking, observing, and
meditating.”41 He also took advantage of the many European paintings exhibiting in New
York galleries at that time. Several letters written to Charlot during this time discuss
Orozco’s critical response to the European “masters.” He had exceptional praise for the
colors of Matisse and Renoir, the solidin of Cezanne, the purity of Seurat, and the power
of Rouault’s aquatints. After seeing the works of Rouault, Orozco told Charlot he had
begun “to study feverishly etching and aquatint. Already I have much information, some
copper plates, acids etc. . .I visited some workshops and I now know etching from A to
23.42

Orozco was also able to see, for the first time, extensive collections of paintings
by Spanish masters El Greco, Goya and Velasquez. In another letter to Charlot, he refers
to El Greco as a god amongst painters. As for Goya, Orozco wrote that indeed, “the only
feeling one dares to feel is humility, as if one was confronted by a storm, a planet, or any

”43

other one of nature’s spectacles. Orozco’s first contact with contemporary Spanish

master, Picasso, found him thoroughly unimpressed, but Picasso’s work slowly grew on
him. Orozco eventually admitted that Picasso “disconcerts, disquiets, wounds,

”44

irnpassions, repulses, only to suddenly attract forcefully. Orozco reserved his harshest

criticisms for Degas and Lautrec, ironically dismissing “these masters that seem to us

 

40Jean Charlot, trans. by Ruth L. C. Sims, The Artist in New York: Letters to Jean Charlot and
Unpublished Writings, 1925-1929, (University of Texas Press, Austin and London, 1974), 40.

“Ibid., 51.

‘2Ibid., 45

“lord, 39.

“lbid., 32.

49

closer to him: Degas with his cruel probing of the form divine; Lautrec, punning
pitilessly at the expense of even of the models he liked best.”45

Orozco’s biggest disappointment came with an unsuccessful Art Center exhibition
of Mexican artists (January, 1928), of which he was one, in what he described as “a total
failure, absolute, final.”46 In contrast, a one-man show by Diego Rivera was well
received by critics, dubbing him “many-sided” and a “great man.” The New York
experience increased Orozco’s contempt for the self-promoting Rivera, whom he often
referred to with some Russian variation of his name like “Diegoft” or “Diego Riveritch
Romanoff.” Presumably, Orozco is making a biting reference to Rivera’s close, albeit
shallow, ties to the Communist Party.

Following Orozco’s initial disenchantment with his situation in New York, things
changed dramatically in Spring, 1928, due primarily to his interaction with Alma Reed
and those of the “Ashram” and Delphic Movement, namely Eva Sikelianos, wife of the
famous Greek poet. Reed had become a great admirer of Orozco and his wOrk. She
actively began promoting his work in New York by opening a gallery named the Delphic
Studios. This interaction was central to Orozco’s succeeding philosophic explorations.

At meetings of the Delphic Movement, Orozcolhad become familiar with
Aeschylus and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom used the heroic image of
Prometheus as artist and transformer of culture to assert universal values.47
While in New York Orozco also explored the various attractions and

neighborhoods that surrounded him. In his Autobiography he reminisces enthusiastically

about visits to Harlem, Vaudeville, and Coney Island, which were subjects of some of his

 

”Jean Charlot, “Orozco in New York” College Art Journal XIX;1 (Fall, 1959): 47. In a letter from
April of 1928, Orozco reveals a bit of his humble nature when he writes, “I detest Mr. Degas more and
more. How I wish I could take his work and hang them in a barber shop. . .I don’t know what the devil I am
doing in art Criticism, damn it! Don’t pay any attention to me.

50

paintings and lithographs from this period, including “Vaudeville in Harlem” and “Coney
Island Sideshow.” The United States also provided a contrasting view of the racial
struggle in the Americas. The experience left Orozco more convinced that race was the
essential dilemma of the New World, not class. Those who lived in the Americas were
products of an entirely American paradigm, one in which a history of ubiquitous racial
and cultural conflict was a perpetually divisive tool used by corrupt leaders, as a political
strategy for the acquisition and maintenance of power. “Orozco saw the history of our
Hemisphere as a form of grand tragedy, with human aspirations for peace, order and
dignity thwarted repeatedly by institutional dogmas of religion or politics.”48 For this
reason Orozco denied the applicability of Communism to the American experience
because it was focussed on class while the New World was mired in race. Orozco was in
New York through the peak of the Harlem Renaissance in the late twenties. He was
likewise to witness its collapse as the United States sank into the Great Depression. By
1933, echoing Orozco’s sentiment, W. E. B. DuBois was less than enthusiaStic about the
efficacy of a Marxian revolution in the United States. He wrote in The Crisis:
We can only say, as it seems to me, that the Marxian philosophy is a true
diagnosis of the situation in Western Europe in the middle of the 19th Century,
despite some of its logical difficulties. But it must be modified in the United
States of America and especially so far as the Negro group is concerned. The
Negro is exploited to a degree that means poverty, crime, delinquency, and
indigence. And that exploitation comes not from a black capitalist class, but from
the white capitalists and equally from the white proletariat. L. .] The shrill cry of a
few communists is not even listened to, because and solely because it seeks to
break down the barriers between black and white. There is not at present the
slightest indication that a Marxian revolution based on a united class-conscious

proletariat is anywhere on the American far horizon. Rather race antagonism and
labor group rivalry are still undisturbed by world catastrophe. In the hearts of

 

“Ihid.
47Polcari, “Orozco and Pollock,” 44.

4”Patricia Harris and David Lyon, “Shining On: Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization,” Americas
31:1 (1990): 60.

51

black laborers alone, therefore, lie those ideals of democracy in politics and

industry which may in time make the workers of the world effective dictators of

civilization.49

DuBois essentially believed that the issue of class cannot provide adequate united
action until the issue of race has been reconciled. For him, the “masses” were not yet
capable of focussing their collective energies to thereby gain a self-conscious
understanding of their individual unity with others of the exploited classes. Although the
situation in Mexico is quite different in that a racial synthesis has been achieved, the
mestizo psyche continues to be victimized by the pigmentocracy inherited from the
Conquest. Overzealous and self-righteous leaders from the extremes of this racial duality
exploit the cultural or ethnic ambivalence of the mestizo. Orozco saw Communism
simply as another means for ideological control that would suppress self-consciousness
rather than promote it. Here, in the racially polarized environment of the United States
Orozco fully established--or at the least reaffu'med--his belief in the “color line” as the
prominent and essential issue to be addressed. Gutierrez-Solana, curator of the J .C.
Orozco and Diego Rivera exhibition at Queens Museum in 1979, wrote in its
accompanying catalogue “Orozco believed that the only hope for mankind lay in the
abolition of interracial hostility and the caste systems that fostered it.”50 Furthermore,
this conveys an understanding of the sympathy established between Mexican and

African-American artists during the thirties and forties as asserted by Goldman and

LaFalle in their book In the Spirit ofResistance '(1997).

 

49W. E. B. DuBois, A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995),
543.

”Carlos Gutierrez-Solana, Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera: paintings, drawings and prints.
Queens Museum Exhibition Catalogue, September 15 through November 11, 1979.

52

By 1930 Orozco’s luck improved as he secured a commission to paint a mural at a
small college on the West Coast. Here Orozco comes closest to his beloved El Greco. In
the Prometheus mural (Fig. 31) of Pomona College in Claremont, California, we can see
an emerging sense of self-conscious exploration, an attempt to express in plastic form the
internal conflict raging through his soul. It is an attempt to reconcile his individual
existence within a universal context.

Indeed, it is not a strained interpretation to see in the Prometheus figure Orozco

himself the isolated artist, struggling titanically, consumed by the very creative
gift he brings to man, received by an indifferent or hostile crowd.51

But this is also a time of tremendous clarity when the experiences of the
revolution were transforming into a coherent image of a particular people participating in
and contributing to a universal struggle to achieve freedom; to refine and to redefine the
very meaning of freedom. [Micheal Brenson has written that, “Orozco’s theme was
nothing less than that of the eternal threat to individual freedom.”52 The Prometheus
mural at Pomona College exemplifies his Classical Spanish heritage, in form as well as in
subject, with the exploration of a universalizing Greek allegory, the martyrdom of a
revolutionary hero,. and his gift of fire consuming the ignorantfthe unwise, and the
foolish exploiters and victims of its power.

Shortly after finishing the Pomona mural Orozco returned to New York and
executed, apparently for free, the frescoes at the New School for Social Research.
Influenced by the theories of Jay Hambridge concerning “dynamic symmetry,” these

murals are closely related to the discussions that took place at the Ashram and Delphic

 

“Scott, “Orozco’s Prometheus,” 6.
52Micheal Brenson, “Orozco: Mexican Conscience," Art in America 67:5 (September, 1979): 78.

53

Studios. Taking only forty-six days to complete, Orozco depicted in unusually realistic
portraits the leaders of contemporary world revolutions for peace, including Ghandi,
Lenin and Felipe Carillo Puerto. This last figure was Alma Reed’s fiancé and governor
of the state of Yucatan. He had been assassinated before their marriage which
memorialized him here as a hero of the Mexican fight for freedom. These murals were
not well received by the critics which disappointed Orozco greatly, but thanks, in part to
Reed, he was soon offered the walls of the Reserve room in Baker Hall at Dartmouth. At
some 3000 square feet, this hall prepared Orozco for the task of decorating the Cabanas
Institute four years later.

In Spring 1932, Orozco began the “Epic of American Civilization” at Dartmouth
College (Fig. 32). He continued the theme of myth from Pomona, this time choosing one
indigenous to the New World. Mexico, representing the unified Americas, had an
equivalent allegorical icon in Quetzalcéatl, which he chose as a subject in his final major
U. S. mural. In many ways the Prometheus mural is an introduction to those at
Dartmouth; to establish an allegorical acquaintance between them. It serves as a primer
setting the theme for his murals to come, which merged Western fresco with pre-
Columbian narrative mural painting to proclaim the independent nature of the American,
born of two worlds and thus transcending them both.

Orozco’s “Epic of American Civilization” contrasts the well-known Prometheus
myth, a symbol with which Westerners were comfortable, with the myth of QuetzalcOatl
which was not simply allegory, but also prophesy. In a Dartmouth College news release
in May 25, 1932, Orozco wrote that,

The American continental races are now becoming aware of their own personality
as it emerges from the cultural currents, the indigenous and the European. The

54

great American myth of Quetzalcéatl is a living one, embracing both elements

and pointing clearly by its prophetic nature, to the responsibility shared equally by

the two Americas of creating here an authentic American civilizations3

According to the myth, the god that had brought knowledge and culture to
Mesoamerica, peacefully enlightening its people, is ultimately banished as they descend
back into the depths of superstition and decadence. Upon his departure, QuetzalcOatl
vowed to return in the skin of a white man to unleash a cleansing inferno of vengeance
from which would rise the Cosmic Race. Orozco moves from the theme of rebellious
Titan to banished god. Both themes carry the same meaning however; that knowledge
once given has proven often to be the exploiter of peoples. It is here that Orcho hones
his fresco technique; he is given, finally, the wall space necessary to begin translating his
personal philosophy and vision into a new idiom through paint. These three periods--the
Revolution, the early muralist movement, and the years in New York--form the
foundation for his magnificent works in Guadalajara which culminate in the Hospicio
Cabar'ias Institute which nearly all scholars of Orozco agree are the best works of his
career. In his book Man of F ire of 1953, MacKinley Helm points to these murals as an
integration of his various styles and iconography.

Except for two or three portrait studies Cervantes, El Greco, the Episcopal

founder Cabaiias most of the themes of the side walls and vaulting had appeared

in the earlier frescoes, but reassembled as they are in this place, and graced with
new and more colorful overtones, they make a stupendous Orozco thesaurus.54

 

53Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States, (Albuquerque: University of the
New Mexico Press, 1991), 55.
S"Helm, Man of F ire, 76.

55

Similarly, the Cabar'ias Institute is the most comprehensive example of Orozco’s
philosophical conceptions. And it is the city of Guadalajara “which enabled him to

realize himself far beyond his keenest hopes.”55

Triumphal Return
After briefly visiting Europe on a three-month tour paid for by Dartmouth,

Orozco returned to Mexico in 1934. Two years later he went to Guadalajara at the
request of the governor of J alisco, Evarado Topete. Before painting the Cabaiias Institute
he executed two more master works in fresco, further delving into those themes and ideas
aroused and distilled in his US. endeavor. He first painted “Creative Man and its False
Leaders” (Fig. 33) at the Assembly Hall of the University, enabling Orozco to express
more fully his disdain for ideology, for anything which stifles the individual creative
experience. “In the relationship between the other figures, the Philosopher-teacher and
the Rebel, Orozco postulates an ideal unity between thought and action.”56 This idea
finds a perfect analogue in the philosophy of Bergson, which will be more thoroughly
discussed in Chapter 4. In the panels below the dome, we see once again Orozco’s
warning against false leadership. Helm believed that with these murals “Orozco had
taken a second look at the heroes, especially the Marxist heroes, of the new ruling classes
and roundly condemned them.”57 Below the dome Orozco painted “The Public” and
“The Leaders” to confront the effects of ideology on its victims. Orozco has contrasted
the spiritually, emotionally, and physically emaciated with the gluttonous and obese

ideologues of Mexican politics. Labor leaders stand with “books by the side, rifles at

 

55Alfred Neumeyer, “Orozco’s Mission,” College Art Journal X;2 (1951): 126.
”Rochfort, “Terrible Beauty,” 76.
”Helm, Man of F ire, 69.

56

their feet and sledge hammers in their hands suggest the imposition by violence or brute
force of the ideologies contained in the tomes.”58 Fernandez further states,

Thus from the above we may conclude that the paintings around the platform of

the Auditorium express the dramatic reaction of a people which has endured in its

own flesh the effects of alien ideologies.59 '

The mural depicting Hidalgo, the “Phantasms of Religion,” and the “Carnival of
Ideologies” (Figs. 35, 36), completed in 1937 at the Government Palace in Guadalajara,
restate the Prometheus allegory and the symbolic gift of fire which turns into a storm of
destruction as freedom is given to the people of Mexico by a martyred revolutionary
figure. This gift, of course, comes with a heavy responsibility. Unrestrained freedom in
the hands of those unaccustomed to its power are easily corralled by charismatic leaders
and their ideologies and led to their demise. Orozco uses the images of Hidalgo, Christ,
Lenin, Prometheus, and Quetzalcoatl interchangeably for one explicit purpose; to elevate
revolutionary figures as the life-force of progress. He always places them in a historical
dialectic relationship with the outer social sphere to Show how their ideals become
corrupted by self-indulgent ideologues and in turn re-establishes the very oppression the
revolutionary fought to destroy in the first place.

In 1938, Orozco began what many consider his greatest masterpiece, the murals at
the de-consecrated chapel of the Hospicio Cabanas. Here, on 1250 square meters of wall
space, he was able to bring his experiences to full fruition, an expression of his life
philosophy, a portrait of his people, and a monument to the American spirit; an

accomplishment rivaling those of the Sistine Chapel.

 

”Fernandez, Orozco, University of Guadalajara, J alisco en el Arte, (Guadalajara:
Planeacion y Promocion S. A., n.d.), 32.

59Ibid., 34.

57

Bearing witness to the self-destruction of his people clearly framed the formation
of his own existential philosophy which gained texture and context from a philosophic
analysis of Mexican history. This Orozco distilled, internalized, and reshaped into plastic
form at the Cabar‘ias Institute in which is contained a voluminous, visual philosophic
treatise. Many scholars have associated Orozco’s murals with dialectical thought,
however, little has been done to directly compare Orozco’s visual philosophy with formal
written philosophies. In so doing I wish to exemplify how three particular perspectives
can be united under such universal principles as freedom. Arguments could surely be
made as to the incompatibility of certain aspects and details of the philosophies presented
here, but in order for one to discern those discrepancies one must also understand their
unity; their unity is what I am here concerned with. It should, therefore, not be surprising

to find in Orozco’s work a sense of contradiction.

Chapter 4

THE SHAPING OF IDENTITY

With the goal of detailing how mind and memory—-intellect and intuition--shape
an individual’s potential for action through experience and history, Henri Bergson Offers
a philosophy that will serve as a mechanism for applying the language and method of
Hegel’s outer dialectic to an inner dialectic; taking us from the universal to the particular.
These two philosophers, Hegel and Bergson, seem particularly well-suited to illustrate
the depth of thought involved in Orozco’s murals, especially those in Guadalajara.

Hegel’s philosophy of history acts to interpret the dialectical struggle of Mexico
for freedom and self-realization depicted in the lower levels of the Cabafias Institute.
Additionally, Hegel’s Master/Servant dialectic introduces a heuristic model of the
dynamic involved in the Spanish domination over indigenous culture and the ensuing
split in the mestizo identity; an idea echoed in W. E. B. DuBois’ concept of the “double-
consciousness.” The dome at the Cabafias Institute, however, presents an individual
response, an expression of Orozco’s personal philosophy for traversing life’s path
through adaptation, reinvention--a modern New-Fire ceremony.6O There are then two
struggles at work; one plays out in the wider, universal social sphere upon which we are
all dependent; the other is an inner struggle to adapt and advance, to progress--to define

and to express the self; an independent existence; that is, to reconcile the relationship of

 

6"The Meso-american New Fire Ceremony was celebrated every 52 years, based on the calendar
developed by the Maya and later utilized by the Toltec and Aztec cultures.

58

59

one’s own freedom with one’s dependency on shared context. J ustino Fernandez, who
wrote extensively on Orozco and his art, most notably in Orozco, forma y idea, was the -
first to place an emphasis on the philosophico-religious meaning of Orozco’s
symbolism.61 He asserted the idea that,
In the Government Palace, in the Hospicio Cabafias, in the many other
monumental works and in the single, independent pieces, he paints the human
being under various historical circumstances, but he rises beyond them and
converts them into metaphors to illustrate with them the inner reality of life.62
For Hegel the evolution of the human race was leading to self-realization through
a process, the perpetual struggle of ideas. His dialectic theory is a means of coordinating
all of human history into a unifying human drama with which we might achieve true
“substantial” freedom.‘53 It is therefore important to study the histories of all peoples who
have left evidence of their existence behind. If we bring this past into our present for the
purpose of informing our action and further defining our identity, we may ensure that we

d?!“

are based on the “rough groun from which we can see the full scope of human

 

6’ Octavio Paz wrote in a footnote to his Essays on Mexican Art, “Justino Fernandez diffidently began
such a study in his Jose Clemente Orozco, forma y idea. He examines the Prometheus at Pomona College
superficially and refers to Panofsky’s iconographic studies. Unfortunately, he failed to pursue the subject
and delve more deeply. It is regrettable, for Justino Fernandez was the first to emphasize the philosophico-
religious meaning of Orozco’s symbolism.” (190) Fernandez also described Orozco’s work as “historic-
philosophic” in Orozco, Genius of America (146), contrasting it with the historical-social painting of Rivera
and Siqueiros.

‘2 Justino Fernandez, Orozco, University of Guadalajara, 38.

63 Hegel describes what he means 'by ‘substantial freedom’ in On Art, Religion, Philosophy, “If we say
that the consciousness of freedom is connected with the appearance of philosophy. this principle must be a
fundamental with those with whom philosophy begins; a people having this consciousness of freedom
founds its existence on that principle, seeing that the laws and the whole circumstances of the people are
based only on the notion that mind forms of itself and in the categories which it has. Connected with this on
the practical side is the fact that actual freedom develops political freedom, and this only begins where the
individual knows himself as a independent individual to be universal and real, where his significance is
infinite, or where the subject has attained the consciousness of personality and thus desires to be esteemed
for himself alone. Free, philosophic thought has this direct connection with practical freedom: that the
former supplies thought about the absolute, universal, and real object, the latter, because it thinks itself,
gives itself the character of universality.” (298)

6"The term “rough ground” was used by Heidegger to describe a general basis of universal experience.

60

history, and thus see ourselves within that context, as opposed to how past civilizations
have traditionally viewed themselves as strictly separate and apart, with the ever-
tlrreatening Other looming just beyond the horizon. John Dos Passos said of the similar
American search for a useable past, we “need to know what kind of firm ground other

men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on.”65

This is why art is
particularly useful, because it acts as a Rosetta Stone which spans not only the chasms

between cultures, but also bridges past with present. It is a living reminder that the past

dies only when it is forgotten, just as it is a means of preventing that from happening.

Intellect and Intuition: The inner dialectic
Any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and

the physical sides of our nature, time occupies the key position.
Sir Arthur Eddington

I have framed the analysis of Orozco’s murals at the Cabafias Institute on the idea
of an inner and outer dialectic, an inner struggle to reconcile one’s existence with the
outer social sphere. I opened this paper by saying that history is the human struggle to
achieve truth, or self-consciousness, whereby we might become truly free. When Hegel
speaks of this he is talking about the collective human consciousness, freedom for all.
Bergson addresses self-consciousness in a personal sense. They are, however mutually
dependent. Hegel believes we as a whole are moving towards absolute freedom, a
collective human self-consciousness which requires the Bergsonian sense of individual
and personal self-consciousness, that helps to more successfully navigate life’s obstacles
regardless of whether the outer goal is achieved; but, it is also a means towards achieving

it.

 

6’Polcari, “Orozco and Pollock,” 38.

61

The theory of this tum-of-the-century French philosopher, Henri Bergson,
essentially states that human reality is based on the relationship between space/time on
the one hand and mind and memory on the other. Memory pools experience for the sake
of better-informed action. For him, time is created by the universal expansion. Although
his theory predates the monumental discoveries of Hubble, Einstein, and Bell, these
cosmological insights lend credence to Bergson’s philosophic treatise.66 Bergson
displays an intuitive understanding of these physical laws a decade before their
articulation.

Implicit in the existence of time is a perceiver of it. Human existence is made up
of two inextricably linked realms. On the one hand we have time and space, and on the
other we have mind and memory. One has no meaning without the other. It does not
matter that time progresses if we do not perceive that it is doing such. And inversely,
memory and human spirit cannot exist without duration or the constant passage of time.
This is what makes human beings so extraordinary, that they can act freely and become
themselves active in creation.

We have in the art of world cultures a mechanism to which we might apply the
idea of duration. The life and work of artists are sub-durations in and of themselves,
much like Hegel’s concept of the geist, which connects the individual and society, and
are mutually dependent as reflections of the other for progress. The ideas of both men
are rooted in organicism. Bergson describes his idea of duration in The Creative Mind as
follows,

I should say that the inorganic world is a series of infinitely rapid repetitions or
quasi repetitions which, when totaled, constitute the visible and pre-visible

 

66I am speaking here specifically of Einstein’s theories of Relativity and Quantum Physics, and Bell’s
Interconnectedness Theory, and Hubble’s Expansion Theory.

62

changes. I should compare them to the swinging of the pendulum of a clock: the
swingings of the pendulum are coupled to the continuous unwinding of a spring
linking them together and whose unwinding they mark; the repetitions of the
inorganic world constitute rhythm in the life of conscious beings and measure
their duration. Thus the living being essentially has duration; it has duration
precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is
no elaboration without searching, no searching without ‘groping.67

Duration can be likened to a forest of trees. Each tree represents a particular
duration. Each year the tree blooms. The blooms are sub-durations of the tree, and
likewise the tree a sub-duration of a particular geological or climatic era of a particular
planet of which they are sub-durations, etc. The trees grow from a soil amassed by the
death of countless living things and are sustained in the lives of the trees.

For Bergson life ascends and matter falls. Life, like fire, is ascendant by nature.
Orozco uses fire in this sense, as symbolic of life itself. His work exemplifies the
particular intuition Bergson believes is possessed by artists as being able to penetrate into
the duration of true reality. Bergson writes,

For hundreds [thousands] of years, in fact, there have been men whose function

has been precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive.

They are artists. What is the aim of art if not to Show us, in nature and in the

mind, outside of us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses
and our consciousness‘.768

Other philosophers, too, like Hegel, believed that the artist has a potently
enhanced ability to express things about truth of reality by tapping momentarily into the
universal duration or absolute truth. Hegel believed that art offered a window to the
divine, a window to that which is true. He believed that the purpose of art was to illicit

feelings universal to all of humanity by which our consciousness might be further

 

67Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabellc L. Andison (Philosophical Library Inc., 1946;
Totowa, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1965; reprint, 1975), 109.
68Ibid, 159.

63

developed with understanding becoming aroused in the individual. Hegel’s eloquent
description of art’s purpose is thoroughly fitting for the power of Orozco’s images.

[Art's] aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering

emotions, inclinations and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human

being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole' range of what man's soul
in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that
is able to move and to stir the human's breast in its depths and its manifold
aspects; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind
possesses of real and lofty in its thought--all the splendor of the noble, the eternal
and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness
and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and
horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving
in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-
stimulating visions.69

Duration in fact is reality for Bergson, as the duration equals the whole. He
believes that we have relied too heavily upon the intellectual faith that reality may be
equated accurately to symbolic representations, as if reality is made up of points along
the line of time. Our conception of the world is made up from the remnant images, like
the Hindu mayo, created by the activity of universal expansion or creation. These
remnants, although useful in providing a common paradigm within which we may
evolve, obscure the true nature of reality and its movement.

It has become common in Western thought, whether it be in science, history, or
philosophy, that if we isolate the individual moments of this movement or duration we
may return them to their proper positions and then contrive a whole, a truth, or an
absolute picture of being. Bergson denies this as a vain and misleading attempt which

actually stunts our ability to intuit the flow of life which is the duration. We create

complexity where there should be none. That is not to say that intellectual endeavor itself

 

‘91. Glenn Gray, introduction to Philosophy of History by G. w. Freidrich Hegel, ed. J. Glenn Gray
(New York: Harper Row, 1970), 10.

is in vain; indeed, it is quite necessary for understanding the physical world and
enhancing our intuitive abilities, i.e. through history, philosophy, art, science and
religion. He believes that in order to use the intellectual knowledge appropriately their
must be an intuitive grasp of the movement which sustains us, that is, as Hegel explains,
the union of the particular and the universal. But, Bergson further argues, that in not
realizing each intellectual endeavor has met with the duration--that each has grasped an
element of the truth--conflict, confusion, and competition arises between rival schools of
thought which is ultimately governing, that is to say, keeping a cap on, the pace of human
development which prevents the achievement of real human liberation. With Bergson we
can begin to penetrate the individual which might yield a better conceptual grasp over
ever-larger unities of particulars and universals. This will be further elaborated below.

- Bergson’ 3 philosophy is geared towards cultivating each individual’s innate
intuition and one’s capacity for action. Particularly, it is within the art of our world
cultures that his concept of intuition has its greatest exemplar. The key to unlocking this
vault of the absolute is in realizing that all humans intuit; all forms of religion,
philosophy, art, literature do, or may, tap into the duration of life, which is the coming
into being through progressive stages of creation, the becoming. Each of these stages has
produced individuals who have perceived or glimpsed the absolute, but when it comes to
expressing it, individual perceivers are only left with representations and symbols with
which to reflect this fleeting association back to others or even to themselves. Bergson
illustrates the process by which philosophies become reified and static, moving further
and further from their original intuitive realization of the truth of the whole.

He could not formulate what he had in mind without feeling himself obliged to
correct his formula, then to correct his correction: thus, from theory to theory,

65

correcting when he thought he was completing, what he has accomplished, by a
complication which provoked more complication, by developments, has been to
convey with an increasing approximation the simplicity of his original intuition.
All the complexity of his doctrine, which would go on ad infinitum, is therefore
only the incommensurability between his simple intuition and the means at his
disposal for expressing it.70

By studying and uniting the multitude of cultural creations that have come into
the realm of possibility, and which offer complex alternative vantage points from which
to view the same truth, human intuition may be honed to a more perfected, or self-
conscious state. Human intuition is the faculty of accessing one’s own experience and
history in order to meet the demand of life to act. Just as Hegel insists one must
understand the whole (of history) in order to grasp conceptually the dominant forces Of
the present and thus find truth, Bergson believes that an individual must be able to
understand these forces immediately; but he must also be able, at the same moment, to
pull those experiences and knowledge of his own history in order to react wisely. But
this is extremely difficult with our reliance on intellect alone. As corrupt ideology
becomes oppressive to a society, so too does intellectual ossification create a personal
static imprisonment, resistant to innovation and change, unable to break one’s own mold
and create a new one.

Human existence is based upon a system of knowledge, personal and cultural.
This system of knowledge is self-perpetuating, as it is a result of the universal becoming
or expansion and human memory. As long as we continue to persist, and record it in
cultural production and memory, the system automatically expands. Bergson’s theories,
for example, are a further philosophic elaboration of Friedrich Hegel whose philosophy

of history teaches that human evolution or the becoming, the action of the Zeitgeist in

 

7"o.w.1~‘reidn'ch Hegel, 0n Art, Religion, Philosophy, 128.

66

Hegelian terms, leaves behind a residue as it progresses through time; he calls this
history.71 For Hegel, each successive culture, empire, dynasty--or any particular people -
who leave their mark on our present--deposits a bit of itself in the next. In the book On
Art, Religion, and Philosophy, Hegel writes,
The life of the ever-present spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments, which
looked at in one aspect still exist beside each other, and only as looked at from

another point of view appear as past. The grades which spirit seems to have left
behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present.72

Cultures in conflict have always retained attributes of both victor and vanquished.
In China, the barbarian Mongols of the North defeated the Chinese, but wholly adopted
the Chinese culture as their own while bringing with them their own unique cultural traits
and influence. Likewise, in Mesoamerica, the Mexico, who exploited the void left by the
fall of the Toltecs, adopted-the sedentary agrarian way of life and the Nahuatl language of
the peoples they began to conquer. This is the idea of the thesis and antithesis in conflict
which results in a resolution by which each has lost or shed the certain ostensibly less
perfect or less useful elements of its nature by learning from the experience of struggle
thereby creating a more perfect union. This is the synthesis that will ultimately become
diametrically opposed to yet another force, thus forming a new dialectic relationship and
so on. This theory requires that history is recorded and transmitted somehow, whether in
art, religion, philosophy, history or literature, etc.; from this is derived Hegel’s idea of
world historical peoples. .

The ultimate goal of Hegel’s model of polemic struggle is, if looked at in the

proper light, nearly the same as Bergson’s. It is the increasing complexity in our system

 

71Concepts taken from Hegel’s Philosophy of History.
72Gray, introduction to On Art, Religion, Philosophy, 10.

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of Knowledge, of evolution itself, which is ideally leading to true human liberation and
actualized freedom dubbed the Idea by Hegel. Via the action of the Zeitgeist, through
human creation and evolution, the Idea, or human liberation, will become actualized, i.e.
human beings will achieve self-realization, of being in-and-for'dtself as Hegel would term
it, or, for Bergson, human beings are able to intuit the duration of life, merging intellect
with intuition. Here it will be helpful to unify parts of the philosophies of Hegel and
Bergson. For Hegel the true is in the whole, and for Bergson the truth is in the duration.
In Hegel we can see a certain solidarity with Bergson. Glen writes of Hegel,

The true is the whole meant for [Hegel] that the apprehension of truth lies in
history. . .The true is a process, not a conclusion; spirit is not a substance, but an
activity. This deep-rooted conviction led Hegel to conceive philosophy and to an
almost equal extent, art and religion as the history of thought. The active being of
anything can be known only by knowing what it has been. 3

Furthermore, that which is true in thinking and in reality is discoverable only in
the union of the particular and the general (in the sense of genus or universal).
Hegel never confuses the general with the abstract, as we so frequently do. The
true is the concrete universal, that is, a grasping conceptually of the organic
togetherness of particular and universal the universal being the principle or
underlying source of the various particulars which flow from this source. The
truly concrete universal would be a totality of everything that is and has ever
been. But since such a level of concreteness is in fact, if not in theory, impossible
for mortals, it is necessary to content oneself with striving for a conceptual grasp
of ever-larger unities of particulars and universals.74

This concept of self-consciousness is when the individual perceiver, a relative
center of perception, becomes aware of the dependent circumstances which ensure the

environment in which the individual may express his freedom. Freedom in this sense is

not simply being allowed to do whatever you want to--this is essentially always the case--

 

73lbid., 9.
“1mm, 12-13.

68

not a freedom simply to do, rather it is freedom from those things which prevent its
realization, by subjecting yourself to a moral law. It is the liberation from racism, crime,
angst and so on. True freedom as such demands of us an intimate understanding of our
dependency on a shared context. For Bergson it is as imperative that all human beings
develop their natural ability to intuit the truth of reality as free-willed entities acting
within a web of dependent relationships, as it is for Hegel that we find truth in the union
of the particular and the universal. Orozco exemplifies what Bergson poetically
describes;
Artisans of our life, even artists when we so desire, we work continually, with the
material furnished us by past and present, by heredity and opportunity, to mold a
figure unique, new, original, as unforeseeable as the form given by the sculptor of
clay. Of this work and what there is unique about it we are warned, no doubt,
even while it is being done, but the essential thing is that we do it. It us up to us to
go deeply into it; it is not even necessary that we be fully conscious of it, any
more that the artist needs to analyze his creative ability; he leaves that to the
philosopher to worry about, being content, himself, simply to create.75
'Bergson’s philosophy states that everyone is naturally endowed with this intuitive
connection to duration as everyone is a product and part of it. His doctrine actively
admits that all philosophers, artists, playwrights, scientists, etc. have intuited the absolute
truth of duration--the flow of 1ife--to varying degrees, but how the individual perceiver is
able to express this contact is based completely on the pool of symbolic representations
accumulated by personal experience, creating a perspective of absolute uniqueness as a
relative center of perception. Implicit in this idea is that everyone has something to offer

to the world of possibility and the world of the real. It behooves us all to practice this

ability. It is the means by which we evolve and perfect the human spirit. Bergson writes,

 

75Bergson, Creative Mind, 110.

69

Philosophy stands to gain in finding some absolute in the moving world of
phenomenon. But we shall gain also in our feeling of greater joy and strength.
Greater joy because the reality invented before our eyes will give each one of us,
unceasingly, certain of the satisfactions which art at rare intervals procures for the
privileged; it will reveal to us, beyond the fixity and monotony which our senses,
hypnotized by our constant needs, at first perceived in it, ever-recurring novelty,
the moving originality of things. But above all we shall" have greater strength, for
we shall feel we are participating, creators of ourselves, in the great work of
creation which is the origin of all things and which goes on before our eyes. By
getting hold of itself, our faculty for acting will become intensified.76

This faculty for acting is the whole purpose of Hegel’s philosophy of history, for only he
“who comprehended the past by diligent study and by repeated efforts of the creative

imagination could lay claim to understanding the dominant forces of the present.”77

A Philosophy of History: The outer dialectic
It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and
ideas of their hearts, and fine art is frequently the key--with many nations there is
no other--to the understanding of their wisdom and their religion.

G. W. F. Hegel

Duality has been an elemental fact in human existence since the moment of
consciousness--man and woman, life and death, night and day, sun and moon, good and
evil. We see with two eyes and hear with two ears then process it in two halves of one
brain. From these basic and essential phenomena of human reality emerged our ancient
sources of wisdom. The concept of duality has been at the root of all the world's great

religions and philosophies.78 Cultures the world-over have adopted a perspective based

 

“mid.

"Gray, introduction to On Art, Religion, Philosophy, 10.

78In the Hindu tradition Shiva and Parvati form one complete God. The power he possesses as creator
and destroyer may be used for either, for one actually implies the other. The destructive force is a filling of
the earth which invites rebirth and rejuvenation. We see the Yin and Yang in the Chinese cosmology
representing masculine and feminine, the two opposing forces from which everything has come and
through which everything flows. In Africa, the Yoruba people believe in a,spiritual force known as ashe.

70

in duality. It is in the opposition, the duality or the dialectic, of man’s nature that the
catalyst for change, progress, and evolution exists. And it is through the nature of the
dialectic that universality exists in all men. Friedrich Hegel revised and secularized
religious dogma through a modern re-conception based in reaSon, logically and rationally
constructing a meaning and an ideal for humanity. His theory of the dialectic is the broad
platform from which all here-to-fore Western philosophy springs. In working out his
theory of the dialectic, Hegel constructs a Philosophy of History that breaks down all of
human development into a simple process of collision between opposites. The thesis and
the antithesis conflict with one another creating a synthesis of the two whereby the most
prominent traits of each are retained, while also elevating the awareness of its own
existence.

The Spirit, devouring its worldly envelope, not only passes into another envelope,

not only arises rejuvenated from the ashes of its embodiment, but it emerges from
them exalted, transfigured, a purer Spirit.79

The synthesis is thereby relieved of weaker and presumably less desirable attributes,
however not immune to them. What results is a wider consciousness in having learned
from experience.

Hegel's theory makes grasping the seemingly chaotic evolution of human history
a matter of logical and necessary design, that is, necessary to achieve true human
freedom. Each individual (each particular subjective mind) belongs to and helps to

define the essence of his culture, community, people, race, etc. This is the concept of the

 

This is the force of the universe has a neutral ambivalence that may be manipulated for good or evil. In
fact the entire culture is based on an ideal civil balance being achieved and sustained. In Christianity, the
polarity of heaven and hell underline its entire philosophy. This idea of duality also exists in Meso-
American religious ideology with the idea of cyclic change in which can be seen a unity of past and future
events.

79Hegel, 0n Art, Religion, Philosophy, 79.

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Volkgeist (literally folk-spirit), the identity of a people endlessly adapting and advancing
as the dialectic dictates. The ultimate goal of this struggle borne by humanity is seen as
the achievement of self-consciousness of the Zeitgeist (the spirit of time), i.e. attaining a
self-conscious identity; this is when each individual is aware of his place in space and
time as part of a whole--as an intricate piece of a human organism and a reflection of the
universal in humanity, when each subjective agent immanently comprehends himself as
struggling towards the goal of each and every person, towards a human goal of freedom.

Within this paradigm every historical event, epoch and evolution can be
deciphered, all as necessary and good, for the good of all ensuing generations. Only with
the passage of time can the conflicts occur that ultimately would shape the evolution of
thought in humanity. The world community expands; it encounters itself; it wars and
commits atrocities; it wipes out cultures in the name of religion or by pure human greed.
But this race of beings also consistently teaches itself and is constantly being reminded
and informed of what is right and wrong, good and evil, truth and lie. It is only as we
historically encounter the questions of existence that we might progress. Our existence
can be neither easily nor quickly reckoned. Just as the trial in ones own life nurture
wisdom and learning, the conflict in human past and present feeds the consciousness of
those who will follow tomorrow.

Understanding the theory of the dialectic is always most vivid and easily achieved
by example, by its application to world historical events and its progressive embodiment,
which is what Orozco has done in his murals. The system of dialectical theory is found
manifest in its most beautiful and essential form as the most basic human social structure.

Man, woman and child represent the most eloquent example of two opposing “forces”

72

combining into a perfectly synthesized composite, drawing from the best each has to
offer as genetic inheritance. The fruits of the loins are, however, only one half of the gift
presented to our children. It is the gift of wisdom and knowledge and tradition that truly
connects the circle of a “well-rounded” individual. It is the gift of identity. A child
raised by loving parents, within a strong community, will be imparted with the
knowledge and wisdom and strengths of each. Within a child lives also the essence of
two individuals. This concept can be applied to the process in which humanity is
imparted with an ever-higher level of consciousness from its antecedents, finally filling in
the full identity of man.

The immanent realization about which Hegel and Marx write is the conclusion to
humanity's quest for discovering and remaining conscious of its identity. Marx would
say this is the state of being in which the present dominates the past, when people have
demanded “to give up a condition which needs illusions.”80 Paradox is implicit in this
process, as it develops in two realms. It is an individual inner struggle that is in absolute
control, yet utterly at the mercy, of the outer social struggle of humanity as a whole.
Each realm is mutually dependent upon the other, for the spiritual health of an individual
needs the defining strength of culture, of background and of communion. Conversely,
one cannot hope to have a strong and healthy “national” identity, a Volkgeist, if the
identities of those comprising it are vague, fragmented or confused.

Conflict between tribes, peoples and nations has forever been burning away the

old to make fertile soil for the new. A Phoenix has always emerged rising from the ashes

 

80Karl Marx, excerpt from “Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” in Man: and Engels,
Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S Feuer (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books,
Doubleday and Company, Inc. 1959), 263. The illusion Marx refers to here is that of religion’s “illusory”
happiness, the abolition of which is required for “real” happiness.

73

of human conflict. Seen in the colonial age of Mexico, a most violent and awesome
display of the dialectic at work, two alien worlds are thrust into a bloody SOD-year quest
for assimilation. The history of Mexico is the most remarkable and successful resolution
of cultural confrontation from the colonial age.

The story of Mexico is unique in many ways. Prior to Spanish colonization, the
peoples of Mesoamerica had evolved a cultural tradition of immense power and depth.
Mesoamerica produced a series of highly complex and prolific civilizations. Like Greece
or Rome to Northern Europe, the pinnacle of Pre-Columbian social organization rested
primarily in Mesoamerica. With the Spanish arrival came the immediate mixing of races.
Malinche, the Tlaxcalan woman who divulged the legend of Quetzalcoatl to the Spanish,
and Cortés, conqueror of the Aztec Empire, stand as symbolic of this primary collision.
They were truly the Adam and Eve of Mexico. Here, unlike anywhere else in the
Americas, raged a clash of two dominant cultures meeting face to face locked together in
a feverish battle to the finish, on a direct path to its resolution. Cortés and Malinche gave
'birth to a child that has taken a half millennium to reach adolescence.

With the Mexican Revolution and the 20th Century muralist movement, Mexico
finally reached the point of self-consciousness, of Mexicanidad, an emerging awareness
of the self-defined Mexican Volkgeist. Paz says the “Mexican Revolution was the
discovery of Mexico by Mexicans. . .the Revolution revealed Mexico to us.” The frescoes
of José Clemente Orozco present the clearest image to contemporary viewers of the
fundamental dialectic engineering involved in the five centuries of construction requisite

for fusing (while diversifying) a dynamic new culture. Orozco, like contemporary

74

cubists, Braque, Stella, or Picasso for example, broke down reality into its most basic

ingredients, an intellectual endeavor.81

Unlike them, however, he gave revealing,
timeless truths of universal application in scenes of disturbing expressive realism.
Whereas the cubists were interested purely in the visual representation of vital forms,
Orozco chose consciously to dissect society intuitively, to expose social reality in its
truest universal light. He took the complexity of his world and in extraordinary
simplicity reflected back to his people their own tortured souls.

Orozco is not suggesting that the self-realization of the mestizo consciousness
equates to achieving absolute freedom. On the contrary, he is amplifying his message
that it is but a new beginning, a new cycle, the next stage, etc. Life is movement and one
must continually fight against the complacency, the apathy, the misanthropy, the
oppression and the recalcitrance of ideological, intellectual and institutional atrophy and

deceit. Orozco believed like Bergson that revolution is a continuous process that

ultimately leads to true freedom.

Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic

In the Phenomenology of Spirit Friedrich Hegel describes the organic
development of human consciousness. For Hegel humans are beings the desire to master
objects in our physical and living environment. In its first stage human self-
consciousness is aware of objects through a desire to consume or master them, to
incorporate or destroy them, to negate them in order to assert its own existence and
satisfy bodily needs. This will-to-mastery is the basis for the second stage of

consciousness in which the self is confronted by another. In this meeting the “principle

 

81Bergson attributes human intellect with the purpose of dividing up the seamless flow of reality.

75

of negation,” the human desire to assert its selfhood through destroying or mastering,
presents what Hegel calls the “struggle unto death.” Each independent self is attempting
to destroy the other, to assert its being, however, since the object before him is also
conscious, killing the other leaves no concrete affirmation of his existence. The self finds
that it must instead master the opposing consciousness which has the capacity to
acknowledge and express awareness of its defeat and reaffirm the master’s self. Hegel
wrote that in the course of human development two opposing forms of consciousness
emerge, “one, the independent consciousness, to which being-for-itself is the essence;
and the other, the dependent consciousness, to which life or being for another is the
essence,”82 the master and the servant.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is an attempt to construct a history of human
consciousness, the history of human thought. Civilization, or what he calls the “nation-
state,” is a reflection of the ideal, the absolute in a state of becoming. For Hegel, each
civilization that emerges develops through these stages until historical circumstances
bring its own destruction. But the spirit persists through the historical evidence it leaves
behind. So history might be seen as progressive steps of consciousness. The third stage
of consciousness forms a Master/Servant relationship. The master has realized that to
make a slave of the other is greater in satisfaction than to kill him. The servant is
necessary to the identity of the master. They have formed a relationship of mutual
recognition and therefore of dependence.

Objects are the medium through which this relationship and consciousness

 

82G. F. W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1994), 177.

76

evolve, as objects and the desire or need to master them were the genesis of human
consciousness, and are therefore symbolic proof of the master’s dominance over the
servant. The master enjoys the object of desire by using it, consuming it. He disposes of
the object by negating it and in the process reaffirms his own being. The thing is enjoyed
without acknowledging its independence, for he does not see from the perspective of the
servant who has produced the object and consequently had to let it go. The servant sees
the thing as independent, lasting and enduring. The master has therefore placed the truth
of the certainty of himself in the object produced by the inessential consciousness of the
servant. Conversely, for the servant, truth is in the master, or the independent
consciousness existing for itself. The master negates the object through enjoyment of its
use or consumption; the servant negates the object through work. There is no concrete
truth left for the master when the object is consumed. For the servant, work has the
negating power and the object has independent being, endurance, which means that the
truth has also these qualities. It is the consciousness that works, that attains as a
consequence, a view of independent being as itself.

The master derives great satisfaction for his sense of self in no longer needing to
dominate objects directly, but rather in delegating to another that menial task. The master
plays no part in the actual mastery of matter. Objects are given to him already
transformed by the human hand. He has been cut off from that human activity which first
formed his consciousness. In turn, it is the servant who must develop and discover means
to manipulate matter and objects. Through this process it is the servant which is gaining

a true sense of self-awareness. It is the servant who finds true freedom. It is Hegel’s

77

relationship of matter and labor that is the basis for Marx’s Communism. Although Marx
rejected Hegel’s “bourgeois” dialectic idealism, his dialectic materialism accepts this
methodology as the basis for his class struggle; it is the proletariat, the workers who will
achieve true self-consciousness and establish a state of Communism.

“The master never knows truth; if consciousness fashions, or forms, without the
initial fear, it is merely a vain sense of self; for its form or negativity is no negativity in
itself; and its fashioning cannot therefore give it the consciousness of itself as the
essence.”83 Being in the position of the master does not allow for the recognition
necessary to achieve freedom and true self-realization. Only through subjection, through
work and improvement, can consciousness overcome the initial absolute fear, and thus
become truth and find freedom.

Once this is achieved, that is, once freedom and truth have been established as a
universal egalitarian ideal (philosophically), a final stage in consciousness is achieved,
that of reason. A new inner struggle emerges from which stream a perpetual flood of
social ills. Hegel and Bergson believe it is necessary to achieve and maintain self-
consciousness of these ideas. Bergson’s philosophy--often accused of being more poetic
than practical--is an attempt to make legible the process by which an individual can be
led astray, deceived by intellect and ideology, and then submersed in a sphere of
stagnation, destined to repeat over and again the mistakes and setbacks that might
otherwise have been retrieved from memory as an instrument of insight-tumed-into-
action, to more successfully navigate life’s demands.

In colonial Mexico we can see the sources for the crisis in the Mexican identity.

 

83Ibid., 180.

78

The depth of Orozco’s understanding of these past events is what enables him to see the
present as concrete reality. His philosophic conception of history, identity, and freedom
is as complete and comprehensive as that of Hegel, Marx or Bergson. I agree completely
with Paz’s assertion that,

Orozco’s icon, which contains its own negation, is not a god or an idea but a

reality at once present here and now and eternal, universal, and concrete, a reality
in perpetual struggle against itself.84

 

“Paz, Essays, 179.

Chapter 5

OROZCO: ART AND AUTHENTICITY

Orozco remains arguably one of the New World’s greatest artists. One of those
rare “world historical figures,” Orozco transcends his place and time. Endowed with the
gift of turning fallacy transparent, Orozco exhibits traits possessed by another remarkable
figure, Francisco Goya. Considered by many to be the father of modern painting, Goya
was engaged in a campaign to free his people from the oppression of ignorance and
superstition by translating in the visual imagery of the artist, the true and simple reality of
his world. In many ways Orozco was facing an extension of the same unresolved and
exacerbated issues that plagued Goya. For late eighteenth century Spain, the dialectic
was at work in the forces of revolution across Europe in the clash of Neo-Classicism and
Romanticism, of monarchy versus democracy, and of religion against philosophy and
science. It was an era of great turbulence and wondrous intellectual achievement.

A century later, revolution was still actively rising up against similar ills in
Mexico. The oppression of a nameless, faceless people was being combated on several
fronts. Unification of the Mexican people was an intricate part of this struggle for
freedom and humanity. Orozco saw this task as his undeniable destiny; to create a
monumental people's art with which to transfer his insight to the disenfranchised in
unmistakable language. He brought to Mexicans the tremendous strength of his character

and pride, something from which all Mexicans could draw to seal the cracks in their

79

80

fractured identities. His dedication to seeking truth and expressing it through painting
demanded a strict detachment from the political merry-go-round of the first half of the
twentieth century. In the opinion of Fernandez,

It would be wrong to interpret Orozco’s work as limited to political interests. No,
his great soul, free and generous, knew how to look beyond the immediate
circumstance, which was for him only the means to see the deeper and universal
human reality.“

Marx and Hegel

Karl Marx used the idea of the Master/Servant Dialectic as the basis for his
Communist philosophy. The servant workers were the proletariat, the masses who
would, once they achieved an awareness themselves and their collective oppression,
revolt against the capitalist masters. Marx adamantly refutes Hegel’s dialectic idealism
in favor of a dialectical materialism.

‘My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct
opposite. To Hegel, the life—process of the brain, i.e., the process of thinking,
which under the name of the idea, he even transforms into an independent subject,
is the demiurgos (creator) of the real world, and the real world is only the
external, phenomenal form of the idea. With me on the contrary the idea is
nothing else that the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated
into forms of thought. With Hegel (the dialectic) is standing on its head. It must
be turned rightside up again.’ In other words, Marx found, in history of the
material world of our senses and our working conditions, the source of ideas and
the source of conflict and change rather than seeing in the human history of ideas
and thought those same sources.86

Insofar as these two philosophies are dialectically opposed it seems logical to
assume that a synthesis of the two is likely; or perhaps better said, various views that

synthesize the poles of Hegel and Marx may be constructed. And I believe that Orozco

 

85 Fernandez, Orozco, University of Guadalajara, 36.
86Roy C. Macridis, Contemporary Political Ideologies: Movements and Regimes, 4th ed. (Boston: Scott,
Forseman and Company, Fourth Edition, 1989), 120.

81

and Bergson provide a basis for that synthesis. These two realms are so tightly
interconnected that neither has sole dominion over the other. This is exactly what
Bergson’s philosophy is all about, dispelling the belief that any philosophic system is
complete, that they all are actually only partial manifestations of truth.

The outer social sphere, one’s culture or “nation-state” is a mirror of the human
mind. Just as the need for revolution and revolutionary figures exists in the social
context, the need for revolution of one’s own ideological basis must also be able to break
the old mold and create new ones, or risk personal ossification. Orozco’s is a united view
of Marx and Hegel’s philosophic view of history. For from Hegel’s point of view the
world is an evolution of the battle of ideas, the history of thought. Marx at the other end
of the telescope believes it is the phenomenal world, the material reality of social
relationships that reveals the fallacy of our perceptions. And like Marx, Orozco and
Bergson accepted Hegel’s method and went a step further.

Bergson was the first to try to give the term intuition a scientific basis. He

transformed and regrounded the static pattern of the older forms of intuitionism

by giving it a biogenetic and psychologically dynamic justification. Intuitive
knowledge is not limited to the few, is not a private, purely solipsistic affair; but
is a general property of all thinking minds. Bergson’s conception of intuition
represents a fusion of scientific objectivity and artistic directness.87

I do not believe that Orozco was anti-Marxist, he was rather certain that the
contemporary application of Marxist theory, and the political demon it engendered,
namely Stalin, were too far removed from the present reality to ever succeed. Marx died
the year Orozco was born, and by the nineteen thirties, when the cycle at Guadalajara was

painted, it was clear that Communism, as the last stage in human social relations, was no

where near occurring. It was also clear the imposition of a temporary pre-Communist

 

87The Dictionary ofPhilosophy, ed. Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1942), 37.

82

state, as seen in Russia, was becoming just as oppressive as the capitalist bourgeois ruling
class the proletariat was feverishly attempting to destroy.

Bergson and Orozco believe that it is through the individual who is able not only
to be aware conceptually of the traps of ideology in society, but who also has the power
to shatter the glass house of their intellect, and, with an intuitive grasp of duration,
rebuild it. But that they should also constantly glimpse through the one-way mirror of the
soul to their collective sources of identity, as one’s social environment is the basis for the
individual and one’s freedom to act. Once again Fernandez eloquently describes
Orozco’s philosophy,

His unique and explicit theme is man here and now, a concrete individual, for he

knew that to be a man is to be an individual, to take his own and personal

responsibility and live, being consumed by fire. There is no need to say that he
was not concerned with the isolated individual except in necessary relations with
others and with all that constitutes his historic (real) world. Those who detest this

individualism hope for others to save them or consume them, either to burn or to
save humanity. Orozco condemned himself to movement.88

Another component of Hegel’s philosophy that Orozco seems to be in agreement
with is his idea of the “nation-state.” Hegel believed that an egalitarian democracy set up
in mutually beneficial relationships with other styles of democratic or republic city- or
nation-states would provide the best environment in which to foster self-consciousness
and to find freedom. Implicit in this is the role of diversity, and the importance of
cultural, ethnic and traditional sources of identity. Orozco’s art is an attempt to build the
idea of a Mexican nation, of a mestizo identity by bringing those sources to light. Even
Marx admitted that the revolution of the proletariat might be averted in certain

democratic systems of government, as Macridis has pointed out,

 

88Fernandez, Orozco, University of Guadalajara, 44.

83

It is true that at times Marx wavered, and Engels did even more so. On occasions

they both conceded that it was possible for well-established democracies, in

which the parliamentary system and universal franchise had gained deep root

where in other words the superstructure was genuinely democratic to radically

transform property relations and socialize the means of production.89

Comparing Hegel’s ideas with those presented in Orozco’s murals seems best
adapted for the purposes of a philosophical analysis. Hegel, the father of modern
dialectics, is appropriate on many levels. Marx was a Hegelian philosopher, and since his
Communist philosophy is the most important influence on the work of the muralists,
particularly of Rivera and Siqueiros, the contrast of Hegel and Marx elucidates many of
the distinctions between Orozco and his two peers. Orozco knew, as did Rivera and
Siqueiros, that the reality of Communism in the Soviet Union was pale in comparison to
its stated political and social objectives. Paz points out that both, Rivera and Siqueiros,
must have been keenly aware that the artistic freedom each had with respect to both

subject and content would never have been allowed in Russia. This is one such element

of hypocrisy that elevates the authentic value of Orozco’s art above the other two.90

The “Tres Grandes”
Orozco began to distance himself from Rivera and Siqueiros shortly after the

Syndicate of Painters was established in 1922.91 Because the latter two so completely

embraced an ideology the former could not accept, Orozco positioned himself in

 

89Macridis, Contemporary Political Ideologies, 120.

90Rivera (a long time Trotskyite) and Siqueriros (a steadfast Stalinist) supported an ideological system
that was clearly oppressive as practiced in the Soviet Union, yet continued to extol the virtues Soviet
Communism despite this fact.

mAll three artists were among the founding members of the union of Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors
and Engravers, also referred to as the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. It was a
collective of allied, progressive-minded artists who advocated a new kind of social art through cooperation,
while opposing the rich elite, the bourgeois intellectuals, and the racist tyrants who came in and out of
office in organized efforts of creative subversion, public awareness and, often, Communist propaganda.

84

opposition to Rivera and Siqueiros, and by extension in opposition to Marxism. I am
suggesting here that Orozco consciously realized that his work was in many ways the
antithesis of Rivera’s and Siqueiros’s and knew that his work would remain an alternative
perspective of Mexican historical development. Octavio Paz’s essay on Mexican
muralism provides the most succinct description of the differences between the Tres
Grandes.
Rivera was a painter who possessed many resources, but in my opinion he was an
academic painter. His Cubism came from outside, and the same can be said of his
other manners and styles. His art does not spring from within himself. In Rivera
there is ability, great ability, at times mastery, unquestionable talent, but never, or
almost never, passion. Exterior painting, the diametrical opposite of Orozco’s.
Rivera was an eclectic artist who combined several manners. Instead of
inventing, he adapted and combined styles, sometimes with great dexterity.92
As other people are necessary to the understanding of oneself, Rivera provided an
antithesis, an example of what Orozco was not. Rivera, simply by being who he was,
clearly inspired Orozco to work ever more diligently, to negate the impression Rivera
might give the world of Mexican art and identity. A letter dated 23 February, 1928,
Orozco wrote to Jean Carlot while in New York expresses his contempt for Rivera and
his disgust with the pleasant critical response Rivera’s work received in the US.
Referring to him as Diegoff Riveritch Romanoff, Orozco warns Charlot that the
“potentate” Rivera represents a threat to Mexican painters,
. . .the idea that we are all his disciples is very well entrenched here. To talk about
“Indians,” “revolution,” “Mexican renaissance,” “folk arts,” “retablos,” etc., etc.,
is to talk about Rivera...The “syndicate,” (?) and “proletariat,” Max. Pacheco,

“agrarian reformists,” etc., etc., all those words are synonyms of Diegoff...93

In short, Orozco believed that Rivera’s work represented not more than an eclectic, but

 

92Paz, Essays, 118.

85

overly simple, folk art tied to a hollow understanding of Marxist philosophy.

As Hegel’s Master Slave dialectic demonstrates, self-consciousness and freedom
come through individual labor, the personal mastery and manipulation of matter. One’s
work is a reflection of one’s self. Orozco’s art is exceptional‘precisely because it is
wholly a part of his being. It was not compromised by political associations, nor was it
watered-down by an incomplete awareness of the self. Orozco’s art is an organic
extension, an immortal extension of his mortal existence. This is the “authentic” quality
of his work that Paz cites to distinguish Orozco from Rivera and Siqueiros. Paz wrote in

Essays on Mexican Art,

The Russian Dawn, as Waldo Frank called it, brought enlightenment to many
consciences in 1924. In accordance with the logic of every millenarianism, a
group of Mexican artists shared in those years of a portentous experience: being
witnesses to and actors in the Change of Times. Only the divinatory gaze of

- Orozco perceived, with terrifying clarity, the true reality of the awesome dawn;
the other two, Siqueiros and Rivera, became converts to the new idolatry.“

Octavio Paz seems to be the first historian to discover that it “is not possible to

judge the anarchic Orozco and two ideological artists such as Rivera and Siqueiros by the

”95

same criterion. What separates Orozco from the younger two muralists is what Paz

describes as authenticity. In a single paragraph Paz reduces the dynamic relationship of
the T res Grandes to its essential elements:

Those works that call themselves revolutionary and that, in the case of Rivera and
Siqueiros, give proof of a simplistic and Manichaean Marxism, were
commissioned, sponsored, and paid for by a government that had never been
Marixist and that had ceased to be revolutionary. The government allowed artists
to paint on the walls of government buildings a pseudo-Marxist version of the
history of Mexico, in black and white, because such painting helped to give it the
look of being progressive-minded and revolutionary. Populist and progressivist
nationalism has been the mask of the Mexican state. As for Rivera and Siqueiros:

 

93Charlot, The Artist in New York: Letters to Jean Charlot and Unpublished Writings, [925-1929, 40
9"Paz, Essays, 147.
951bid., 131.

86

they couldn’t have helped but realize that in Mexico they could paint with an
independence that they never could have had in Russia. Hence there was a dual
complicity, that of government administrations and that of artists. Here again I
must make an exception for Orozco. He was the most rebellious and the most
independent of these artists; he was probably also the best of them. An
impassioned, sarcastic, and religious spirit, he was never the prisoner of an
ideology: he was the prisoner of himself. His contradictory and vehement genius
made him fall at times into a melodramatic rhetoric, but at other times it sheds
radiant light on his work and lends it a moving authenticity.96

Orozco’s Politics

The productive imagination of the artist is the imagination of a great mind
and heart, the apprehension and creation of ideas and of shapes, indeed,
the exhibition of the profoundest and most universal human interests in the
definite sensuous mould of pictorial representation.

G. F. W. Hegel

That Orozco considered himself an apolitical individual has often been a source of
critical debate. He wrote in his autobiography that “no artist has, or ever has had,
political convictions of any sort. Those who profess to have them are not artists.”97 This
should not be construed to mean that he did not have a personal philosophy, or
convictions, or opinions. Shifra Goldman correctly pointed this out in her book
Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change, but she went on to say;

At the same time, Orozco had the typical fear of the bourgeoisie confronted by the

masses. To him, they were a blind destructive force that might be utterly barbaric

if not checked. Orozco found no redeemers or creative spirits in the lower depths

of humanity. There is no dialectical interaction in his works, as there is in
Rivera’s, between the people and the great men of history. In this sense Orozco is

 

”Ibid., 132.

”This statement has been reproduced in almost every book and article on Orozco, in full, or in part.
Fernandez responds: “To his authentic liberal sense of human existence corresponds his politics as well;
ever truthful, he hated lies and farce, never offered aspirins, and so he could lay about him lustily both left
and right. For this reason some have taken him for a destructive anarchist or for a contradictory and
negative spirit One could say that his ideal was Freedom for the Truth, for there can be nothing higher
though more difficult, more expressive of his absolute good faith. Liberty and creative action in art were
something more that symbols for him; he was never brutalized by politics and only a few understood what
he was trying to say when he stated, ‘Artists do not have nor have ever had political convictions of any sort
and those who believe that they have them, are not artists.’ Orozco is an exemplary case of liberty, of the
kind that one creates for himself, which he takes, and which he made, and for this (therefore) on seeing his
works, the spirit moves freely and goes on through the anguish and horror of this world, consumed by fire,
forgetting the body.” Fernandez, “Orozco: Genius of America,” 144.

87

Nietzchean. The people are led toward the light unwillingly; they quarrel among
themselves in the process. The victims shake their fists toward the heavens in
existential despair. Orozco could not, like Rivera and Siqueiros, put aside the
middle-class attitudes into which all three had been born and identify himself with
their kind of heroic working-class figure.98

Although I agree with her conclusion that he does indeed have “theories,
opinions, and a moral position,” I must confess my bewilderment with her
characterization. It seems almost laughable to contend that Orozco was unable to “put
aside middle-class attitudes” while using Rivera in contrast as someone who could (only
when it worked to his advantage). Had she said Orozco was unable to put aside
“bourgeois idealism,” I might be inclined to agree. If any of the Tres Grandes are to be
labeled bourgeois, it is most definitely the immodest and opportunistic Diego Rivera,
regardless of his hollow advocacy of Communism; for Orozco, Rivera was one of the
“false leaders” he fervently attacked in word, painting, and deed. Furthermore Orozco
completely denied the validity and efficacy of Communism as a political strategy, and
therefore also rejected the ideological poster-child of Marxism, the working-class figure.
Goldman also says that Orozco “found no redeemers or creative spirits in the lower-
depths of humanity.” I find this a serious misrepresentation of the man and his work.
Consider in contrast the words of Luis Cardoza y Aragon;

He loved his people and their customs; he loved nature; he identified with his own

country and his own kind, with their pains and sorrows, simply and bravely,

without standing in any way aloof from them. The great spirit of Mexico filled all
his sails; his words would tumble out in a torrent and his eyes would grow moist
whenever he talked of his country. Then that hasty, dry man would become eager
child, soaked in fervor, speaking of all that Mexico has suffered and what it must

always be, the everlastingness of its profile: he loved his people, in grief or
happiness, the people themselves, just the way they were.99

 

98Shifra M. Goldman, Contemporary Mexican painting in a Time of Change (Austin and London:
University of Texas Press, 1981), 14.

99Luis Cardoza y Aragon, “Notes for a Portrait,” introduction to Jose Clemente Orozco (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Losada, 1944), 9.

88

Orozco did not speak idle rhetoric in his works. He did not attempt to use his art
as propaganda supporting an already corrupt ideology. Rivera was the epitome of the
very bourgeois attitudes that the proletariat was supposed to be rising up against. His
lifestyle, without going into any detail, clearly represents the type of self-absorbed
decadence bourgeois culture had been accused of.

Goldman further states that “there exists no dialectical interaction in his works, as
there is in Rivera’s, between the people and the great men of history.” Again I am
confounded. The extent to which Orozco’s work is dialectic has been, as demonstrated
earlier, a ubiquitous and fundamental component in analyses of his work. His art is
precisely that, a portrait of the dialectical relationship between the revolutionaries, the
subsequent false leaders and those who suffer under them. He was simply not convinced
that Stalin, for example, is necessarily a “great man of history” as evidenced by his
School of Social Research mural which depicts a portrait of the revolutionary Lenin, and
his ideological successors--one of whom is Stalin.100 I would argue that it is indeed his
abiding faith in the masses led by a righteous leader that sustained his artistic endeavors.
Unfortunately, all leaders are not primarily concerned with the welfare of their followers.

Lastly, Goldman states that Orozco is in a sense Nietzchean, that the “people are
led toward the light unwillingly.” Again, I believe Goldman has misread Orozco’s work,
for the artist saw his people as naturally being already in the light. It is the ideology of

the “great men of history,” distorted by the false leaders, that is responsible for leading

 

looStalin is shown below the portrait of Lenin, marching closest to the viewer in rank and file with other
“party types.” Stalin is thus shown as the frontrunner of the demagogues vying for power after Lenin’s
death. Ghandi, and several other individual figures are also depicted, surrounded by several smaller figures.

89

them astray, for preventing them from realizing they are actually “light” themselves. In
this case I must agree with Fernandez when he says:
For some short-sighted persons, his work has a negative emphasis, because their
attention is fixed on its wretched aspects and they do not see the sublime, vital
and positive features it contains. Orozco’s greatness consists in his sharp
conscience, in his intuition of what is real, and in his prodigious creative artistic
capacity.101
Although rather idiosyncratic, Orozco was a man of truly impeccable character, a
man of sincere modesty and a man tortured by images of his people's self-destruction.
His philosophy of life could not be party to any of the ill-fated political factions of his
contemporary Mexico. N o allegiance could be made to either of the extremes that
fluctuated in and out of power because none could ever get past the issue of race and
revenge. In his autobiography, Orozco describes the situation in his contemporary
Mexico:
Like victims of amnesia we haven't found out who we are. We go on classifying
.ourselves as Indians, Creoles and mestizos, following blood lines only, as if we
were discussing race horses, and the effect of the classification is to divide us into
immacable partisan groups, the Hispanists and the Indigenists, who war to the
death.102
Orozco remained outside of that myopic mentality while painting his walls of
mirror. This being understood, the art of this great master is unambiguous and
passionately overflowing with meaning. Orozco was not exclusively anti-revolution, not
anti-Indian, nor anti-Spanish, rather he sought to learn from these histories and
experiences in order to help heal and understand the present, and further to establish an

ideal for Mexico’s future. He was a man of fantastic perspective who tirelessly warned

of the dangers posed by ideology tainted by simplistic interpretation and criticism. “In

 

101Fernandez, Orozco, University of Guadalajara, 36.
mJose Clemente Orozco, An Autobiography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 104.

90

many respects Orozco espoused a philosophy of human conduct that demanded of
political leaders a broad humanism.”103 Seated high above the chaos that surrounded
him, existence and outlook were not confined to his environment or orientation, for
Orozco had an overarching world-view. He was concerned solely with rooting out in
visual form the essence of the unjust and capricious activities of man, removing the veil
of ignorance and resignation of the oppressed to glimpse the divine in man. His work is
an assault on the senses which challenges and exposes the wanton, greedy nature of a
society whose ideals have been corrupted by the pursuit of a few for self-gain.

The history of Mexico is a story of epic importance. Orozco saw the world as
slave to the issue of race. The history of man had been but one story of barbarism told
time and time again. He speaks of the pride all races have “in the extreme.” “The racial
thesis, or theory, when applied to the exclusion of any other, works serious harm.”104
Trapped in a gravity of infinitely destructive orbits, each offended race awaits “a day of
revenge, which may come sooner or later, without fail, and then the victims of yesterday
will be the victors of tomorrow.”105 In his, Mexico, Orozco saw a nation that had
accomplished nearly nothing on the issue of race in 400 years of bitter, bloody conflict.
All people in his homeland were, for him, still chained to the wall that separated the
established racial hierarchy. Orozco continues,

At any given moment the Conquest looms more immediate than the forays of

Pancho Villa. The attack upon the Great Teocalli, the Noche Triste, and the

destruction of Tenochtitlan did not take place early in the sixteenth century, but
just last year.106

 

103Joyce Waddell Bailey, “Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949): Formative Years in the Narrative
Gragahic Tradition,” latin American Research Review 15:3 (1980): 79.

l Orozco, Autobiography, 30.

‘°’lbid., 107.

"”Ibid.

91

In Mexico we see an allegory of man's history. It is the universal struggle of
humanity to overcome a most essential and complex dilemma, racism. Here, again, we
face paradox. It is our pride of race that has nurtured human magnificence. In the
modern world race or ethnicity have established an identity With which to contrast and
define the individual, employing skills and experience which liberate the mind to expose
man's reason and creativity to evolution and enlightenment, even at the expense or
exclusion of other races. At some point, however, this necessary racial basis transforms
into humankind's greatest dilemma. The catalyst becomes constrictor. The final step to
the next stage of development is the most difficult challenge posed to humanity. What
Orozco so poignantly depicts in his murals is the nature of Mexico's unfolding, the
paradox of human existence resolving itself in an ever-widening context. We glimpse
within the particular event our universal condition.

Orozco was a man with a philosophy of life, a life ethic. The politics of
contemporaneous Mexico were of no use to him. He held a high standard for himself that
he felt should extend to each individual. He did not profess one thing and perform
another. Upon reading dozens of biographical sketches one thing becomes apparent, the
absolute sincerity of this artist undeniable. No political ideology or agenda is to be found
within his art, as is so overtly found filling the work of both Diego Rivera and Siqueiros.
With these latter two muralists, one needs to know the doctrine of Communism to fully
understand or critique the meaning of their works. Orozco’s art requires no such
background, as it is not tied to ideology, but to an ideal.

However passionately he felt he makes no personal revelations, either in paint or

print. He does not participate in recrirnination or in resentment on a personal

basis; his feelings were much more abstract, and he took positions based on
principle rather than become involved personally in the issue. Orozco, like

92

Balzac, saw a vast human comedy, gay and diverting, but one on which he takes
no editorial position.107

Orozco's pride and self-confidence are the pillars of his strength. This is precisely
what he saw as lacking in his people, a foundation on which to employ their individual
and collective power. Orozco drew upon the sources of his strength, his family, his
heritage and his environment. Knowing himself to be, as a true Mexican man, the
product of two worlds, he was both proud of and disturbed by the origins of his being.
He came to see the revolution, and perhaps all revolution, as the apocalyptic sentence
each civilization must serve for past misdeeds and dereliction of duties to self and to
others. This notion is expressed in sensual form on the dome at Hospicio Cabanas, in
Guadalajara. Mexico served as a real life purgatory where the sins of the reborn were to
be incinerated by the cleansing fire of transcendence before passing into the final fusion
of what Vasconcelos called the Cosmic Race. In the violent turmoil of the dialectic,
synthesis sheds the failures and offenses of both cultures thereby liberating the newly.
emerging Mexicans from that which had forever enslaved their ancestors.

Orozco's politics, if they must be defined, are dialectical and idealist in nature.
Were be pushing a platform, it would espouse that the Mexican people rise above their
narrow perspectives, and behold their magnificence and potential. They must celebrate
the past as a path from which all have emerged, wiser and more self-aware than any
culture yet known to man, for they are a liberated race, the race who would inherit a new
reign of the thirteen heavens as established by the return of Quetzalcoatl. For Orozco,
the conquest and the revolution were the fulfillment of this prophesy, the necessary

obliteration of the barbaric tendencies of each race, of the human race. Quetzalcoatl

 

‘mlbid. introduction, xxii.

93

vowed to return in the skin of a white man. And, it may be said, he did return, first as
Cortés, then as Jesus, as Spaniard and as Catholic. Quetzalcoatl is the Mexican
Prometheus, once again bringing enlightenment, and the gift of transcendent
consciousness.

His view of what might be, were his people to finally embrace who they are rather
than trying to destroy what they believe they are not, is the climatic scene depicted in the
dome of the Cabanas chapel. Here are Orozco's philosophy, his politics and his hope.
Here he turns the lessons of the past into the actualization of Mexico's potential future
splendor, and, indeed, the true majesty of the human-race. It must be kept in mind that
anything Orozco wants for his people, he also wants for all people. He sees the Mexicans
as a “world historical” people, as an example to the world of a new order based on
simpatia, pride, and diversity. This new order being the development of a volkgeist, the
construction of an identity based in the universality of human spirit rather than clinging to

the old identity fragmented and stunted by race.

CONCLUSION

The revived medium of European fresco and the renaissance of indigenous mural
painting offered the early twentieth century artist a powerful medium to convey
tremendously complex subject matter. It is interesting to note that herein the dialectic is
again at work. The classical context of fresco joined with the pre-Columbian narrative
muralism in an artist who was endowed with an innate ability to focus on his reality with
eyes of both a Spaniard and an Indio, as a Mexican—-an artist who could exploit and
synthesize the two traditions--liberating the modern painter from the confines of the
easel.

Mural painting began under auspices. Even the errors it committed were useful. It

broke with the routine into which painting had fallen. It disposed of many

prejudices and served to reveal social problems from a new point of view. It
liquidated a whole epoch of brutalizing Bohernianism, of frauds who lived the life
of a drone in their ivory towers--their fetid dens--where drunkenly strumming on
their guitars, they kept up a pretense of absurd idealism, beggars in a society that
was already rotten and close to extinction.108

In one work of art Orozco could achieve his highest aspiration of creating a
people's art by taking on the theme of their identity, its historical struggle and resolution.
Orozco knew well that a new authentic Mexican art, offered as an alternative to European
modernism, must be accessible for it to function. With this new conception of art, he
could truly begin to fulfill a role in awakening his people, to give them the means to

overcome this burden of racial polarity. He trusted unconditionally the power of painting

when wrested in the hands, or hand, of a true artist. Reed explains Orozco’s faith in art,

 

’oslbid., 88.

94

95

Orozco believed in the efficacy of painting as a medium for interpreting both the
physical and the spiritual world. All of his panegyrics were reserved for painting,
which he hailed as the complete art, superior to all other arts. He often told me
that through painting alone, the artist who 'knew enough' would be able to analyze
natural phenomena and penetrate cosmic mysteries...The moral flows from an
Orozco painting as inevitably as it flows from human existence.109

For Orozco the highest realization of the painting medium was achieved in fresco.
Fresco allowed Orozco to fully articulate his philosophic beliefs like no other medium
could. The cycle of images in the Hospicio Cabanas leads the viewer through the vital
nature of Mexico's past, piecing together a sensual depiction of Mexico’s spiritual
evolution. In the process, however, he makes it explicitly clear that it is impossible and
unwise to seek a return to either the pre-Columbian or the Colonial epochs of Mexican
history.

Orozco's alternative modernism embarks on a journey seeking to expose truth.
This fresco series at the Hospicio Cabanas is a monumental portrait of those aspects that
have fashioned his world. Its brilliance presents a portrait of an entire people, while also
describing the personal struggle we all face. Undertaking a task of such enormous scale
requires exceptional comprehension of the manifold interrelations of history and culture
and self. The magnitude of this work is arguably unrivaled. Only with this amount of
wall space does the possibility of a people's portrait become realizable. Orozco injects
into his revolutionary art an understanding of his time and people, and of himself, which
might otherwise require years of research and reading to attain. Here is an example like
no other of the power, the mystical expression of art. Encoded within these images is a

language that surpasses, goes beyond total apprehension, yet is universally recognizable.

 

109Reed, Orozco, 49.

96

It travels through hidden networks in our system of consciousness, imparting an enriched
insight and understanding of ourselves.

From its very inception, this paper has had but one goal: to resuscitate an often
vilified and nearly forgotten man. Orozco’s murals have lost little of their impact and
immediacy in our day. It is especially with the fall of Soviet Communism that a
reconsideration of Orozco’s artistic genius must be undertaken. He has often been
overshadowed by the girth of Rivera’s reputation and renown, even referred to as a
student of Rivera. However, a simple preliminary investigation of Orozco’s work reveals
this to be total fallacy.

Orozco seems to only rarely appear in the surveys of Western art. It is
unfortunate that he is not often enough placed within that tradition as a pivotal figure in
art historical influence and innovation. Although the impact of Orozco’s art on later
Mexican artists and movements has been investigated by some Mexican scholars, his
influence on Abstract Expressionism, his interaction with the New York Intelligencia,
with Thomas Bentson, his influence on Chicano community mural painters, these things
have not attracted much attention. He is by all accounts a thoroughly Western painter.
And beyond that, he is an American painter who sees with that liberated American spirit,
who rises with life above the quagmire of human past. He decided to be free, and
expressed his freedom through his art. In so doing, Orozco leaves a visual philosophic
understanding of the vital universal process of his own being. He is a man who to a great
extent achieved the type of freedom Hegel and Bergson describe. Orozco fits absolutely
those descriptions of the power and purpose of art that they exalt. It takes two points to

make a connection, but it takes three to make a circuit. Orozco fits in dialectic opposition

97

with Rivera, who stood in Opposition to Siqueiros. By studying the three together one
better understands the individuals. Likewise, Orozco completes the circuit of the
Bergsonian and Hegelian conceptions of human development and reality.

This paper has been written in the spirit of these philosophies. It has meant to
exemplify how we may link particulars and universals, and of how the unification of
knowledge as described by Hegel can be approached. From three subjective centers
comes a unification of thought and action. Each acts as an archetype of the liberated
man, the revolutionary man, the creative man who sees the human world as an organism,
a collective of independent beings, slowly progressing through life and experience,
struggling to achieve that elusive and ambiguous ideal of freedom.

Within the particular man, visions of his own world merged into his philosophic
system. Due to Orozco’s deep empathy with human struggle he is able to transform the
story of his people, through this fresco series, into the story of all people. It is the union
of Hegel’s particular and universal, in which we may see the truth of a particular reality
by virtue of its universality. The truth is in the whole. Orozco knew this intuitively. He
saw in his people a composite, an amalgamation fused together by the events of the
Mexican past. In this work Orozco paints ever-larger unities of particulars and
universals.110 He paints the individual struggle of man who faces the necessity to do and

to live, which is borne out in his life and work. He shows us historically how truly

 

noGray, introduction to On Art, Religion, Philosophy, 13. “The true is the idea...The idee is not
something simply in men’s heads (in the way either mental images or concepts are) but a form of structure
of reality, plus more or less adequate awareness of it. The idea is the ideal union of objective reality in its
essential features with the human world of thought. To become truly actual or realized, the external world
must be assimilated to a kind of thinking that eschews all accidental properties of a subject and penetrates
to the essential and enduring substance in process. Hegel calls this kind of thinking absolute knowing or
science. It is far removed from sense perception or mental representation or imaging, though all these
activities are lower stages of the act of conception, by which true union of subjective and objective realities,
thinldng and being, is brought about.”

98

dependent we are on those past events for identity, and how man as civilization, or
society, or nation has progressed towards freedom through an assertion of the self and its
will. The individual artist within a particular epoch must understand the sources of his
origin in order to grasp conceptually the dominant forces of his present. Orozco, like few
others, is able to capture these forces and mold them into an expression of universal
solidarity, without hollowly relying on a ready-made philosophic ideology. He
vehemently attacks ideology as being doomed to stagnation and rigidity because the
practitioners, as exemplified by Rivera, are all too often unable to carry out “a thorough
radical criticism of their attitudes.”111 It is ironic that the least Marxist of the T res
Grandes was the same one who demonstrates in his painting the clearest understanding of
its comprehensive philosophy.

In comparison to other American Masters,112 and most certainly to their European
counter-parts, J 056 Clemente Orozco seems to have been given but brief and cursory
attention in our time. Perhaps it is believed that everything that can be said about Orozco
has been said. Perhaps he is disregarded as a confused and naive idealist. Has he simply
been forgotten, along with the walls once decorated by WPA artists--individuals
ostensibly suffering from the same idealist naivete--painted over as if an obsolete
propaganda opposed to the post-World War II individualism of the United States, his
work lumped into the fold of the relatively hollow social realism of the WPA? It may be
that his murals take on a theme of Mexico deemed too foreign, too far removed. Or

perhaps he has become lost in the deep shadow of Rivera, as much of Mexican art has. In

 

”'Paz, Essays, 156.

“zAgain I am using American in a Pan-American sense, although Mexican (and Latin American)
painters in general are not often included in the Western canon of the masters. But Orozco, even in
comparison to other Mexican painters, like Rivera, has received little attention from scholars.

99

much of the literature concerning Orozco and his life and work, some specter of concern
compels admirers to emphasize the future worth and efficacy that would be discovered
and understood by later scholars far removed from the immanence of the period. They
believed in the universality and power of Orozco’s art, in the message his works
conveyed to viewers. They could not possibly have predicted, however, the extent to
which art would shrink and shrivel in the heat of new media. They certainly would not
have believed that fifty years after his death Orozco would remain marginal, often half-
understood, under-estimated and virtually uncelebrated outside Mexico.

This project has been an attempt to acknowledge and recognize the contributions
of J 056 Clemente Orozco to our understanding of the Mexican Revolution and the
identity of its people, to elevate and distinguish his work from the clutter of the period,
and to articulate the significance and universality of his artistic endeavors. His deeply
philosophic painting speaks to us as boldly today, and with as much pertinence, as it did

to Mexican’s during his lifetime.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX A

Figures

 

Figure 1. Interior of the Cabanas Institute

101

 

Figure 2. The Indigenous World

 

Figure 3. Coatlique

102

 

Figure 4. The Conversion

fill P “L

FIEUIC

b

103

 

.11.’

1 17;}3ufi; "’ “ l

 

Figure 5. The Confusion of Religions

 

Figure 6. Cortes

105

.

""A- ,

 

Figure 8. The Two-Headed Horse

 

Figure 9. The Mechanized Horse

107

 

Figure 10. Triumph of Death

108

 

Figure 12. Triumph of Death, Pieter Breughal

 

Figure 13. Philip [I

 

 

110

 

Figure 14. The Militarized Masses

lll

 

Figure 14. The Military Parade

112

 

Figure 15. The Demagogues

113

 

Figure 16. The Human Spirit

114

 

Figure 17. The Human Spirit

l

‘ .

l

i...
t

that:

f?” .

BI
,_

Figure 19

. Dome

 

116

 

Figure 21. The National Preparatory School

117

 

Figure 22. Driftwood

118

 

Figure 23. Omniscience

 

Figure 24. Murals of Orizaba

120

 

Figure 25. Cortés and Malinche

121

 

  

Figure 26. The Rich Banquet While the Workers Quarrel

122

 

Figure 27. Maternity

123

 

Figure 28. The Trench

Figure 2 . The Revolutionary Trinity

 

 

30. Prometheus

gure

Fi

126

 

Figure 31. Dartmouth College Murals

Figure 32. University of Guadalajara Murals

 

128

 

Figure 33. Father Hidalgo

129

 

 

Figure 34. The Carnival of Ideologies

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX B

Excerpts from Notes on the Preparatory Murals

Painting in its higher forms and painting as a minor folk art differ essentially in
this: The former had invariable universal traditions from which no one can separate
himself for any reason, in any country, and in any epoch. The latter has purely local
traditions that vary according to the life, the changes, agitations, and convulsions of each
people, each race, each nationality, each social class, and even each family or tribe.

To confuse the one with the other is a serious error, to apply the one the laws that
govern the other is a regrettable mistake because it denaturalized it and disorients and
confuses the collectivity, causing a delay in its aesthetic development. .. .

Each race will be able to make, and will have to make, its intellectual and
emotional contribution to that universal tradition but will never be able to impose on it
the local and transitory modalities of the minor arts...

True nationalism must not consist in this or that theatrical costume or even in this
or that popular song of more than doubtful merit, but in our scientific, industrial, or
artistic contribution to human civilization, and the painter who works in the Italian
tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, is more of a nationalist than
the one who goes crazy over the nationalistic pots and pans that are very suitable for
decorating kitchens but not drawing rooms, and even less libraries or laboratories...

All aesthetics, of whatever kind, are a movement forward and not backward...

The real work of art, like a cloud or a tree, has absolutely nothing to do with
morality or immorality, with good or evil, with wisdom or ignorance, or with virtue or
vice. A mountain that springs up has nothing of that, and thus must plastic or musical or
literary expression spring forth, like anything that is born of the impulse of natural forces
and in accordance with their laws. A painting should not be a commentary but the fact
itself; not a reflection but light itself; not an interpretation but the thing to be interpreted.
It should not connote any theory or be an anecdote, story, or history of any kind. It should
not contain opinions about religious, political, or social matters: absolutely nothing but
the plastic fact as a particular, concrete, and rigorously precise case. It must not arouse in
the viewer any pity or admiration for the objects, animals, or persons of the theme. The
only emotion it must generate and transmit must be that which is derived from the purely
plastic, geometric, coldly geometric phenomenon, organized by a scientific technique.
Everything that is not purely and exclusively the plastic, geometric language, subjected to
the inescapable laws of mechanics, expressible by an equation, is a subterfuge to conceal
impotence, is literature, politics, philosophy, what you will, but not painting, and when an
art loses its purity and is denaturalized, it degenerates, becomes abominable, and finally
disappears.

130

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX C

Orozco the Artist: A Chronology

Reproduced from: J. C. Orozco en el Instituto Cultrual Cabanas. Introductions by Luis
Cardoza y Aragon and Teresa del Conde. Guadalajara: Instituto Cultural Cabar'ias, 1993

1883

1885

1890

1900

1904

l 907

1 908

1909

1910

1911

1912

He is born on November 23th in Ciudad Guzman, J alisco. Second son of Irineo
Orozco and Rosa Flores a couple with good economic standing being owners of a
sopa, dyes and ink factory and a printing and bookbinding workshop.

Family moves to Guadalajara where they live in a house which is, according to
OrozCo “very good but modest if compared with the mansion we had at
Zapotlan” (Zapotlan is Ciudad Guzman’s former name). Guadalajara’s house was
located in front on San Felipe Church. They remain five years in this city.

Due to unexpected economic difficulties, the Orozco’s move to Mexico City.
They live in a very simple house at Hospicio de San N icolas Street (today the
street is named Repr’rblica de Guatemala). J 036 Clemente goes to the Elementary
School dependent from the School of Education, at Licenciado Verdad Street. He
meets José Guadalupe Posada who works in the famous Venegas Arroyo printing
workshop where Orozco will receive the first stimulus for his artistic career and a
“revelation” of the existence of the art of Painting”. He goes to the night shift at
San Carlos Academy. Following his family wishes he enters into the Agricultural
School at San J acinto and for three years he attends the courses needed to become
an Agricultural Technician.

He is admitted in the National Preparatory School where he remains for four
years. Plans to study Architecture. During a lab experiment accidentally causes an
explosion that ruins his left hand and leaves his sight and hearing impaired.
“Obsession with Painting” leads him to abandon the Preparatory and he intends to
return to San Carlos Fine Arts Academy; he is now convinced of his calling.

His father dies and young Orozco has to work as a draftsman at “El lmparcial”(a
Mexico City newspaper), in order to support his architectural studies.

He enters the Academy of Fine Arts to study painting; takes the course given by
the Spanish teacher Antonio Fabrés; among the students of Fabrés he meets Diego
Rivera.

He follows drawing with German Godovius and Leandro Izaguirre. Meets Jesr’ls
Ibarra, director during the Revolution of the political newspaper “Acci6n” and
one of the leaders of the student’s strike in 1911-1913 at the Academy.

He participates in the Collective Show of the Fine Arts Academy organized on
account of the Independence Centennial with some charcoal drawings.

Starts working as a cartoonist for “E1 Hijo del Ahuizote”. Beginning his water
color series “Casa de Lagrimas” (“House of Tears”).

Goes on with “House of Tears” series; he gathers some 123 studies of women
(water color, pastel ink, oil on paper) and a significant number of thew works deal
with the red-1i ght district atmosphere.

131

1914

1915

1916

1917

1918
1920

1923

1924

1925

1926

132

Orozco is chosen by Dr. Atl to form part of the groups in charge of distributing
among the poor the money from the National Treasury.

Collaborates as a cartoonist for “La Vanguardia”, a newspaper founded by Dr. Atl
at Orizaba. He paints his first painting in a large format “The Last Spanish forces
honorably evacuating San Juan de Ulr’la Castle.”

First one-man show; it takes place at “Biblos Bookshop” gallery in Mexico City
(the gallery director is Francisco Gamoneda). He exhibits in the gallery of
Francisco Navarro his “Estudios de Mujeres” (“Studies of Women”) from the
“House of Tears “series. He decorates the “Los Monotes” cafeteria, owned by his
brother. (“monote” means “big monkey” but also an informal clumsy drawing of
a human figure as made by children or as people later claimed, by the muralists.
N. of T.).

Not finding in Mexico a favorable ambiance for the arts, Orozco travels for the
first time to the United States. At Laredo, Texas, sixty of his drawings are
destroyed on charges of immorality. Orozco settles in San Francisco to paint,
Fernando R. Galvin is his dealer. Travels to New York, visits Niagara Falls and,
later, is deported from Canada.

Orozco comes back to Mexico.

Paints his mother’s portrait “Doria Rosa Flores, viuda de Orozco.” Alongside
with Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Pedro Henriquez Urefra, Alfonso Caso, Diego
Rivera and Enrique Delhumeau, among others, forms the Solidary Group with the
Working Movement, whose goal was to interest intellectuals in worker’s
problems; sent by the Group, Orozco travels to Morelia and Guadalajara.
Beginning of his murals at the large court in the National Preparatory School;
erases his first sketches: “The Elements”, “Man’s Struggle against Nature”,
“Failing Man” and “Christ destroys His Cross”. From the initial plan he preserves
only “Maternity” and a Head of Christ later to be used in “The. Strike”. He paints
“The White House” (today in the Carrillo Gil collection).

He signs the Manifesto proposed by the Union of Painters, Sculptors and
Engravers. Marries Margarita Valladares. ‘

“International Studio” a New York magazine, the article “Orozco, the Mexican
Goya” by José Juan Tablada is published; the article is illustrated with drawings
from “The House of Tears” series. After the resignation of J osé Vasconcelos as
Minister of Public Education, Orozco and Siqueiros are hurled onto the street by
the students and the murals are seriously damaged with sticks, stones and knives.
Collaborates in “El Machete”, newspaper published by the Union of
Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors and Engravers of Mexico. His son .1086
Clemente is born. .

Paints the al fresco mural “Omniscience” on the staircase of the House of Tiles,
popularly known as “Sanbom’s” in Mexico City. An exhibition of his work is
presented in the Bemheim-Jeune gallery in Paris.

Supported by the Rector, Doctor Alfonso Pruneda, he takes up again the
suspended murals at the Preparatory; but again work is interrupted. Paints in two
weeks a 100 square meter mural in the Industrial School of Orizaba, Veracruz;
this mural is named “Social Revolution”. His son Alfredo is born. Cuban writer
Alejo Carpentier publishes in “Social” a magazine printed in Havana the article

1927

1928

1 929

133

“The Art of Clemente Orozco”; illustrated with various murals later destroyed,
among them “Man” (Man annihilating the Past, Man triumphantly advancing
towards the Future, Man the Multiple singing a hymn of power and joy. Another-
mural described by Carpentier and later destroyed by Orozco are “The Dance of
Death of contemporary life, its pathetic moments and its intense conflicts’. When
Orozco is not pleased with one of his works he destroys it. In he knifed several
frescos which, fortunately were photographed in time. He paints “Soldaderas”
(“soldaderas” were the revolutionary soldiers’ women who followed them
everywhere); the canvass is at the National Museum of Visual Arts in Mexico
City.

Finally the Preparatory mural is finished. This work includes “The Strike”,
“Destruction of the Old Order”, “The is Trench”, “The trinity, peasant, soldier,
worker,” “The New Ideals”, “The Undertaker”, “Farewell”, “Revolutionaries”,
“The Origin of Spanish America Cortés and Malinche”, “The Indian World”,
“Builders” and “Evangelization”. His daughter Eugenia Lucrecia is born.
Travels to New York thanks to Genaro Estrada, Minister of Foreign Affairs, who
gives Orozco money for three months. ,
He meets Alma Maria Sullivan (Alma Reed), journalist and correspondent for
“The New York Times”; he also meets Eva Sikelianos engaged in the Greek
nationalist movement and Sarojini N aidu, Ghandi collaborator and head of the
committee to help the Indian movement against the British. He also met French
novelist Henri Barbusse. He is symbolically adopted as a son of Greece by
Doctor Kalimakos, Patriarch of the Greek Church in New York and director of the
Greek Daily National Herald; he is crowned with laurel leaves and baptized as
“Panselenos”, a famous Greek painter of the Byzantine period. He sells ten
drawings from the series “Mexico in Revolution to Mrs. W. Force ‘ of the
Whitney Museum for 35 dollars each, among the drawings we note: “Dead
Comrade”, “In Vain”, “An Aristocrat Dances”, “Battlefield Nr. I “Neans and
Tortillas” and “The Reactionary.” In a private house (12 Fifth Avenue) the first
exhibition of Orozco in America takes place. Later his temperas from “ Mexico
in Revolution” art shown at Marie Sterner Gallery (9,57‘h East Street). Orozco
meets Leon Underwood, a British painter and engraver. His circle of American
friends at the time include, among others, the poet Charles Leonard Van Noppen,
art critic Claude Bragdon, Doctor Kalimakos and philosopher Emily S. Harnblen.
Meets poet Juan J osé Tablada. He is a regular customer of Tovar, a Mexican
Restaurant (58,109'h West Street) he goes them usually accompanied by Alma
Reed, Madame Naidu and two or three more friends; this restaurant is also visited
Frequently by poets Sy'ud Hossain and Jalil Gibran who was to become extremely
popular.

Orozco proves himself as a writer in English; he publishes “New World, New
Races and New Art,” illustrated with 3 reproductions: the Franciscan Panel from
the al fresco paintings at the Preparatory and two temperas: “Requiem” and “The
Flag”, from the series “Mexico in Revolution”; the article expresses Orozco’s
rejection of folklorism. Starts painting a profile portrait of Alma Reed; she
suggests Orozco open gallery in New York to show and sell his work; they hire a
place at 57th Street and name the gallery “Delphic Studios”. His oil painting

134

“Revolution” is shown at a collective exhibition of Mexican painters of the time
at The Art Center on 55th Street, under the patronage of Frances Flynn Paine.
About this show, Orozco wrote: “ It has left Mexican art in completest ridicule”.
An Orozco show takes place in the Little Gallery of the New Student’s League, in
Philadelphia. Dorothy Grafly writes in the “Ledger”: “Depth of soul should rise
over simple technique and imagination contrasts in Orozco”. He exhibits in
“Downtown Gallery”; the catalogue presents eleven oil paintings and two
drawings from the series produced in New York; besides “Coney Island: Side
Show” the series of pictures -small and medium size— include “Street Corner”,
“Queensboro Bridge”, “Fourteenth Street”, “Elevated No. 1” “Elevated No. 2” and
“Workers”. There are some comments in the newspapers: Elizabeth Luther
Cary’s in The New York Times and Margaret Bruening’s in The Post. His
drawings from “Mexico in Revolution” are shown in the gallery “Fermée la Nuit”
in Paris, this show takes place thanks to Madame Sikelianos. He exhibits in the
Art Student league of New York; the catalogue includes 113 works not included
in other American exhibitions; he presents new paintings, anatomical drawings
and the complete temperas from “Mexico in Revolution”, photographs from
Mexican Murals, three lithographs made that year and a study in Vaudeville ovals
over a Harlem theatre show. Young people acclaim “Subway No. I” which is
purchased by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. for rive hundred dollars; favorable
critical features are published in The New York Times, Herald Tribune, and The
New York Sun; in the Sun’s article critic Henry McBride emphasizes the value of
mural painting. Orozco receives in New York the magazine “Bandera dc
Provincias” (“Provincial Banner”) published in Guadalajara; there, José
Guadalupe Zuno wrote “Orozco is a real revolutionary, who does not copy,
without cubist patches. Whoever knew his cartoons twenty years ago rinds his
present work very logical. Very Mexican, very modern, very J aliscan”. He

’ receives Cahiers d’Art, the most important French art magazine where Christian
Zemos writes about Orozco’s show at “Fermée la Nuit” Gallery. He produces a
new series: “Park Avenue Types” and a color sketch called “Lucky People”, an
acid comment on the spiritual sterility of wealth as wen in American society.
“Idols Behind Altars” a book by Anita Brenner contains a chapter on Orozco
which was the first full recognition of his value written in English; this book
explains the past of the artist. J osé Clemente lives through the economic
depression in New York. “Mexico in Revolution” drawings are shown in
Chicago’s Art Institute thanks to an invitation by Dr. Harshe. Among the painters
that get acquainted with Orozco in New York we find: Marsden Hartley, Clifton
G. Newell, Thomas H. Benton, Boardman Robinson, Jean Chariot, Olle
Nordmark, Dewey Albinson, Katharine Breen and Eloise Schwab. He meets
writers Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford. The Mexicans who came to see
Orozco were Jaime Torres Bodet (diplomat, later Minister of Education and
Director of Unesco); Genaro Estrada (also a diplomat and poet); Luis Barragan
(one of Mexico’s greatest architects and like Orozco, born in Jalisco State);
Alberto Rembao (director of the Spanish Bureau of the Foreign Language
Information Service) who wrote several articles on Orozco for The Interpreter;
Juan de Dios Bojorquez, (politician and writer).

135

1930 Exhibits at Delphic Studios, New York. In order to raise funds for the mural in

1931

1932

Pomona College (Claremont, California) students issue an “al fresco edition” of
the school’s magazine “Student Life ” including photographs of Orozco murals
and a portrait of the artist done by Doris Ullman. He paints “Prometheus” in
Pomona College at the request of Art History Professor J osé Pijoan and his friend
Jorge Juan Crespo de la Sema. Paints in San Francisco the canvas “Zapata
entering a peasant house’. Back in New York City,.he begins his mural “The
Table of Universal Brotherhood” for the New School for Social Research; in this
mural he painted people from all races, presided by a black and surrounded by
revolutionary leaders: Lenin, Gandhi and Carrillo Puerto; in this mural Orozco
follows the geometric aesthetic principles of Jay Hambridge, whose basic findings
tried to relate the measurements and proportions found in natural shapes and in:
Greek art. Edward Weston takes a portrait of Orozco. Exhibit of the series of
lithographs in the Museum Exhibition Park, Los Angeles, California. Paints
“Zapata”, his greatest canvas painting (permanent collection of the Chicago Art
Institute).

Completes the murals at the New School for Social Research; he is helped by the
young artist Louise Wilcox. Stephen C. Clark from the Museum of Modern Art
commissions Orozco to paint several large pictures-, the first painting is to be a
development from the tempera “Cemetery” originally acquired by Stephen C.
Clark himself. Thanks to a down-payment of 2.500 dollars, Orozco is able to
send for his family and furnish an apartment in the East Side; his wife and
children arrive in New York City. Paints “Zapatistas” for the moden Art Museum
and “Villa” (Now in the Carrillo Gil Collection). Orozco meets cinema director
Sergei Einsestein. Exhibits in Boston (“Grace Homes Galleries”); prepares a

. series of lithographs and drawings to be shown at the Wisconsin Union

He makes a short--and only--trip to Europe: he visits Great Britain, France, Italy
and Spain. Back in America he paints in Dartmouth College (Hanover, New
Hampshire) 3 series of panels representing the historical development of America;
he had been invited by the head of the Fine Arts Department, Mr. Packard. The
panels are to depict: The Migrations”, “Human Sacrifices”, “Coming of
Quetzalcoatl”, “The Culture of Corn, “The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, Conquest and
Evangelization”. “Industrialization”, “English America,” Spanish America”,
“Science” and “Modern Sacrifice of the Unknown Soldier”, the composition is
closed with “Christ destroys His Cross”, showing the Lord in front of a
civilization collapsing surrounded by cannons. H is assistant in Dartmouth is
Carlos Sanchez, a Guatemalan educated in the United States. Orozco draws five
illustrations for Susan Smith’s novel “The Glories of Venus”. Publication of
Alma Reed’s book on Orozco. The painter’s family moves to Hanover. This year
Orozco produces several works including large pictures. He interviews Eisenstein
in New York City. His temperas from “Mexico in Revolution” and some
lithographs are exhibited in Albertine Gallery in Vienna. That exhibition will go
later to Denver. He is elected by “Vanity Fair” Magazine as The Man of the
Month for the Hall of Fame. He meets again French pacifist and writer Henri
Barbusse.

1933

1934

1936

1937

1938

1939

136

Proceeds with his work in Dartmouth; he amplifies the goal of his murals filling
then with devastating commentaries on American society. He paints “Tomb of
the Unknown Soldier”, synthesizing anti-war arguments of peace lovers. In the
Austrian newspaper Die Kunst an article is published of Orozco frescoes written
by Doctor Hans Tietze, director of the Albertine Gallery.

Conclusion of Dartmouth College murals. He writes, on request, Foreword to
Orozco F rescoes at Dartmouth. Exhibits are at theCivic Auditorium at la Porte,
Indiana and at the Arts Club, Chicago, Illinois. In New York City, Mexican
restaurant “Tovar” closes; the restaurant had been for a time a meeting place for
the artist and his friends. He comes back to Mexico and paints, commissioned by
Antonio Castro Leal, director of the Department of Fine Arts, the mural
“Catharsis”, located on the third floor of the Palace of Fine Arts. This painting is
a violent criticism of contemporary society. Orozco meets Luis Cardoza y
Arag6n, art critic. 1935 As a delegate of the Writers and Artists league (LEAR)
he goes with Rufino Tamayo to the Congress of American Artists in New York
City. His mother Rosa Flores Navarro Viuda de Orozco dies. Publishes a series
of lithographs: “Mexican Rocks”, "The Pile of Debris”, “Dead Woman”,
“Fragments” (Female heads from Catharsis) “Hats” and the engravings Note I and
II”. In Jalisco the Governor is Evarardo Topete who intensifies land reform,
supports the workers and finances strikes. Carlos Chavez composes his “Indian
Symphony” and “Republican Overture”; in them he incorporates indian rhythms
and melodies. Guillermo Ruiz builds the monument to Morelos in Janitzio island.
Fernando Beltran Puga and Federico Maliscal design the building 0 the
Department of Federal District, twin to the old City Hall. Diego Rivera builds the
Anahuacalli shaped like a pyramid and art laboratory dependent from the National
University is opened.

Orozco goes to live in Guadalajara invited by the Governor of Jalisco Everardo
Topete. He paints “The People and the False Leaders” -and “Culture” (also
known as the Five Phase of Man”) on the walls and dome of the University’s
main Auditorium. The New Delphic Studios exhibits a complete collection of
Orozco‘s lithographs: “A Requiem”, “Rear Guard”, “Soldier’s Widow”,
“Franciscan Friar”, “Mexican Village”, ”Three Generations”, “Little Indians”,
Mural detail”, “Revolution” “Maguey”, “Marching Women”, “Mexican
Landscape”, “Hand”, Unemployed”, “Lovers”, “Vaudeville”, “Tourists and
Pulqueria”, later: “The American Stage” was added.

He starts the decoration of the walls. and vault of the staircase of the Palacio de
Gobiemo (State Capitol) at Guadalajara, Jalisco. He paints there “Exploitation of
the Masses”, “Rebellion of the Exploited”, and “Fall of the Exploiters”. He places
Hidalgo as a heroic fighter against political miseries. He finishes the decoration of
the main auditorium of the University of Guadalajara.

He starts the murals of the Hospicio Cabanas, also in Guadalajara with the subject
“The Spanish Conquest in Mexico” (The Hospicio Cabanas was the State
Orphanage).

Conclusion of the Hospicio’s murals including the dome where he painted the
monumental “Man of Fire.” considered by many as his master work.

l 940

1941

l 942

1943

1944

1 945

l 946

l 947

1948

137

The Gallery of Mexican Art in Mexico City exhibits sketches and studies for his
mural paintings. He agrees, on request from architect Mario Pani to design a
crucifix for the Church of Christ the King in Mexico City. He finishes the
drawings but the next stage which was to build the metal model was never
finished. He paints in Jiquilpan. Michoacan the murals for the “Gabino Ortiz
Library”. He goes back to the United States, paints the portable panel “Dive
Bomber” for the MOMA. The Museum publishes the leaflet “Orozco Explains”
where the artist writes on the absurdity of trying to explain painting which he
defines as “A poem and nothing else”. This text is illustrated with photographs in
which he appears working in different stages of fresco painting. He returns to
Mexico, finishes the paintings at Jiquilpan and starts the murals for the Supreme
Court of Justice in Mexico City.

He finishes the murals at the Supreme Court. In them he deals with Justice, The
Proletarian Struggle and National Resources.

He starts the mural for the Church of the Hospital de Jesus Nazareno in Mexico
City, then murals are based on the Apocalypse. He publishes his autobiography in
a Mexico City newspaper, “Excelsior”.

He is appointed member of the Colegio Nacional. He exhibits for the first time in
this institution with paintings about death including the outstanding canvas
“Death and Resurrection”.

He paints “The Victory” (Carrillo Gil collection) a denunciation against war while
the struggle goes on against Nazi Germany. Second exhibition at El Colegio
Nacional. He speaks on the seventh anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
Paints a portrait of Mexico’s Archbishop, Dr. Luis Maria Martinez. He paints the
vaults of the choir in the former chapel of the Hospital de Jesus Nazareno.

He paints the portable murals for the dining hall at the Turf Club in Mexico City.
Third exhibition at El Colegio Nacional. He returns to New York City.

In New York City he paints his last self-portrait (Carrillo Gil Collection). He
comes back to Mexico City. Fourth exhibition at El Colegio Nacional. He is
awarded the national prize of Art and Science.

He participates in the National Exhibition that takes place at the Palace of Fine
Arts in Mexico City and writes his “Notes about Mural Paintings Techniques in
Mexico during the last twenty-five years”, material included in the book “José
Clemente Orozco”. Fifth exhibition at El Colegio Nacional: he shows the series
“Los Te6lcs” (“The Conquerors”). At the end of the year he starts the mural at
the open air Auditorium of the National Teacher’s School; he also decorates the
hall of the building.

At the UNESCO meeting in Mexico, Orozco broadcasts an. Important message:
“Mexico and its Painting”; at the time he was painting the parabolic wall (380
square meters) at the Teacher’s School: “this mural painting is the first made in
Mexico on a concrete wall in the open air and with materials which are weather
resistant such as ethyl-silicate glass incrustation and stainless metals”. He makes
arrangements to finish his murals at the Hospital de Jesus Nazareno and to protect
them. He paints “Revived Juarez”, portable panel in the National Museum of
History. Sixth exhibition at El Colegio Nacional. Starts the decoration in
Jalisco’s Chamber of Deputies. During these last years of his life he shows a

l 949

138

great interest on portraits and accomplishes remarkable paintings using oil and
synthetic materials; the portraits of Luis Cardoza y Aragon, J ustino Fernandez,
Enrique Corcuera, Santiago Reachi, Annette Stevens, Dolores del Rio, Carmen
Alvar de Carrillo Gil, and the painter’s daughter Lucrecia are outstanding.
Finishes his mural in Jalisco Chamber of Deputies called “The Great Mexican
Revolutionary Legislation”. He is very busy with the plans to finish the frescoes
at the Hospital de Jesus where he wants to create an abstract decoration as a color
equivalent of musical harmonies; he is also working on a project for the
decoration of a dome at the monument to the Revolution and a new mural, called
“Springtime” for the garden of the housing-complex President Aleman. He dies
on September 7'". The New York Times publishes his obituary on the 8'”. A
solemn wake takes place at the Palace of Fine Arts. The Mexican Congress
decrees two days of mourning; his remains are to rest in the Rotonda de los
Hombres Ilustres (A cemetery for great Mexicans). In December, El Colegio
Nacional offers Orozco a posthumous hommage.

 

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