Painters: Man of Fire

His art is apocalyptic. A vision of crushed humanity, rapine, bestiality, murder and death. A man is hanging from a telephone pole, prisoners are being massacred, mothers wail over the bodies of their emaciated children. Reinforcing this vision of inferno are his colors: stark blacks, whites, umbers, reds, yellows, and ghastly phosphorescent greens of putrified corpses.

Such was the bequest of José Clemente Orozco, and in his day his gigantic murals made him the most powerful of Mexico’s Big Three.* For his contemporaries, Orozco’s work caught the spirit of Mexico, bloodied and in ruins, emerging from eleven years of brutal class warfare triggered by the Revolution of 1910. They are all there in his paintings, the heroes of the revolution: Zapata, Pancho Villa, Carranza, and the armed peons marching off to war. Their faces are shrouded by their sombreros, or they are often seen from the back, the anonymous masses, the revolution’s avengers and its victims.

The Heart Involved. So completely has such painting gone out of fashion that no major exhibition of Orozco’s work has been shown in the U.S. since 1953, four years after his death. But to show that he has not been forgotten, Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art is currently staging an exhibition of 200 of his paintings and drawings, many of them sketches for murals in Mexico and the U.S.

The exhibition confirms what Orozco himself maintained: that his best work was in his drawings and murals. He considered his oil paintings mediocre, turned them out mainly to make money. By contrast, when his heart was involved, he worked for a pittance. He got $4 a day while painting the 13,000-sq.-ft. ceiling mural in the Hospicio Cabanas at Guadalajara. Today this allegorical representation of the elements ranks as his masterpiece.

The Epitaph Written. In his day, Orozco was acclaimed for what were considered his uniquely Mexican qualities. He drew his subject matter from Aztec, Mayan and Toltec mythology, the history of the Spanish conquest and the 1910 Revolution. His colors are violent and rough, like those of the native Indian pottery and fabric designs. His figures are powerful, primordial and violent; their every thrust calls out for social justice.

But it is clear that Orozco’s fame rests on more than subject matter. Though Orozco turned his back on the tradition of Paris, calling it a city “old, ruined, miserable—an immense brothel, a moldering cadaver,” he shows by his extraordinary draftsmanship that he owed as much to his spiritual pilgrimage to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and El Greco’s Toledo as he did to the allegiance of his Indian blood. The sketch (17½ in. by 22 in.) for one of the figures in Orozco’s mural in the rotunda of the University at Guadalajara is more than the record of a painter’s solution to a difficult problem in perspective; it is in itself a master drawing in the great tradition of Western art.

On the morning of his death on Sept. 6, 1949, he was asked to contribute to an article about himself, and wrote his own epitaph: “If I had not been a painter, then I would have wanted to be a painter.” It was a title that few today would deny him.

* The others: Diego Rivera, who died in 1951, and David Siqueiros, now 68, who has resumed painting after getting out of jail last year, where he had been tossed for inciting a Communist riot.