Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-34

Of the three great painters whose monumental works formed the base upon which Mexico's mural renaissance developed, Orozco has remained by far the most enigmatic. While David Alfaro Siqueiros is recognised as a longtime leftist who unapologetically put his art in the service of Communist Party politics, painting furiously for social and political change, spending time in prison for his beliefs, even casting the brush aside and taking part in an attempt to assassinate Trotsky, and while Diego Rivera, especially during the last phases of his career, is understood as a mythmaker who offered a nostalgic view of Mexico's revolutionary history, imagining a world that was diametrically opposed to a messy and broken Mexican modernity, Orozco is something of a mystery. Bookish, distant, irascible, scornful of admirers, often cynical and pessimistic about the course of Mexican history, and given to extraordinarily grand but also esoteric thoughts about the human condition, Orozco does not easily fit the mould of the activist public muralist. He found Siqueiros's convictions simple-minded, Rivera's nostalgia facile and opportunistic, and the Mexican government for which he sometimes painted a caricature of real leadership. He once claimed--and he was not joking--that he wished to see friends and acquaintances only if he could insult them. As he got older, he came to think that art had no public or political purpose whatsoever, screaming that 'Art is not caricature'. No wonder he found few admirers among muralism's early scholars! As discussions about the mural renaissance have become increasingly tied to debates about the formation of the new Mexican state, Orozco has often been seen as an outsider to the main story of modern art and politics in his native land.

'Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934', a major exhibition organised by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, tackled this image of the painter directly. With more than a hundred paintings, prints, and drawings on view, it was the first major exhibition of his work to be seen in the United States for nearly half a century. Concerned with a brief but intense period of Orozco's career when he lived and painted in New York, California, and New Hampshire, it argued that the painter's American experiences caused him to think carefully not only about the nature of his political commitments, but also about his attachment to Mexican culture and history. While the exhibition and its fat, well-illustrated catalogue (with essays by, among others, Renato Gonzalez Mello, James Oles, and Dawn Ades--respectively Mexico's, the United States', and England's acknowledged scholars of Orozco) did not exactly dispel the conventional image of Orozco, they fruitfully complicated it. During his time in the United States, it is true Orozco was bookish and intellectual, but he was also fiercely devoted to new ideas about a human community that would provide an alternative to the bitterness and sectarianism of class conflict. He preferred the company of a literary society to the movement of the masses, but he also looked with contempt at the violence effected on the Mexican peasantry by successive political regimes. He began to view painting as a worthy craft on its own terms, not because it avoided questions of social responsibility but because that responsibility increasingly depended on a certain kind of personal and artistic freedom. And despite the general image of Orozco as an intellectual and political flaneur, he drew scathing political cartoons, incisive vignettes of Mexican life, bustling pictures of street life in New York, grim images of lynchings, and quiet pictures of peasants mourning their dead (Fig. 2), as this show amply displayed.

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The exhibition was organised into seven themes, each meant to reflect aspects of Orozco's work during his years in the States: his efforts as a public artist; his relation to the so-called Delphic Circle (a starry-eyed literary group, part mystic, completely esoteric, which took an ancient Greek spirit as the basis for a new 'universal salvation'); his work as a printmaker and illustrator; his many images of Mexico in revolution; his re-imagining of the Mexican landscape (no small subject in land-hungry Mexico); his encounters in New York City; and his confrontation with modernism. While this framework had the merit of underlining Orozco's multiple concerns, it also revealed how difficult it is to pigeonhole such a prodigious artist. A painting like Elevated (Fig. 1) was at once a confrontation with New York's urban jungle and an experiment in an edgy, high-toned, Cubist-derived modernism. Many of the pictures in the section devoted to the Mexican landscape could just as easily have been included in the sections dedicated to his careful work as a printmaker. What one learned from the various prints, drawings, and paintings was not so much that they fell neatly into discrete subject categories, but rather that Orozco handled each medium radically differently, often for the same ends. In his drawings, he preferred a crisp, precise mark and allowed an accumulation of those marks to dominate the visual interest. In contrast, in his prints he favoured large silhouetted shapes and organised pictorial space around them--surely the result of the sheer pleasure he derived from hacking at the metal plates. And in contrast to his practice either in his drawings or prints, in his paintings he tended toward an almost frenetic build-up of bodies and shapes, as if for him the empty canvas demanded that its whole surface be worked and reworked constantly.

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The section that seemed most coherent was devoted to Orozco as a public artist and consisted of the many preparatory sketches for his famous mural, Epic of American Civilization: Hispano-America, in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College. Indeed, what gave the Hood venue its special boost was its proximity to that great mural, only a hundred or so metres from the museum itself. To see it in this context was to understand the many complicated strands of Orozco's art that the show and catalogue narrated. In panel no. 16 of Epic of American Civilization: Hispano-America (Fig. 3), Orozco's multiple concerns were all in stunning evidence--the confrontation with Cubist modernism, meditation on Mexico's revolutionary history and myths, critique of modernity (note the shattered background architecture), argument with Mexico's still-violent leadership (note, too, the general about to plunge a dagger into the campesino's back), and belief in a polemical public art. That he painted this on a wall in a remote New England, Ivy League college, where the imagery and narrative were bound to provoke patrons and locals, testified to the antagonistic, internationalist, and also epic attitude he was in the process of developing.

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The exhibition 'Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934' was at the San Diego Museum of Art from 9 March to 19 May 2002, the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, from 8 June to 15 December 2002, and is at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, from 25 January to 13 April 2003. The catalogue is published by W.W. Norton and Company, New York and London, 2002, ISBN 0 393 04176 X, $75

Anthony W. Lee teaches at Mount Holyoke College, Mass. He is the author of Painting on the left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals (1999), and Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (2001), which recently won the Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art.

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