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Orozco: A Small Tribute
Mary-Anne Martin

New Yorkers are more blessed with Orozco’s work than many, as the splendid 1931 Zapatista Landscape is now on permanent view at the Museum of Modern Art, and a taxi ride down to the New School on 12th Street will deliver you to Orozco’s recently restored mural series on the themes of Brotherhood and Revolution, completed in 1931. New York auction goers sometimes get to view a drawing or painting changing hands from one private collection to another. A five hour drive to Hanover, New Hampshire will be rewarded by a chance to visit Dartmouth College, where Orozco suffered two hellish New England winters in 1932 and ’33 painting the murals at the Baker Library. But the opportunity to contemplate a large body of this artist’s work requires a trip to Mexico City and Guadalajara.

5. Women Fighting, c. 1915-16

Earlier this year I had the chance to do both. There is a tendency when returning to places on business to allow time pressures to afford an excuse for not revisiting museums and monuments, things that one has already “seen” as a tourist. This summer I allowed myself to be a tourist guide to a young friend who was not so familiar with Mexico City as I. We found ourselves at the Carrillo Gil Museum practically awestruck by the power of the Orozco paintings there. We stood before canvas after canvas of the highest quality, each of which would have been a “star lot” in a Christie’s or Sotheby’s sale, were such paintings permitted to leave the country (they are not). Later in the summer we visited Guadalajara and again I played tourist, visiting murals that I had not seen in person since I was giving my daughter the grand tour of Mexico fifteen years ago. There is no slide or reproduction in a book that can communicate the experience of standing beneath the Man of Fire dome of the Hospicio Cabañas and taking in the power and sheer size of this mural group. The viewer is filled with the force of the artist’s rage at man’s stupidity and cruelty and his compassion for life’s victims. Equally stirring is the Hidalgo mural at the Government Palace, which depicts Father Hidalgo as a bloody avenger wreaking destruction of the evil powers that corrupt mankind: the clergy, totalitarian rulers, greedy businessmen. The viewer stands in the center, a witness to the end of the world, almost a participant. This is the unique effect of mural painting, which not only confronts but can also surround the viewer. This is an effect which Orozco understands completely and takes to the limit.

On the same trip we spent several mornings with Clemente Orozco, the artist’s son, who has devoted much of the last thirty years to documenting his father’s life and art for posterity. He has completed a ten volume catalogue, painstakingly cross-referenced, which was commissioned years ago but has yet to be published in Mexico, due to unavailability of funds. This work would be a great resource for scholars in the United States as well, and an English language publisher is needed.

Most particularly Clemente Orozco wanted to call attention to the sad state of one of his father’s murals in Mexico City, The Apocalypse, in the chapel of the Hospital of Jesus the Nazarene, which is “falling down in chunks.” Clemente writes, “The hospital was founded by Cortez at the time of the defeat of the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan right at the site where Cortez met with Moctezuma for the first time in 1519. In 1523 Cortez realized that there was no place for the sick. He built it with his own money and it was for all the people, both Spanish and Indian. So this institution, which is still running, should be considered to be the Plymouth Rock of Mexico.” During the 1970’s the José Clemente Orozco Foundation began attempts to alert the Mexican Government to the deterioration of the Apocalypse fresco, but doubtless due to other pressing financial necessities the government has not been responsive. Twenty years later the situation has become an emergency and the world will soon lose this monument altogether if someone does not intervene. Given the generosity of outside donors in similar situations, we hope that printing this plea in our catalogue will provide the first step in organizing a rescue effort for this mural.

6. Hands and Banner, c. 1926

Because of the enormity of organizing a true Orozco retrospective exhibition, we consider this Small Tribute to be no more than a gesture in the right direction. Our purpose is twofold: to plead the case for serious critical and academic recognition of Orozco as one of the leading painters of the twentieth century, and to initiate a campaign to restore the Apocalypse mural in Mexico City to its former glory.

We wish to thank the private collectors who have lent works to this show, most particularly Irving Richards, who knew and admired Orozco in Mexico and even painted Orozco’s portrait (Orozco painted his as well). Mr. Richards has been telling me for years that Orozco is the most under appreciated and greatest artist of Mexico. Finally I have had a chance, with his help, to do something about it. I also wish to thank Hayden Herrera, who has been my friend and Mexican art ally for many years, for allowing us to print for the first time a transcript of a lecture she gave in November 1990, contrasting the art of Orozco and Rivera.

November, 1996

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