1883
José Clemente Orozco is born on November 23 in Zapotlan el Grande, Mexico, to Ireneo Orozco, a businessman, and Maria Rosa, a homemaker and amateur singer. A few years later, the family moves to Mexico City, where he takes night classes at the famed San Carlos Academy of Art.

1898
Parents send him to the countryside to become an agricultural engineer. Contracts rheumatic fever and returns home with a heart condition. Studies architecture at the National Preparatory School.

1903
Father dies suddenly of typhus. Orozco quits school and begins a series of odd jobs to support his mother and two siblings. Works as an architectural draftsman, as well as hand-tinting postmortem portraits.

1904
Mixing chemicals to make fireworks to sell on Mexican Independence Day, Orozco accidentally sets off an explosion. His left hand and eye are injured, but due to the holiday, he is not attended at a hospital for a few days. Gangrene sets in and his hand and wrist must be amputated to save his life.

1910
Mexico celebrates 100 years of independence from Spain with lavish festivities, including an official exhibition of Spanish art. The irony is not lost on young Mexican artists, who set up a counter exhibition like the French Salon des Refusés years earlier. It is an unexpected success with the public.

1911
Constitutionalists force dictator Porfirio Diaz out of office. Francisco Madero is elected president, but Victoriano Huerta stages a coup and murders him. A bloody struggle amongst political factions will last for a decade. Due to his disability, Orozco escapes conscription and works as a caricaturist for various opposition newspapers.

1916
First solo exhibition opens, “The House of Tears,” featuring paintings of Mexico City’s red light district. Most critics ignore or attack the exhibit.

1917-19
Travels to the U.S. in search of better opportunities. At the Texas border, customs officials destroy two thirds of his early work because of their “immoral” character. He lives in San Francisco and New York City and makes a living painting cinema posters and plastic Kewpie dolls.

1923
Mexico’s new revolutionary government begins an ambitious literacy campaign that includes mural painting in public buildings. Hired to paint walls at the National Preparatory School, but is forced out after students deface his murals. Later completes the 3-story mural cycle to wide acclaim.

1927
Leaves his wife and children and returns to New York City where he witnesses the “Crash” of 1929. Paints the economic and social devastation of the Great Depression. American journalist Alma Reed becomes his agent and Orozco exhibits widely.

1930
Commissioned by Pomona College in Claremont, California to paint a mural in the student cafeteria. Paints Prometheus, the first true fresco ever painted in the U.S. The following year, paints murals at the New School for Social Research.

1932-34
Hired by Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to paint murals in the campus library. Joined by his wife and three children. Creates the 24-panel The Epic of American Civilization, which evokes controversy and praise. David Alfaro Siqueiros’ mural in Los Angeles and Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center are both destroyed by offended patrons.

1934-39
President Roosevelt establishes the WPA’s Federal Arts Projects, which hires artists to paint murals in hundreds of government buildings throughout the United States. Returns to Mexico and paints his best-known works, including murals in Guadalajara’s government palace and university and the Hospicio Cabañas. Known as the “Sistine Chapel of the Americas,” the Hospicio features Orozco’s magnum opus, the Man of Fire.

1940
Commissioned by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art to create the centerpiece for its exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art. Paints Dive Bomber and Tank, an indictment of the impending conflagration of WWII. Paints murals in the library of Jiquilpan, Mexico.

1941
Paints a daring critique of the judicial system at Mexico’s Supreme Court. Time magazine reports the outcry demanding their removal, but the murals are protected. Paintings and prints are exhibited in museums throughout the United States, including Brooklyn and Philadelphia.

1943
Meets and falls in love with Gloria Campobello, the prima ballerina of the Mexico City Ballet and designs sets, costumes and posters for the ballet. Elected as fellow to the Colegio de Mexico, an elite circle of intellectuals and artists.

1944
Listed in Who’s Who in America and begins painting The Apocalypse in Mexico City’s Church of Jesus of Nazareth. It is his most complex mural.

1946
Leaves his family and lives in New York City with Gloria Campobello. Exhibits and is reviewed in the national press, but creates few paintings. After Gloria abandons him, returns to Mexico.

1947
Illustrates John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, judges an art contest with Walt Disney, and works with UNESCO. Mexico honors him with a major retrospective.

1948
Paints his only outdoor mural, Allegory of the Nation, at Mexico’s National Teachers College, featured in Life magazine. He creates Metaphysical Landscape and other abstract works.

1949
Completes mural at Guadalajara’s Legislators Assembly. While painting a public housing mural, he dies of heart failure at the age of 65.

Art is knowledge at the service of emotion.
-José Clemente Orozco

The life of Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), a life filled with drama, adversity, and triumph, is one of the great stories of the modern era. Despite poverty, childhood rheumatic fever that damaged his heart and an explosion in his youth that cost him his left hand, Orozco persisted in his wish to become an artist. He experienced the carnage and duplicity of the Mexican Revolution, the hardship following the New York stock market crash in 1929, and rising fascism in Europe during his only trip there in 1932, and emerged with an aesthetic and moral vision unparalleled in twentieth century painting.

A taciturn individualist, highly sensitive and utterly inept at self-promotion, Orozco had a sharp tongue and mordant sense of humor. Described by a contemporary as “the only tragic poet America has produced,” Orozco was first and foremost a public artist whose greatest achievements were the murals he created not for individual patrons, but for the whole of society. Yet, in comparison with his colleague and rival Diego Rivera, until recently the name of this pre-eminent public artist was little known to the public. Orozco’s work was marginalized as complex and controversial, while Orozco the man has been considered as something of an enigma. Who was this solitary figure who spent years alone on scaffolds creating works that challenge both social norms and the art establishment?

Born in Zapotlan el Grande to a middle-class family that fell on hard times, Orozco was shaped at the outset of his career by the experience of ten years of civil war that gripped Mexico during the second decade of this century. He was twenty-seven when the Revolution began, thirty-four when he left Mexico for the United States for the first time in 1917. Some measure of the brutality he witnessed during those years is conveyed in his autobiography:

People grew used to killing, to the most pitiless egotism, to the glutting of the sensibilities, to naked bestiality. … In the world of politics it was the same, war without quarter, struggle for power and wealth. … Underneath it all, subterranean intrigues went on among the friends of today and the enemies of tomorrow, resolved, when the time came, upon mutual extermination.

Haunted by the savagery and treachery of this period, Orozco’s idealism took a resolutely apolitical form. He saw concepts of race and nationality and dogmas of political and religious salvation as idols that corrupt understanding and prevent the emancipation of the human spirit. Only by throwing off the shackles of creeds and prejudices that have enslaved humankind to authoritarian purposes, he believed, can genuine harmony of individual expression and social purpose come into being.

Under-appreciated as an artist in his native Mexico until late in his career, Orozco spent a total of ten years in the United States. He created four major murals here (at Pomona College, the New School for Social Research, Dartmouth College, and the Museum of Modern Art), along with hundreds of easel paintings and graphic works that challenged U.S. stereotypes of Mexican art. Despite episodes of censorship and periods of financial deprivation, Orozco became a pioneer of the public arts movement of the 1930s and 40s. Isamu Noguchi, Ben Shahn, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, and Jacob Lawrence were among the American artists influenced by his expressionist style. In the 1960s and 70s, Orozco’s work helped inspire a new generation of Chicano and African American muralists to reinvent public art within their communities. His legacy continues today among contemporary artists on both sides of the border.

Orozco created major frescoes in Mexico after his return there in 1934, including the magnificent cycle with which he covered the interior walls of the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara in 1939. The immense nave, encompassing a series of arched panels and semi-circular ceiling vaults, provided a dramatic space for Orozco to explore the interplay of indigenous and European forces within modern-day Mexico. At the center of the nave, sixty meters above the floor, his majestic Man of Fire ascends into the cupola of what has become known as the “Sistine Chapel of the Americas.”

The last time Orozco returned to the U.S. was in 1945. In the throes of midlife crisis at the relatively late age of 62, he told a friend, “I need to do it to renew myself.” But the much-anticipated creative renewal did not materialize, and after months of struggle and soul searching, Orozco returned home. In his final years, Orozco continued to climb the scaffolding, although his damaged heart forced him to stop and catch his breath every few steps. He completed his last fresco less than a month before he died in his sleep of heart failure at the age of 65.

A key to understanding Orozco’s work is an awareness of the relation between the artist’s passionate idealism and his pessimism. Spain’s greatest filmmaker, the late Luis Buñuel, declared that “man is never free, yet he fights for what he can never be, and that is tragic.” Orozco’s sense of the human condition was based on a similar conviction of tragic impasse. “To have a tragic vision in the Americas is extremely difficult,” says Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, “because we were founded as the Brave New World of happiness, the great utopia. So when a writer like Faulkner breaks through the optimism of the United States, or a painter like Orozco breaks through the promise of Mexico of the New World, it is a very striking event.” Through his art Orozco shared his trauma and his anger, which he insisted over and over, in many forms, is our trauma and should be our anger. “Painting,” Orozco believed, “assails the mind. It persuades the heart.”

–Jacquelynn Baas

For more information, and to download a study guide, visit the filmmaker’s Web site.