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.

1785 Born in Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) to Captain Jean Audubon and Jeanne Rabine, his French chambermaid

1788 Sent to Nantes, France. Enjoys childhood here, begins interest in the natural world

1803 Leaves France for the United States to avoid conscription in Napoleon’s army. Moves to Mill Grove, his father’s estate in Pennsylvania

1804 Meets and falls in love with Lucy Bakewell, daughter of neighbor William Bakewell in Mill Grove. Creates wire constructions that help him pose dead birds in lifelike positions to paint them.

1807 Sets up general store in Louisville, KY

1808 Marries Lucy Bakewell and moves with her to Louisville.

1809 Son Victor born

1810 Meets ornithologist Alexander Wilson, and declines to subscribe to his publication, American Ornithology. Moves to Henderson, KY with family.

1812 Son John Woodhouse born

1815 Daughter Lucy born

1816 Invests in steam-powered grist mill in Henderson.

1817 Daughter Lucy dies

1819 Samuel Adams Bowen attacks Audubon on the street; Audubon stabs him in self-defense. Business fails. Jailed for debt; released when he files for bankruptcy. Family loses all possessions. Daughter Rose is born.

1820 Daughter Rose dies. States intention to complete, in his lifetime, “a collection of the Birds of our Country, from Nature, all of Natural Size”.

1821 Arrives in New Orleans and begins portrait painting on the street. Wife and sons join him in December.

1824 Attempts to obtain support from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia for a publication of his engravings of American birds. Opposed by George Ord, editor of American Ornithology by Alexander Wilson.

1826 Leaves for England. Gains success quickly. Exhibits 250 paintings at the Royal Institution at Liverpool, Manchester, and Edinburgh. Meets William Home Lizars, who agrees to become Audubon’s engraver.

1827 Hires London’s Havell & Son to work on Double elephant Folio etchings.

1829 Returns to America to paint more American birds and convince Lucy to join him in England.

1830 Dines at the White House with President Andrew Jackson.

1831 Publishes first volume of Ornithological Biography.

1833 Travels to Labrador to paint northern bird species.

1838 Fourth and final volume of the Folio edition of Birds of America is completed.

1839 Leaves England for good to settle in New York with Lucy. Begins planning for The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America.

1840 Begins work on octavo edition of The Birds of America.

1841 Purchases Minnie’s Land, a 30 acre estate in Upper Manhattan.

1843 Travels west to search for new specimens for Quadrupeds.

1845 First Imperial Folio volume of The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America is published.

1848 Suffers stroke. Eyesight has now failed and son John Woodhouse has taken over work on Quadrupeds project. Audubon begins to go senile.

1851 Dies at Minnie’s Land on January 27.

John James Audubon is best known for The Birds of America, a book of 435 images, portraits of every bird then known in the United States – painted and reproduced in the size of life. Its creation cost Audubon eighteen years of monumental effort in finding the birds, making the book, and selling it to subscribers. Audubon also wrote thousands of pages about birds (Ornithological Biography); he’d completed half of a collection of paintings of mammals (The Viviparous Quadrapeds of North America) when his eyesight failed in 1846.

His story is a dramatic and surprising one. Audubon was not born in America, but saw more of the North American continent than virtually anyone alive, and even in his own time he came to exemplify America – the place of wilderness and wild things. The history of his life reveals his era and his nation: he lived in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and New York – traveled everywhere from Labrador to the Dry Tortugas off Florida, from the Republic of Texas to the mouth of the Yellowstone – was a merchant, salesman, teacher, hunter, itinerant portraitist and woodsman, an artist and a scientist. He was, in a sense, a one-man compendium of American culture of his time. And his growing apprehension about the destruction of nature became a prophecy of his nation’s convictions in the century after his death.

So it is that Audubon has been called (by Lewis Mumford) “an archetypal American who astonishingly combined in equal measure the virtues of George Washington, Daniel Boone and Benjamin Franklin” and “the nearest thing American art has had to a founding father.”

Audubon’s life seems invented rather than lived; at times his own version of it surely was invented, but even the real life has a distinctly exaggerated, mythical feel. For it’s an archetypal story of the American dream – a Horatio Alger tale in the flesh. The story goes like this: born a literal bastard in Haiti, Audubon was raised like a little lord in France, emigrated to Pennsylvania to escape conscription in Napoleon’s army, failed utterly in frontier Kentucky, was thrown in jail there and driven from his town in penniless disgrace… but he believed in himself, left his family and took a flatboat down the Mississippi, struggled on alone in Louisiana, and finally became a brilliant success, and a legend, overnight… in England. That story then ends with the family reunited, now living on their huge wooded estate in New York City, occasionally pulling in a 300-lb. sturgeon from their Hudson River landing, with a pink sunset rippling over the Palisades. It’s a whacking good story – all of the above, and More! Much More!, with pictures to boot.

The man himself, too, seems much larger than life. John James Audubon was a mix of characteristics, almost always to extremes: he was not just a little anything. He was the kind of excessive person who might show up for a two-month ocean voyage bearing, say, three dogs, two tail-less cats, and 265 live birds – which is what he brought in 1836. He was of course excessively handsome: “a handsomer man I never saw,” one neighbor in Pennsylvania wrote, and another (in Kentucky) crooned that “his eyes were an eagle’s in brightness, his teeth were white and even, his hair a beautiful chestnut color, very glossy and curly.” And he was inordinately vain – with “muscles of steel,” he crowed, and a “handsome figure.” He especially loved that hair: “My locks flew freely from under my hat, and every lady that I met looked at them and then at me until – she could see no more.” When Audubon had his “luxuriant” (his word) hair cut, he wrote a little obituary to it in his journal, with a heavy black border framing the page.

But if he was as unselfconsciously vain as a child, he was equally as charming, magnetically so: almost everyone liked him immediately, and he returned the admiration. He loved children, adored his wife, was a wholehearted and affectionate friend and possessed a whole range of brilliant talents. Yet he was also full of neuroses – insecure about his talent and his worth, his education and his place in the world – craving affection, easily and deeply hurt.

Several Audubon experts have noted a multiplicity in the essential Audubon: there always seem to be competing halves. Biographer William Souder remarks an early division between the satin-breeched dandy in Pennsylvania who was the beau of every ball and the serious young student of nature who drew birds endlessly, turned his room into a natural-history museum, and was the first person ever to band birds. Writer Ella Foshay points out that he was equally comfortable sleeping on the forest ground as he was under the downy quilt of an European four-poster; that he played the violin and flute exquisitely, yet liked to swap tall tales and bawdy stories with frontier fur traders; that the same man who reveled in frozen weeks in the wilderness hunting bear and swan with Shawnees could also quote Shakespeare and Milton or cite Titian and Correggio. Sir Walter Scott thought that Audubon was “a Frenchman by birth, but less of a Frenchman than I have ever seen”; but a young assistant from Maine said that the painter was “a nice man, but as Frenchy as thunder.” There were always two Audubons.

The artist was a self-taught scientist, but an innovative one. As a young man, he studied the migrating phoebes near his home, tying colored yarn to their legs. This was, surprisingly, the first recorded instance of banding birds. Later, he devised an original set of experiments challenging the common belief that vultures find their food by smelling it. He put a painting of a dead sheep into an open field; sure enough, vultures landed and tugged at the canvas. He then put the painted decoy down close to a concealed pile of stinking vulture “food”; again, they pecked only at the painting – at the image rather than the scent of food. Finally he put small pieces of beef onto a cloth that covered a large amount of reeking offal. The vultures ate the beef, but did not detect the covered food. Audubon had proved his point.

Audubon probably regarded his election to membership in the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Linnaean Society, and the Royal Society of London as his greatest accomplishment as a scientist. To most people today his scientific success is best exemplified by the birds. Despite his missteps, he discovered twenty-five new species, twelve new subspecies. These are astounding numbers.

Hard science demands an abiding concern for truth, and virtually all Audubon scholars point to the way Audubon was “economical with the truth,” as Duff Hart-Davis nicely puts it. Indeed, Audubon lied to hide the secret of his illegitimate birth. He claimed his father (a captain) was an admiral, and at one point decided that his family had been imprisoned in the Bastille (they hadn’t). He copied several figures from the work of others, then said he hadn’t. He quietly erased the name of an assistant, who’d made backgrounds, from the bottom of numerous paintings. “A tenuous balance between fact and fiction runs through Audubon’s life and work,” Ella Foshay tells us.

Audubon’s writing has drawn the hottest fire. His Ornithological Biography was made up of essays about individual species interspersed with what he called “Episodes” – personal essays and remembrances. Sometimes he “remembered” hearsay, sometimes he invented stories, such as a night spent in a cabin with Daniel Boone. But as biographer Shirley Streshinsky points out, his “Episodes” were written “to edify, to entertain, and particularly to give a frontier flavor to the book.” If the American West was the place where one could find vast rivers virtually choked with sockeye salmon or trees as wide as small houses (in real life), it was also the home for mountainous men whose best pal might be an ox – a blue one, yet – or a daring woman who could ride a catfish the size of a whale. To a degree, Audubon was simply taking the reader to that place. He wasn’t so much lying as telling stretchers.

But even if Audubon was a very particular case – an unusual and complex character with an astounding life – an examination of that life and that man tells us a great deal about his times in general. John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature provides a large clear window onto life on the American frontier; it shows how Europe regarded the still-young United States, and how people (on both sides of the Atlantic) regarded nature. It creates a meaningful portrait of the state of both Art and Science in the first decades of the 19th century. It shows us a person, and a people: the life and times of John James Audubon.

–Ken Chowder

One of the best-known artists of the twentieth century, David Hockney is renowned for his prolific production, high level of technical skill, and extreme versatility. He has achieved renown in a wide variety of media including pen-and-ink drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography. Alongside the quality of his work, his round face and owlish glasses have made him one of the most recognizable artists working today.

Hockney was born on July 9, 1937 in the industrial town of Bradford, in Yorkshire, England, to a working-class but politically radical family. Although his father, Kenneth, ran an accounting business, he was also an antiwar activist who wrote letters of protest to world leaders. David was the fourth of five children. His mother, Laura, was a shop assistant and a strict vegetarian.

By the time he was 11, Hockney had already decided to become an artist. He studied at the local Bradford School of Art from 1953 to 1957, where he acquired an early reputation as a skilled draftsman. After fulfilling his National Service duties as a conscientious objector by working in a hospital for two years, Hockney enrolled at the London College of Art in 1959. He excelled there as well, both socially — his outgoing, gregarious personality won him a number of friends, most notably the painter R. B. Kitaj — and professionally — he discovered modernism, his work in the Young Contemporaries show in 1961 led critics to dub him one of the rising stars of the pop movement, and he won the College’s Gold Medal in 1962. Academically he lagged, though, flunking out twice before the school finally allowed him to graduate.

Hockney’s early work was characterized by a sort of false amateurism (”faux-naif”), in which he mixed sophisticated, highly skilled technique with intentionally crude folk-art styles. He often scrawled lines of poetry or other text over his works that related to their meaning. His influences throughout this period included Jean Dubuffet and Pablo Picasso, and Hockney’s own homosexuality (for example, a series of paintings in 1960-61 titled We Two Boys Together Clinging takes its name from the Walt Whitman poem). His 1962 series Demonstrations of Versatility was a dazzling collection of paintings, each in a different style, that showcased Hockney’s skill and creativity.

Hockney was an avid lithographer as well; some of his best-known work from this period includes 1961’s Myself and My Heroes, in which he appears alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Walt Whitman, and his 1961-63 The Rake’s Progress, an updated version of a series of William Hogarth prints from 1732-33. In 1975, Hockney designed the sets for a production of the opera inspired by the prints at the Glyndenbourne Festival in Australia.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, upon graduation from art school Hockney had already established himself well enough professionally that he didn’t have to take a teaching position and could work full-time as an artist. In 1963 he moved to California. Settling in Santa Monica, he began working with acrylic paints instead of oils and adopted a more realistic style, winning acclaim for a series of rich, colorful paintings of swimming pools. Hockney fell in love with California’s sunny weather, its cleanness and spare beauty, its social freedom, and the beauty of its inhabitants. Many of his works during this period were “snapshots” of men in casual poses, engaged in activities such as swimming; Neil Simon’s 1978 film California Suite used a number of them in its opening credits. During this period Hockney also painted several critically acclaimed portraits of his friends; one of these, Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, is considered by authorities at the Tate Museum to be the most popular painting in the museum’s collection.

In 1966 he met native Californian Peter Schlesinger, who became his romantic partner and frequently modeled for him. The two moved back to London together, but broke up in 1970. In 1973 Hockney moved to Paris briefly, where he spent part of his sojourn living in an apartment in the Quartier Latin formerly owned by the painter Balthus. While in Paris he produced a series of etchings in memory of his idol Picasso, who had died that year, and produced a 1974 exhibition at the Musée des Artes Decoratifs with the help of two of Picasso’s master printers, Aldo and Piero Crommelynck.

Throughout this period Hockney continued to explore other media besides painting, most notably photography. From 1982-86, he created some of his best-known and most iconographic work — his “joiners,” large composite landscapes and portraits made up of hundreds or thousands of individual photographs. Hockney initially used a Polaroid camera for the photos, switching to a 35 mm camera as the works grew larger and more complex. In interviews, Hockney related the “joiners” to cubism, pointing out that they incorporate elements that a traditional photograph does not possess — namely time, space, and narrative.

Always willing to adopt new techniques, in 1986 Hockney began producing art with color photocopiers. He has also incorporated fax machines (faxing art to an exhibition in Brazil, for example) and computer-generated images (most notably Quantel Paintbox, a computer system often used to make graphics for television shows) into his work.

In 2001 Hockney set off controversy in the art world with his film Secret Knowledge, in which he advances a theory that many Old Masters (particularly Jeane-August-Dominique Ingres, but others as well) achieved the extreme realism of their works through the use of a “camera lucida” (a series of lenses and prisms), projecting an image of their model onto the canvas and then tracing around it. This theory has not drawn much support among art historians, however.

Hockney also has a long history in stage design, particularly for operas and the dramatic theater. He designed the set for the Royal Court Theatre’s production of Alfred Jarry’s play UBU ROI in 1966, and has done design work for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City as well as operas in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Hockney currently divides his time between the Hollywood Hills and Malibu.

– Brian Kennedy

Brian Kennedy is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.