Mural catarsis jose clemente orozco biography
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It was only after a science experiment went wrong and he lost his left hand that he finally enrolled at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City. He said of the Revolution: "The world was torn apart around us. This was a common trope, political satirists in opposition papers often used the administration’s social and economic links to 'high-class prostitutes' to expose their misconduct and corruption.
For Orozco, the mural was an opportunity to condemn the hypocrisy and of the ruling regime in a public space in front of a national audience.
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Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)
Art Career
It was in the town of Guadalajara, where he spent most of his childhood, that Orozco first became interested in art.
He had a notorious inability to connect with others on a one-to-one basis but showed tremendous empathy for humanity as a whole. The family moved first to Guadalajara and then Mexico City in the hopes of improving their financial situation. Dr. Atl was a fervent advocate of promoting a distinctively Mexican art and was opposed to copying the European style that was a requisite activity in the Academy.
Here we see Orozco subtly critique the very institution that commissioned him for the work. In 1932 he started work on the mural cycle for the Baker Library of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The goal was to create a more democratic art form; that is, to make their art - its post-Mexican Revolution, nationalistic themes - accessible to people from all social strata.
The subsequent panels depict the impact of European technology and culture as well as the consequences of industrialization. His preparatory sketches were made solely on paper, never on the mural itself. It was only after his father's death that Orozco became fully committed to pursuing an artistic career.
In keeping with his alternative, anti-colonial readings of Mexican history, Orozco sought both to praise Hidalgo for his role in encouraging the Indians' rebellion and to condemn him, a Roman Catholic priest, whose task it was to indoctrinate the Indians in a foreign faith.
While he had hoped that the work would galvanize the viewer, not only intellectually but also viscerally, into helping realize just such a universal brotherhood, very little about the image invites optimism or is suggestive of inclusiveness. One of the characters, in the role of the festaijuolo in early Renaissance paintings, looks out to the viewer, inviting him -- note that there are no women represented here -- to complete the semicircle at the end of the table that was left explicitly empty.
The Trench is one of the works that he produced during his second stay at the ENP and is dramatically different from his earlier works at that site such as Maternity. Orozco's skill as a cartoonist and print maker is detectable not only in his style but also in his ability to communicate a complex message -- generally, timely political subjects -- simply and on a massive scale.
In 1923-24, along with painters like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, he helped create murals for the National Preparatory School. Allegorical Boticelli-esque females in deep folds of windblown drapery surround the mother and child. He completed his last fresco in 1949.