Jose Clemente Orozco - Biography
The life of Jose Clemente Orozco (1893-1949) is filled with drama, adversity and remarkable achievement. He was born in Zapotlan el Grande, a provincial town in Mexico, but grew up in the hurly-burly world of downtown Mexico City at the turn of the century. He studied at a classical art academy and learned as well from the printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada’s vivid art of the street.
As a young boy Orozco displayed remarkable talent, but only after he lost his left hand in a tragic accident was he able to devote himself to his true vocation as a painter. He came of age during the Mexican Revolution in which one million lost their lives. Due to his handicap, he escaped conscription and became a cartoonist, drawing biting social satires for opposition newspapers.
Orozco’s first solo exhibition was attacked by the critics, and like many other Mexicans, he fled north seeking better opportunities. At the U.S. border, most of his paintings were seized and destroyed by customs agents for being “immoral.” Orozco persevered, but was forced to make a living painting cinema posters and plastic dolls.
Back in Mexico in the early 1920s, he was one of the first to paint public murals sponsored by the new revolutionary government. His first murals were vandalized by an angry mob, but he went on to explore the upheaval of the times in a daring series of frescos.
Orozco later returned to the United States, where he lived through the great economic “Crash” and painted murals in California, New York and New Hampshire. During that time, he transcended cultural and language barriers, becoming a pioneer of the public arts movement of the 1930s-40s. After that, Orozco achieved recognition and decorated many of Mexico’s most important public buildings, including Guadalajara’s Man of Fire fresco, considered the Sistine Chapel of the Americas.
