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José Clemente Orozco (November 23, 1883 – September 7, 1949) was a Mexican caricaturist[1] and painter, who specialized in political murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others. Orozco was the most complex of the Mexican muralists, fond of the theme of human suffering, but less realistic and more fascinated by machines than Rivera. Mostly influenced by Symbolism, he was also a genre painter and lithographer. Between 1922 and 1948, Orozco painted murals in Mexico City, Orizaba, Claremont, California, New York City, Hanover, New Hampshire, Guadalajara, Jalisco, and Jiquilpan, Michoacán. His drawings and paintings are exhibited by the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City, and the Orozco Workshop-Museum in Guadalajara.[2] Orozco was known for being a politically committed artist, and he promoted the political causes of peasants and workers. [3]
One of his most famous murals is The Epic of American Civilization at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA. It was painted between 1932 and 1934 and covers almost 300 m2 (3200 square feet) in 24 panels. Its parts include: Migrations, Human Sacrifices, The Appearance of Quetzalcoatl, Corn Culture, Anglo-America, Hispano-America, Science and Modern Migration of the Spirit (another version of Christ Destroys His Cross).
‘Orozco was in New York in the 1930s for a meeting of the Artists’ Congress. I saw him and was impressed with the strength of his face and asked to take his portrait. I was living on Fifty-third Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art. He came by and sat for me; it was one of the few times I asked anyone to pose for me after I returned to New York.’ (Berenice Abbott, quoted in O’Neal, p. 183)
“The only pleasure you can get from creating something is the pleasure you have in doing it, not the final product even,” the photographer Berenice Abbott once said of her work.