Orozco was another of the “
Big Three” muralists of the
Mexican Mural Movement. Unlike the other two (
David Alfaro Siqueiros and
Diego Rivera) Orozco’s work evolved greatly over the span of his lifetime, reflecting significant changes in style as well as in Orozco’s
political beliefs.
Orozco’s first government
mural Maternity for the
National Preparatory School in
Mexico City was a traditional, Renaissance-style
fresco depicting a fair-skinned woman and child surrounded by
angels. This non-controversial image of the standard set of ideals was quickly left behind, however, as Orozco moved on to more envelope-pushing material.
Orozco’s growing
disillusionment with the
Mexican revolution was made very clear in his new murals (1923-6), showing
peasants as in-fighting peons, lost in their struggle and left in a world no better than the one they’d seen before the
revolution. The mural
Revolutionary Trinity showed a crew of three figures, one lost in
prayer, one blinded by a
Jacobin hat meant to symbolize the revolution, and one kneeling helplessly with its hands severed from its wrists.
The Family depicted an impoverished and disheartened family looking on at the ruins of a fallen
city.
The Trench cast three fallen figures lying prone on a
rifle that jut diagonally into the space of the mural as an eerie contrast against the standard pictures of
glorious heroes, courageously fallen in the name of the cause. The soft, curving figures of his early murals gave way to highly
angular compositions intended to jar the viewer.
These new murals were so poorly received that Orozco lost his
commission and disappeared briefly from the
Mexican mural scene. He reemerged several years later with a series of murals staged at
Dartmouth college (1932). In pure Orozco-style
defiance, a number of these murals deplored the
American education system, showing it as a
skeletal mother giving birth to a stillborn, skeletal
fetus at the hands of a ghoulish group of figures in the robes of
academics (
American Civilization – The Gods of the Modern World).
Orozco eventually returned to
Mexico (1940) where he continued to make
irreverent and moving political statements in his work up until his
death in 1949.