An Intimate Take on a Public Gem

Seventy years ago, the Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco--on his way to becoming one of the most famous muralists in the world--made an important stop at Pomona College. He painted a fresco there: “Prometheus,” the only Orozco mural in Southern California and one of only three in the United States.

Eventually, Orozco--along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros--would be dubbed one of Los Tres Grandes, the Big Three, founders and masters of Mexico’s vibrant and influential mural movement. And as Orozco’s reputation grew, so did the value of the dramatic 20-foot-tall “Prometheus” he had painted at Pomona. The mural, says Marjorie Harth, director of Pomona’s Montgomery Gallery, “is the college’s chief artistic treasure.”

Until this fall, however, Harth considered that treasure incomplete. That’s when nearly two decades of negotiations finally paid off and the 17 drawings Orozco did in preparation for “Prometheus” were added to Pomona’s collection.

“Drawings like these have an immediacy and directness that is very different than the impact of the mural,” Harth says. “Where the mural is public, they are private. I think this is why [such] drawings are so appealing--they put us in the presence of the artist in an almost intimate way.”

It’s somewhat surprising that an Orozco mural ended up on a Pomona College wall in the first place. It was a professor of Hispanic civilization and art history named Jose Pijoan who brought the artist to the campus for his first U.S. commission--a painting in the arched north alcove of Frary Hall, the school’s dining hall. Known for left-leaning sentiments in his art, Orozco “was a courageous choice,” says Harth, “and an unusual choice for a mural at a college.”

The artist, then 46 and living in New York City, arrived in California in March 1930, and worked at Pomona for three months. He made the mural in true fresco style--that is, painting on wet plaster, a section at a time. His design called for four panels--the main one, which faces into the dining room, two side panels and an overhead panel hidden behind the arch.

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The work’s central figure is a muscular, anguished Prometheus, the Titan of Greek myth who stole fire from the gods to give to mankind. Around him, Orozco painted the masses who would benefit from the crime. Overhead, a geometrical design represents the godhead, the source of all power. And on the side panels, Harth explains, are figures that “represent what Orozco called the old order which Prometheus upset.” In the right panel are two male centaurs above an anguished female centaur ensnared by a serpent and her worried baby nearby. In the left panel, the heads of Zeus and Hera hover over a distressed Io (the woman who was turned into a cow for having an affair with Zeus).

According to Harth, there is no definitive record of how Orozco chose his subject, although Pijoan has credited himself with the idea. Perhaps, she says, its inspiration came from Orozco’s participation in a New York salon known as the Ashram, where Greek mythology was a particular passion.

Whatever its influences, the subject matter “is very appropriate for a college,” Harth points out, “because the notion of stealing fire from the gods is usually interpreted to be [about] gaining knowledge, with some people receiving it and some people rejecting it.” In fact, on the central panel, some of those clustered around Prometheus are desperately reaching up, others are turning away.

It has also been suggested that this Prometheus is autobiographical--symbolic of Orozco’s own suffering as an artist. After the negative response to a one-man show in Mexico in 1916, he wrote, “I have supported patiently the flood of epithets which the public let loose upon my head on account of that hapless exhibit, but when in a widely read newspaper I am insulted in such fashion, I cannot remain quiet longer. . . .”

It was the following year that he made his first visit to the United States, though his path here was initially no smoother--he ended up making a living by painting faces on dolls.

Returning to Mexico in 1920, he made a living as a newspaper cartoonist. Then in 1923, he received his first mural commission, at the National Preparatory School. He painted a series featuring the Mexican Revolution, the destruction of the old order and the uneasy rule of the new. He left Mexico again in 1927 when he again fell out of favor with critics and political conservatives.

After “Prometheus” was completed at Pomona College, Orozco headed back East, where he painted murals at the New School for Social Research in New York, and at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. With his reputation firmly in place, he went back to Mexico in 1934 for good. Among his best known works from this period are murals at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City and the University of Guadalajara. Orozco died in Mexico City in 1949.

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The courtship that finally reunited Orozco’s working drawings with his finished mural began in the early 1980s, when Harth took charge of Montgomery Gallery. One of her first tasks was dealing with the conservation of the mural. That was when she discovered the existence of the drawings, which were held in Mexico by Orozco’s three children, Clemente, Lucrecia and Alfredo.

Harth was attracted to the way the drawings revealed Orozco’s creative process at Frary Hall.

“They really are a record of Orozco thinking his way through this composition,” she points out.

Done in graphite, five are compositional studies--outlines for the wall panels. The rest are figure studies--outstretched arms, twisted torsos, muscular backs. The main compositional study, on two sheets of paper pieced together, clearly shows the diagonal thrust of the figures, from the extreme contortion of Prometheus to the arrangement of the masses on either side of him.

Orozco chose the solar plexus of the Prometheus figure as the center of the composition. On the drawings, he plotted radiating lines from that point which determined the flow of the crowds, as well as the angle of the smaller figures in those crowds. Additionally, bisecting lines were drawn from the two lower corners of the drawing--and in the finished mural, it’s clear that they outline the corona of fire that Prometheus is seizing in his uplifted hands.

The drawings also reveal changes between conception and execution. One of the more obvious is in the sketch for the left panel, which shows a schematized cityscape in the lower right corner. In the actual mural, this section is an oblong swatch of gray, with a jagged line through it. Harth agrees that it looks unfinished, but there is no firm explanation for its current state--perhaps Orozco ran out of time or changed his mind.

Harth first broached the subject of acquiring the drawings with Clemente Orozco, the artist’s eldest son, when he came to the college during the mural’s restoration. He named a price, but it hardly mattered. At the time, the college’s acquisition budget was nil.

But Harth never gave up.

In 1990, she succeeded in borrowing the 17 drawings for an exhibition at Pomona, all the while keeping negotiations for their purchase alive. “Discussions went on and on,” she recalls. “Basically our funds were so limited and Clemente’s expectations were so high in terms of price that we weren’t able to come to any kind of agreement. Periodically I would write and express interest again.”

Also in 1990, Harth managed to start an acquisitions fund, with an estate donation as seed money. The price for the drawings, however, remained out of reach. Five years later, Harth nearly gave up on ever having them, using some of the acquisition money to buy Goya’s etching series “La Tauromaquia.” Then last year, Lucrecia and Alfredo Orozco, both getting along in years, expressed interest in selling.

“They had always believed that the preparatory drawings belonged with the mural,” says Harth. Eventually, they convinced Clemente to go along too--the final offer was $250,000.

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But there was yet another hurdle. Certain artists in Mexico--including Orozco--are considered national treasures, and their works cannot be exported. Pomona College had to persuade Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts to make an exception to that rule.

“Our argument was based on the fact that these drawings were done in Claremont, preparatory for a mural permanently installed here; that they would be housed in a public museum, accessible to students and scholars and exhibited publicly,” Harth says.

When the institute finally ruled in Pomona’s favor, Harth made the trip to Mexico to pick up the drawings. Until Dec. 17, the four main compositional studies are on display in Montgomery Gallery. In January and February 2002, Pomona plans a full exhibition of the drawings, and some of them will be shown later in the year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of an Orozco exhibition organized by Dartmouth College.

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“WITHIN OUR WALLS: THE MUSEUM AT POMONA COLLEGE,” Montgomery Gallery, 330 N. College Ave., Claremont. Dates: Tuesday-Friday, 12-5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 1-5 p.m. Ends Dec. 17. Price: Free. Phone: (909) 621-8283. Call for information on hours that Frary Hall is open.