Ideals and the Marketplace

Along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco is known the world over as one of the Big Three leaders of the Mexican mural movement. But back in 1927, he was a frustrated artist whose ambitions were not satisfied by hometown opportunities. Leaving a wife and three daughters behind in Mexico City, he moved to New York to jump-start his career.

“Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-34” paints a deliciously detailed picture of a pivotal phase in the legendary muralist’s career. At the San Diego Museum of Art, this judicious survey of more than 110 paintings, drawings and prints is just the right size: big enough to make significant claims without being repetitive or visually exhausting.

It is ruthlessly--and refreshingly--unsentimental. Organized for Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art by guest curator Renato Gonzalez Mello and research curator Diane Miliotes, it refuses to tell another triumphant tale of a lone genius who beats the odds to win a place for himself in art history’s pantheon of masters. Instead, the sober show honestly chronicles Orozco’s struggle to make a living making paintings, both public murals and pictures for the home.

Such radical pragmatism is perfectly suited to the contradiction-riddled oeuvre of Orozco (1883-1949). His vigorous figurative paintings are pressure cookers filled to the brim with simmering mixtures of opportunism and idealism. Long before Warhol demonstrated that artistic integrity and commercial success can go hand in glove, Orozco created major works that hold both goals in a charged alliance.

The first of the exhibition’s three sections contains 15 ink drawings he made within a year of his arrival in New York. Orozco had started pencil sketches of these page-size pictures in 1926, the year before he left Mexico City. Based on the graphic style he developed drawing political cartoons for left- and right-wing newspapers, most are thoroughly standard depictions of the horrors of war.

Collectively titled “Mexico in Revolution,” they include three versions of a group of mourning women; three views of lynched men; corpses strewn around a dynamited train; victims fleeing an explosion; and a rape scene. “Wounded” is the grisliest, with two uniformed soldiers torturing a man lying naked in a makeshift hospital, alongside a blind triple amputee. (Orozco’s own left hand was amputated when he was 21, after an accident with gunpowder that also damaged his sight and hearing.)

But “Aristocratic Dance” is the most captivating drawing. In the center of a ring of sombrero-wearing soldiers stands a man who has been stripped of his clothes, except for his top hat, which identifies him as a landowner. Two of the rebel troops fire their revolvers at his bare feet, forcing him to dance like a puppet.

Ordinarily, pictures like this strive to capture the fear, humiliation and rage that such revenge-fueled scenes symbolize. But Orozco’s drawing displays no emotional abandon or cathartic release. Although smirks break out on two of the men’s faces, the rest act as if they’re only going through the motions, doing their job just to be done with it.

That’s the same feeling Orozco’s 15 drawings convey. In them, he appears to be doing his perfunctory duty, performing like a robot to deliver a cartoon version of the Mexican revolution to U.S. viewers with a taste for such south-of-the-border cliches.

In fact, the main reason Orozco moved to New York was to set up shop in the center of the American art market. In Mexico, his career had reached a plateau. A market for portable works of art did not exist there, and state-sponsored mural commissions were entangled in bureaucratic complications. In the U.S., interest in the Mexican muralists, most notably Diego Rivera, was keen.

The next section of the exhibition is the most stylistically diverse and conceptually messy. It’s also the most fascinating. The majority of its 44 works are oils on canvas. Examples from a series of 20 lithographs, many based on earlier drawings, are also included.

Made to be sold, they feature generalized scenes of mourning and patriotism. Orozco selected these subjects because he thought they’d be more palatable to an American audience than grim scenes of violence and death. He wasn’t wrong: The inexpensive prints sold briskly. He based additional images on murals he had painted in Mexico City, hoping to find similar commissions here.

While Orozco was not opposed to marketing his prints so brazenly, he wanted more from his canvases. At the time, folkloric images of Mexico were popular. But, over his first three years in New York, he couldn’t bear to churn out such romanticized fantasies. Criticizing Rivera for packaging his identity and his homeland in this fashion, Orozco turned his attention to his new surroundings.

He used a gloomy palette of murky browns, dirty grays and vacant blacks to paint looming bridges, shadowy subway tunnels, ghostly laborers and alienated office workers. Drawing on the realism of New York’s Ash Can School and the barbed sarcasm of German painting from the Weimar era, he mocked the pretensions of uptown snobs, producing undistinguished works that wore their politics on their sleeve. The stock market’s crash and the Depression provided ample fodder for his socially conscious imagery.

Far more compelling are his enigmatic works in which he dabbles in such modern styles as Symbolism, Surrealism, abstraction and proto-Pop. In these odd experiments, Orozco borrows and distorts the signature handiwork of Giorgio de Chirico, Joseph Stella, Stuart Davis and Charles Sheeler. Although he quickly dismissed his unflattering homages as belonging to an “ivory tower interlude,” some of their elements made their way into his murals.

Even stranger are Orozco’s paintings dedicated to the activities of the Delphic Circle, an international salon run by a wealthy Greek American, Eva Sikelianos. A portrait of her and a self-portrait stand out like sore thumbs. They invoke rich inner lives, an indulgence Orozco never allowed himself in any of his other works, all of which focus on relationships between groups of people rather than on the invisible dramas that unfold within individuals.

Likewise, “Embrace,” “Vigil,” “Drama” and “Have Another” wrestle with the presence of interior psychological states. But they fail dramatically. These troubled explorations recall Orozco’s early murals (some of which he was forced to re-paint), in which symbols of Freemasonry and other esoteric codes appear.

As time passed, Orozco’s hard-line stance against sentimental images of Mexico softened. He painted pictures of his homeland in the bright colors and simplified forms of what he had previously disparaged as a hopelessly folkloric style. Iconic images of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa also reveal a shift in his assessment of the rebel leaders, or at least the willingness to use them as symbols of what he wanted from his art.

The exhibition’s final section is organized around the three major murals Orozco painted in the United States from 1930-1934: “Prometheus” in Frary Hall, a dining room at Pomona College in Claremont; an untitled cycle of images at the New School for Social Research in New York; and “The Epic of American Civilization,” in Baker Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

Because the murals cannot be moved, viewers are presented with 53 studies, preparatory sketches and transfer sheets that Orozco used to paint them, as well as photographic reproductions of some of their scenes. (A digital projection that takes you on a virtual tour of the three sites is scheduled to run continuously in a side gallery, but it was not yet installed for the media preview on the morning of the show’s opening.)

Some of the drawings reveal changes Orozco made as he worked out the compositions of his monumental images. Others are carefully finished products, souvenirs to be sold to collectors.

The murals are Orozco’s American masterpieces. To see them in sequence, even in reproduction, is to watch his talent, ambition and achievement grow exponentially.

“Prometheus” (1930) is defiance personified. At one end of the dining hall, a neo-Gothic arch barely contains the figure’s upward thrust. If Michelangelo’s “David” had a younger brother who was a rabble-rousing punk, this would be his portrait. Stealing fire from the gods, he triumphs over adversity only to be crushed by it. Victory and defeat go hand in hand in Orozco’s modern rendition of the ancient Greek myth.

Complexity and ambivalence also unfold in the New School mural. Flanked by images of toiling laborers and portraits of Gandhi, Lenin and Stalin, the centerpiece of this four-walled work is “Table of Universal Brotherhood.” Although its title conjures Utopian images of peace and harmony, Orozco depicts nothing of the sort. At a square table, 11 men of various ethnicities sit stiffly, staring blankly, as if the conversation had died and is impossible to revive. Imagine a Thanksgiving dinner among strangers with no food and nothing to say to one another and you’ll have an idea of the discomfort this picture makes palpable.

“The Epic of American Civilization,” which wraps more than a dozen scenes around a library reading room, is a polyglot concoction in which historical and mythical figures march in a cyclical parade filled with mind-blowing surprises. Quetzalcoatl resembles Moses; Christ uses an ax to chop down his cross (like George Washington and the cherry tree) and then sheds his dead skin, like a snake, to emerge renewed, vigorous and ready for anything.

Orozco’s public murals and domestically scaled paintings are impossible to divide into two tidy groups. Their complex goals often overlap, blurring the boundary between reality and imagination, Utopianism and pragmatism. The years Orozco spent in the U.S. taught him that giving people what they want is not the same as giving us what we expect. Taking that lesson back to Mexico, he went on to even bigger and better things, billboard-scale paintings that clobber you with their obviousness and then get under your skin with their weirdness.

“Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-34,” San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, (619) 232-7931, through May 19. Closed Mondays. Adults: $8; seniors and young adults: $6; children: $6; children 5 and under, free.