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      José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera: The Murals
      Hayden Herrera 


      The art and attitudes of the two great Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera and 
      José Clemente Orozco could not be more different. Rivera was a classicist, 
      Orozco an expressionist. Rivera was optimistic, Orozco was a pessimist. 
      Rivera was an indigenista who idealized the Indian segment of Mexican 
      society and glorified pre-hispanic culture. Orozco was a hispanista who 
      admired the Spanish conquerors as a civilizing force in a barbaric world. 
      Rivera has been called the Mexican Revolution&#8217;s ballad singer, Orozco its 
      interpreter and critic, Rivera its &#8220;proud historian,&#8221; Orozco its &#8220;tragic 
      poet.&#8221; 
      The Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who knew both artists when he 
      worked in Mexico in the 1930s, saw them in terms of the 
      Apollonian/Dionysian antithesis. Yet, he wrote, &#8220;It is ridiculous to talk 
      of Apollo when we look at the Rabelaisian, fat-bellied figure of Diego, 
      his flesh bursting out from overtight trousers and his greasy skin 
      appearing tightly stretched from his face to his stomach. It is equally 
      difficult to think of Dionysus in referring to an individual [Orozco] of 
      Promethean proportions&#8230;, protected by enormous round glasses with lenses 
      as thick as portholes....&#8221; Eisenstein saw Rivera as static, &#8220;&#8230;the nerve of 
      reality is fixed as though with a nail to the wall.&#8221; Orozco&#8217;s art he 
      called &#8220;A scream on a surface through form and through style.&#8221; 
      The contrast between the painter&#8217;s personalities was equally dramatic. 
      Rivera was affable, garrulous and gregarious. Orozco was a taciturn lone 
      wolf. Rivera had a life-embracing, sensuous and deeply curious love for 
      people. Orozco had an intense tenderness that was often masked by 
      corrosive irony. Rivera loved to work surrounded by people whom he regaled 
      with a steady flow of theory, opinion and outrageous tall tales. Orozco 
      preferred complete privacy in his studio. 
      These two leaders of the Mexican mural renaissance that began in 1920 are 
      opposites who compliment each other so perfectly that to focus on the art 
      and ideas of one illuminates the work of the other. In Mexico it is said 
      that &#8220;if one had not existed the other might have ceased to exist.&#8221; 
      They admired and competed with each other. In 1925 Rivera said: &#8220;José 
      Clemente Orozco, along with the popular engraver, José Guadalupe Posada, 
      is the greatest artist, whose work expresses genuinely the character and 
      the spirit of the people of the City of Mexico. ...Profoundly sensual, 
      cruel, moralistic, and rancorous as a good, semi-blond descendent of 
      Spaniards, he has the force and mentality of a servant of the Holy 
      Office...in all his work one feels the simultaneous presence of love, of 
      pain and of death.&#8221; Orozco was more withholding of praise. His compliments 
      to Rivera were usually back-handed, and in his letters, he called Rivera 
      &#8220;potentate,&#8221; &#8220;Poor Fat Man,&#8221; the &#8220;Great Folkloric leader,&#8221; and &#8220;Diegoff 
      Riveritch Romanoff.&#8221; He bitterly resented Rivera&#8217;s mania for publicity and 
      the way Rivera set himself up as &#8220;the great creator of everything&#8221; with 
      the other muralists playing the role of his disciples. 
      Legend has it that when in 1934 Orozco finished his fresco Catharsis in 
      the staircase of Mexico City&#8217;s Palace of Fine Arts, he crossed the hall 
      carrying his wet brush and handed it to Rivera who was not yet finished 
      with his remake of the destroyed Rockefeller Center mural. &#8220;Maybe this 
      will help you to finish,&#8221; Orozco is said to have said. 
      As their autobiographies show, their lives were distinct. Rivera&#8217;s was 
      full of drama, scandal, women, glamorous people, politics, pleasure and 
      work. Orozco&#8217;s life was full of work. As Orozco described his 
      autobiography published in 1942: &#8220;There is nothing of special interest in 
      it, no famous exploits or heroic deeds, no extraordinary or miraculous 
      happenings. Only the uninterrupted and tremendous effort of a Mexican 
      painter to learn his trade and find opportunities to practice it.&#8221; 
       
        



      35. Self-Portrait, 1948 



      The artists&#8217; images of themselves in self-portraits are telling. Rivera, a 
      great self-mythologizer, painted himself often. Unlike Orozco who 
      refrained from inserting himself into the walls he painted, Rivera turns 
      up in many of his frescos, for example, in his 1930 The Making of a Fresco 
      at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he demonstrates his idea of the 
      artist as a laborer by picturing himself on a scaffold, a worker among 
      workers. His presentation to the viewer of his fat back side was felt to 
      be a premeditated insult in some San Francisco circles, and when Orozco 
      saw the picture he voiced his disapproval. In 1940 Rivera made a double 
      appearance in his Pan American Unity mural at the City College of San 
      Francisco, where he is seen first in blue work clothes painting, next as a 
      small boy seated on the floor drawing, and finally as a grown man holding 
      hands around the tree of love and life with the film star Paulette 
      Goddard. He turns his back on his third wife, the painter Frida Kahlo, 
      whom he had divorced in 1939 and was about to remarry. Paulette Goddard he 
      said, stands for &#8220;American girlhood...shown in friendly contact with a 
      Mexican man.&#8221; Asked why he had painted himself holding hands with Goddard 
      (who is said to have been a contributing cause in his divorce) Rivera 
      replied: &#8220;It means closer Pan-Ameri-canism.&#8221; 
      Rivera also entered his murals in various disguises: in the Cortez Palace 
      in Cuernavaca he was Morelos, at the National Institute of Cardiology he 
      appeared as an eminent cardiologist, and in his mural sequence at the 
      Ministry of Education he was an architect. His self-presentation is often 
      full of humor, as when he painted himself as a small boy with a frog and a 
      snake in his pockets, and with Frida Kahlo&#8217;s motherly arm around his 
      shoulder. Rivera&#8217;s self-portraits have an intimate, contemplative calm. 
      Orozco&#8217;s are agitated. Orozco&#8217;s Self-Portrait from 1949 shows the painter 
      as an intellectual, a man of self-doubt, and of passionate morality. His 
      blazing eyes bore into the viewer. They contain all the anger and 
      tenderness with which he observed the sufferings and foibles of the 
      Mexican people. 
      Orozco and Rivera were born three years apart, Orozco in Ciudad Guzmán in 
      1883, and Rivera in Guanajuato in 1886. As young children, both moved with 
      their families to Mexico City. Both studied art at the Academy of San 
      Carlos, and both felt their real teacher was the turn-of-the-century 
      broadside engraver Posada whom they claimed to have watched at work when 
      they were mere schoolboys. Orozco recalled: &#8220;I would stop and spend a few 
      enchanted moments in watching him, and sometimes I even ventured to enter 
      the shop and snatch up a bit of the metal shavings that fell from the 
      minium-coated metal plate as the master&#8217;s graver passed over it. This was 
      the push that first set my imagination in motion and impelled me to cover 
      paper with my earliest little figures; this was my awakening to the 
      existence of the art of painting.&#8221; Similarly, Rivera said he pressed his 
      nose so often against Posada&#8217;s workshop window that the engraver came out 
      and befriended him. Both stories may be invented, but it is true that 
      these artists inherited much of Posada&#8217;s humor and imaginative bite. 
      Orozco in particular was known as a cartoonist before he became a mural 
      painter. 
       
        



      4. Girl with Two Dogs, 1915 



      Both Orozco and Rivera had a passionate love for Mexico. Their central 
      subject was Mexican history, and their murals reveal their complex and 
      contradictory approaches to that story. They wanted to create an art that 
      would give the Mexican people a pride in themselves and in and their 
      heritage. To a great extent they succeeded. Their murals changed the way 
      Mexicans saw themselves, and they changed as well, the picture of Mexico 
      formed in the minds of people all over the world. 
      During the period of reconstruction that followed the armed battles of the 
      revolutionary decade from 1910 to 1920, Mexican culture engaged in a 
      search for a Mexican identity. In music, literature, theater, dance and 
      painting there was a &#8220;return to origins,&#8221; a reaffirmation of Mexico&#8217;s 
      indigenous past. Pre-Columbian art and popular art was re-valued. 
      Sophisticated city women began to dress in native costumes, and painters 
      not only populated their works with Indians and native artifacts, they 
      also imitated the folkloric style of popular art. Rivera was the leader of 
      this folkloric trend. Orozco couldn&#8217;t stand it. In 1923 he wrote: 
      &#8220;Personally I detest representing in my works the odious and degenerate 
      type of common people that is generally taken as a &#8216;picturesque&#8217; subject 
      to please the tourist or profit at his expense. We are chiefly responsible 
      for having permitted the creation and fostering of the idea that the 
      ridiculous &#8216;charro&#8217; and the vapid &#8216;china poblana&#8217; represent so-called 
      Mexicanism....These ideas induce me to abjure, once and for all, the 
      painting of huaraches [sandals] and dirty cotton pants. &#8230;in all of my 
      serious works there is not a single huarache or a single sombrero....&#8221; 
      The reaffirmation of Mexico&#8217;s indigenous culture in the 1920s had much to 
      do with President Obregon&#8217;s brilliant Minister of Education José 
      Vasconcelos, a lawyer and philosopher who had participated in the revolt 
      against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Acting on his idea that the 
      &#8220;The Spirit Shall Speak Through My Race,&#8221; Vasconcelos launched a crusade 
      to educate the Mexican people and to bring the Indian into the body 
      politic. Realizing not only that many Mexicans were illiterate and that, 
      as he put it, &#8220;Men are more malleable when approached through their senses 
      as happens when one contemplates beautiful forms and figures...,&#8221; he 
      commissioned painters to work at mason&#8217;s wages decorating public walls 
      with paintings that could teach the people. 
      Orozco and Rivera both wanted to create a truly Mexican art. Of Mexican 
      artists of the 1920s, Orozco said: &#8220;we too had a character, which was 
      quite the equal of any other. We would learn what the ancients and the 
      foreigners could teach us, but we could do as much as they, or more. It 
      was not pride but selfconfidence that moved us to this belief. Now for the 
      first time the painters took stock of the country they lived in.&#8221; Rivera, 
      recently returned from a fifteen year sojourn in Europe, was exhilarated 
      by the beauty of his country: &#8220;It was as if I were being born anew, born 
      in a new world.&#8221; He said he wanted his murals in the Ministry of Education 
      &#8220;...to reproduce the pure basic images of my land. I wanted my painting to 
      reflect the social life of Mexico as I saw it, and through my vision of 
      the truth to show the masses the outline of the future.&#8221; 
      The ways in which Orozco and Rivera painted history are diametrically 
      opposed. In his gigantic mural on the staircase of the National Palace in 
      Mexico City Rivera envisioned the sweep of time as an immense and colorful 
      panorama, starting with the Pre-hispanic period on the right, and moving 
      leftward, through the conquest, the War of Independence, the revolution 
      and finally, on the left, to the present and even the future. With his 
      gargantuan appetite for life and his irrepressible curiosity, he wanted to 
      include everything. As a result, his mural teems with so much detail that 
      the viewer is at first overwhelmed. One must read his mural like a book, 
      examining first one part and then another, until one forms a vivid picture 
      of the story of Mexico. 
       
        



      21. Prophecy of Quetzacoatl (Snakes), 1935 



      By contrast, Orozco&#8217;s vision of history, for example, in his 1932 mural 
      sequence in Dartmouth College&#8217;s Baker Library, is spare. He selects key 
      moments which he abstracts and synthesizes. He discards incident, breaks 
      up logical narrative sequence and retains only the essence of Mexico&#8217;s 
      origins and evolution. In his view, there are a few important historical 
      figures, namely the white bearded priest/god Quetzalcoatl, Cortez, Zapata 
      and an angry Christ who returns to destroy his cross, because, as Orozco 
      saw it, human beings made such a botch of history that Christ realized 
      that his sacrifice had been in vain. Orozco draws a parallel between 
      Quetzalcoatl and Christ. Unappreciated by their people, both these part 
      human, part divine saviors left this world vowing to return. 
      Rivera with his increasing nostalgia for the past, painted an idyllic view 
      of Mexico before the Spanish intervention. To Rivera the conquest was a 
      disaster. He depicted cruel and greedy conquistadors branding and 
      enslaving the natives, and the venal Catholic church in cahoots with the 
      conquerors. His Cortez was a despot and a degenerate&#8212;his National Palace 
      mural shows Cortez as a syphilitic. Orozco felt differently. The Cortez he 
      painted in the National Preparatory School in Mexico City in 1926 is 
      heroic and protective. As the conqueror steps on a slain Indian and joins 
      hands with his Indian mistress Malinche, he stands for the origin of the 
      new mestizo race. Orozco&#8217;s later Cortez at Dartmouth is an even more 
      indomitable hero, albeit a mixed blessing of a hero, for here he is shown 
      as an armoured man, a man of steel who led the way to the dehumanizing 
      industrial era. 
       
        



      13. Friar and the Indian, 1930 



      Orozco thought more highly than did Rivera of the role of the church in 
      the colonial period. To him the Catholic priests were an improvement over 
      the blood-hungry pre-Columbian gods and their tyrannical and superstitious 
      priests who performed cruel human sacrifices. His Franciscan missionaries 
      at the National Preparatory School lift the Indians out of abject misery. 
      The image of Christian charity is less tender in his later mural sequence 
      in the former chapel of the Hospicio Cabanas, an orphanage in Guadalajara 
      whose nave walls he painted in 1938 and &#8217;39. Here the Conquest is a 
      terrifying apocalypse. Cortez is transformed into a robot, and the 
      conquistadors&#8217; horses become two-headed monsters or war machines. The 
      heated imagination of this imagery becomes even more feverish in Orozco&#8217;s 
      subsequent murals at the Supreme Court of Justice and the Hospital of 
      Jesus in Mexico City. 
      Orozco&#8217;s murals universalize his subjects. Rivera&#8217;s are rich with 
      specificity. Orozco wrote in connection with his Dartmouth frescoes: &#8220;In 
      every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, 
      never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the 
      plastic construction, and it is present all the time as energy-creating 
      matter....The important point regarding the frescoes of Baker Library is 
      not only the quality of the idea that initiates and organizes the whole 
      structure, it is also the fact that it is an AMERICAN idea developed into 
      American forms, American feeling, and as a consequence, into American 
      style.&#8221; 
      Although Rivera said that it was the masses that propelled history 
      forward, and his history of Mexico painted at the National Palace is a 
      dialectic of good and evil and of class struggle, his vision of history 
      is, like Orozco&#8217;s, dominated by leaders from Quetzalcoatl to Cortez to 
      Hidalgo to Zapata to Karl Marx. Where Orozco drew a parallel between 
      Quetzalcoatl and Christ, Rivera draws a parallel between Quetzalcoatl and 
      Marx, who is seen at the top of the section called Mexico Today and 
      Tomorrow. Displaying a document that says &#8220;The whole history of human 
      society to this day is the history of class struggle,&#8221; Marx points towards 
      peace and resolution in an industrial utopia. 
      For Rivera the optimist, history moves in the direction of Marxist 
      revolution. For Orozco, on the other hand, history leads to more chaos and 
      more war. He did, however, begin his work at Dartmouth with an image of 
      man liberated from mechanization, and he ended his Dartmouth mural cycle 
      with hopeful images of workers reading and building. But his heart wasn&#8217;t 
      in it, and his real vision of the end of history is in the return of the 
      Messiah to destroy his cross. 
       
        



      33. The Embrace, c. 1945-46 



      Orozco did not idealize the Mexican past as did Rivera. He said that &#8220;the 
      great dramas of humanity do not need to be glorified, for they are like 
      manifestations of natural forces such as volcanoes.&#8221; From his point of 
      view no matter how much the world changed, the same evils&#8212;war, injustice, 
      poverty, oppression, ignorance&#8212;prevailed. He thus believed, as he put it, 
      &#8220;in criticism as a spiritual mission and as the expressive capacity of the 
      spirit in art.&#8221; 
      Orozco had little faith that human beings joining together in groups might 
      bring about social change. He joined no political party. &#8220;No artist has, 
      or ever has had, political convictions of any sort,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Those who 
      profess to have them are not artists.&#8221; Unlike Rivera, whose murals are 
      full of hammers and sickles and who did not deny their value as Communist 
      propaganda, Orozco insisted that his murals took no partisan positions. To 
      him all ideologies were suspect: all of them led to demagoguery and 
      totalitarianism. This skepticism can be seen in The Phantasms of Religion 
      in Alliance with the Military and his Carnival of Ideologies, both painted 
      in 1936 on the main staircase of the Government Palace in Guadalajara. 
      Orozco&#8217;s Carnival was prophetic in bringing together the hammer and 
      sickle, the swastika and the fascist bundle of fasces well before the 
      Stalin-Hitler Pact. The painting lambastes Stalin, who is seen on the 
      upper left wearing a military cap and manipulating a puppet-clown. It also 
      attacks Mussolini, the clown in the pulpit on the right who is shown 
      dangling a bundle of fasces from a sickle as he delivers a political 
      tirade. Equally grotesque is Hitler in the center, wearing a Phrygian cap 
      and an arm band with a swastika and star. Just above Hitler and slightly 
      to his left is the Japanese Mikado waving a pair of detached clenched 
      fists with which he juggles a hammer and a sickle. Orozco does not spare 
      the church, represented here by an old man holding a cross. Marx, too, is 
      ridiculed. He is the tiny bearded figure earnestly ranting just above the 
      fresco&#8217;s bottom edge. 
      Orozco&#8217;s statements of his artistic credo are always outrageously (and 
      misleadingly) formalist. &#8220;A painting is a poem and nothing else,&#8221; he said 
      about his fresco Dive Bomber and Tank, which he painted in 1940 for and at 
      New York&#8217;s Museum of Modern Art, and which expresses the terror of World 
      War II and his distaste for industrialization. 
       
        



      25. Advance, c. 1940 



      When they lived and worked in the United States -- Orozco from 1927 to 
      1934 and Rivera from 1930 to 1934--a period when the conservative 
      political climate in Mexico was inhospitable to mural painting, both 
      Rivera and Orozco were impressed by the beauty of machines. Both artists 
      observed that machines were this country&#8217;s highest art form. But, starting 
      with his Dartmouth mural in which the captives of the conquest are fed 
      into the maw of fantastical machines, Orozco painted machinery as 
      dehumanizing and destructive, whereas Rivera painted them as awesome and 
      constructive. To Orozco, machinery meant &#8220;slavery, automatism, and the 
      converting of a human being into a robot without a brain, heart, free 
      will, under the control of another machine.&#8221; 
      From Rivera&#8217;s point of view, the Marxist revolution would take place in an 
      industrialized country, and he was delighted with his commission in 1932 
      to paint murals on the subject of Detroit industry in the interior 
      courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts. He painted what he called &#8220;the 
      great saga of the machine and steel.&#8221; The steel industry, Rivera said, 
      &#8220;has tremendous plastic beauty...it is as beautiful as the early Aztec or 
      Mayan sculptures.&#8221; In his paean to the auto industry, he pictured the huge 
      stamping press on the court&#8217;s south wall as a totemic idol that is based 
      on an Aztec sculpture of Coatlicue, the goddess of earth and death, who 
      represented the struggle of opposites in nature and in human life, a 
      dialectic of good and evil that continues in the courtyard&#8217;s many fresco 
      panels. 
      Before he began to paint these frescoes, Rivera spent months making 
      careful studies of the Ford Rouge plant. While his depiction of what he 
      saw is as imaginatively freewheeling as the vision that produced Orozco&#8217;s 
      machines at Dartmouth, painted in the same year, he typically insisted on 
      accuracy in every detail, and he was proud when the Ford workers told him 
      he had got it right. 
      His Ford workers may be efficient cogs, but they labor in harmony with 
      machinery and, unlike the victims of Orozco&#8217;s machines, they are not 
      anonymous; indeed, many are based on portraits done from life. Perhaps 
      because he did not want to offend his patron Edsel Ford, in his Detroit 
      frescoes Rivera avoided any hint of the difficult work conditions at the 
      Ford plant or the sufferings of the unemployed during these Depression 
      years. He painted instead a timeless and ideal view of industry, one that 
      expressed his hope that industrialization would bring a new era for 
      humanity, a society in which the worker would control the machine and gain 
      the power to bring peace to the world. The following year at Rockefeller 
      Center he painted this utopian vision. Man at the Crossroads portrays a 
      heroic worker who, like a pilot, has his hands on the levers and buttons 
      that control progress. In this mural Rivera did acknowledge the Depression 
      by depicting breadlines and policemen repressing political demonstrators, 
      and this time he did offend his Capitalist patron; his addition of the 
      portrait of Lenin prompted the Rockefellers to banish him from his 
      scaffold. The painting remained unfinished, and was later destroyed. 
       
        



      15. The Unemployed, 1932 



      Orozco&#8217;s view of New York during hard times was more pitiful and less 
      political. He painted bleak gatherings of jobless men and he painted 
      toppling skyscrapers that reveal a world in cataclysm. In his 
      autobiography he wrote: &#8220;The Crash. Panic. Suspended credit. A rise in the 
      cost of living. Millions suddenly laid off...Red faced, hard, desperate 
      angry men, with opaque eyes and clenched fists. By night in the protection 
      of shadows, whole crowds begged in the streets for a nickel for coffee and 
      there was no doubt, not the slightest that they needed it. This was the 
      Crash. Disaster.&#8221; 
      Orozco&#8217;s profound sympathy for human suffering was not galvanized into 
      political activism as was Rivera&#8217;s. He insisted on the primacy of form 
      above content once again when he said: &#8220;I paint prostitutes, the people, 
      or the archbishop because they give me materia prima for my artistic 
      realizations, in the same way I could paint Hitler or Stalin, without 
      being pro-Hitler or a Stalinist. What basically interests me is art and 
      everything that can provide me with a way to realize an art work. Thus I 
      could just as well paint in Berlin as in Moscow.&#8221; 
       
        



      18. Women, 1935 (study from Catharsis) 



      Appalled at the world&#8217;s corruption, he painted women as whores and 
      victims. They are whores, for example in his 1934 mural Catharsis. And 
      they are long suffering in his Women of the Workers of 1926. These female 
      figures are a far cry from the highly sensual allegorical nudes Rivera 
      painted at the National Agricultural School at Chapingo in 1926 and 1927. 
      His Virgin Earth and his Liberated Earth, both of which represent his 
      increasingly pregnant wife Lupe Marín, reveal Rivera&#8217;s huge admiration of 
      and appetite for women. 
      Both Orozco and Rivera saw the creative process as something organic. 
      Orozco said that art should &#8220;spring forth&#8221; as if it were &#8220;born of the 
      impulse of natural forces and in accordance with their laws.&#8221; Rivera said: 
      &#8220;I am not merely an &#8216;artist&#8217; but a man performing his biological function 
      of producing paintings, just as a tree produces flowers and fruit, nor 
      mourns the loss each year, knowing that next season it shall blossom and 
      bear fruit again.&#8221; 
      For both, making good art came before making a good world. The difference 
      is that Orozco was open and adamant about art&#8217;s primacy. In his artistic 
      credo written in 1923 he said: &#8220;The real work of art like a cloud or a 
      tree, has absolutely nothing to do with morality or immorality, with good 
      or evil, with wisdom or ignorance, or with virtue or vice.... A painting 
      should not be a commentary but the fact itself; not a reflection but light 
      itself; not an interpretation but the thing to be interpreted.... 
      Everything that is not purely and exclusively the plastic, geometric 
      language, subjected to the inescapable laws of mechanics, expressible by 
      an equation, is a subterfuge to conceal impotence; it is literature, 
      politics, philosophy, whatever you will, but it is not painting.&#8221; 
      Not surprisingly, the Communist Party had little use for Orozco. They 
      considered him to be a bourgeois skeptic. When David Alfaro Siqueiros, the 
      third member of the mural triumvirate, saw Orozco&#8217;s designs for 
      Guadalajara&#8217;s Government Palace mural, he told his older colleague, 
      &#8220;Orozco, I think you are a great painter, but you are a lousy 
      philosopher.&#8221; Another time, the staunchly Communistic Siqueiros said: 
      &#8220;Orozco, faithful to his traditional hermeticism and misanthropy, 
      succumbed to apolitical passivity at the same time that he drowned in the 
      empty symbolism of pseudo-revolutionary art.&#8221; 
      Siqueiros did not have a favorable opinion of Rivera&#8217;s politics either. 
      Rivera had been active in the Mexican Communist Party from 1922 when he 
      joined, to 1929 when he was expelled, apparently because of his stand on 
      trade union issues and possibly also because of his admiration for 
      Trotsky. (He was reinstated in 1954, three years before his death.) The 
      problem with Rivera was not passivity, as with Orozco, but over-activity. 
      Rivera was politically anarchic. As one Mexican friend mildly put it, his 
      politics were &#8220;susceptible to circumstantial variation.&#8221; Siqueiros called 
      Rivera a snob, an opportunist, a &#8220;mental tourist, a &#8220;dilettante in 
      revolutionary art,&#8221; and an &#8220;aesthete of imperialism.&#8221; According to 
      Siqueiros, all Rivera cared about was securing mural commissions. Indeed, 
      Rivera&#8217;s muralist colleagues greatly resented his success at hogging all 
      the best public walls. Rivera&#8217;s acceptance of commissions from Mexico&#8217;s 
      conservative government under President Calles and from North American 
      Capitalists such as Rockefeller and Ford, meant, in Siqueiros&#8217;s opinion, 
      that he had sold his soul to the devil. 
      Although Rivera was ousted from the Party, he continued to play a 
      political role in Mexico and to express his Communist faith in his murals. 
      &#8220;Art,&#8221; he said, &#8220;is one of the most efficient subversive agents.&#8221; He 
      explained away his working for Capitalists by saying that he was following 
      Lenin&#8217;s advice to work from within the enemy camp. 
      Rivera&#8217;s artistic credo is the opposite of Orozco&#8217;s. Rivera said: &#8220;To be 
      an artist one must first be a man vitally concerned with all problems of 
      social struggle, unflinching in portraying them without concealment or 
      evasion, never shirking the truth as he understands it, never withdrawing 
      from life. As a painter his problems are those of his craft, he is a 
      workman and an artisan. As an artist he must be a dreamer; he must 
      interpret the unexpressed hopes, fears and desires of his people and of 
      his time, he must be the conscience of his culture. His work must contain 
      the whole substance of morality not in content but rather by the sheer 
      force of its aesthetic facts.&#8221; 
      Rivera&#8217;s first mural painted in the National Preparatory School in 1922 
      did not express the hopes and fears of his people. Entitled Creation, it 
      is a classicizing, art-deco-style allegory of the arts and sciences 
      inspired by Vasconcelos&#8217;s mixture of Christian and Greek philosophy. 
      Symbolic female figures are arranged as emanations of the male and female 
      spirit seen below in the form of a light-skinned Adam and a dark-skinned 
      Eve, a reference to the origins of the American race. Rivera called this 
      mural &#8220;nothing but a big retablo,&#8221; as if it were influenced by Mexican 
      popular art. But at this stage, his visual sources were purely European. 
      Just before leaving Europe he had gone to Italy to study the murals of the 
      Italian Renaissance. His rich and earthy Parisian cubism of 1913 to 1917 
      also informs Creation&#8217;s structure, and in his future murals, cubism would 
      help Rivera to compose numerous details into a single structure that would 
      not poke holes into the plane of the wall. 
      Orozco&#8217;s first mural entitled Maternity and painted in 1923 in the 
      courtyard of the same school where Rivera painted Creation, did not focus 
      on Mexico any more than did Rivera&#8217;s first mural. Orozco&#8217;s blond mother 
      figure is a nude Madonna surrounded by Botticelli-like angels. Orozco 
      compared Rivera&#8217;s Creation unfavorably with a peanut, and he called his 
      colleague&#8217;s experiments with the golden section and cubism, 
      &#8220;pseudoscience.&#8221; Rivera returned the insult. He said Orozco&#8217;s Maternity 
      was &#8220;totally foreign to the exalted spirit of the painter, and of a style 
      that caters to the herd of bucking jackasses that cannot reach with their 
      hooves the level at which the painters&#8217; scaffolds are set.&#8221; 
       
        



      23. Requiem, 1935 



      In their subsequent frescoes, Orozco&#8217;s Peace, 1926, for example, or 
      Rivera&#8217;s Rural School, 1923, both muralists found their own pictorial 
      language. Inspired largely by Giotto, both painted simple, monumental 
      figures that stood for all Mexican people, a type that, when borrowed by 
      lesser artists, became stereotypical. Orozco used this rounded scheme 
      mainly to depict rebozo-clad women, faceless soldiers and anonymous peons. 
      When he painted the nude male torsos in The Trench, 1926, heroic, muscular 
      chests and shoulders reveal his knowledge of classical anatomy. Some of 
      his last frescoes at the Preparatory School, works like the Franciscan 
      missionary or Youth, show Orozco was moving toward a leaner figure type. 
      Then in his 1930 Pomona College mural Prometheus, he began to abandon his 
      classical and linear mode in favor of a painterly expressionism that 
      eventually led to the invention of figures like the beggars in Misery or 
      The People and its False Leaders, both painted at the University of 
      Guadalajara in 1936. Here the starving masses are freely brushed 
      hieroglyphs of skin and bone. 
       
        



      16. Prometheus, 1935 



      In the years of reconstruction in the 1920s the Mexican muralists&#8217; chief 
      subject was the revolution. Mexicans, it was thought, should know their 
      struggles and their triumphs so that they could feel themselves to be an 
      integral part of the nation that was just being born. Rivera painted the 
      revolution&#8217;s hopes. Orozco painted its failures. Rivera could reinvent the 
      revolution as a beautiful epic because he was in Europe while the bloody 
      battles were being waged. Having witnessed the revolution first hand, 
      Orozco was unable to idealize. 
      In 1915 Orozco had gone to Orizaba in Veracruz where he was attached as an 
      illustrator to Carranza&#8217;s revolutionary army. For the pro-Carranza 
      newspaper La Vanguardia, he lampooned the armies opposed to Carranza. 
      Non-partisan even in his youth, he also caricatured &#8216;the Carrancista 
      army&#8217;s drunk and lecherous soldiers. The destruction he saw during the 
      revolution horrified Orozco. In his typically anti-dramatic manner he 
      wrote in his autobiography: &#8220;I played no part in the revolution, I came to 
      no harm, and I ran no danger at all. To me the Revolution was the gayest 
      and most diverting of carnivals...&#8221; Rivera was the opposite. He liked to 
      pretend that he had fought alongside Zapata (and even alongside of Lenin). 
      But the truth is that during the second decade of this century Rivera was 
      safely tucked away in Montparnasse. 
       
        



      9. Zapatista, 1929 (from Los de abajo) 



      Ever contradictory, Orozco goes on in the next chapter of his 
      autobiography, to describe the Revolution in the most poignant terms: &#8220;The 
      world was torn apart around us. Troop convoys passed on their way to 
      slaughter. ...Trains back from the battlefield unloaded their cargoes in 
      the station in Orizaba: the wounded; the tired; exhausted, mutilated 
      soldiers, sweating and tatterdemalion. In the world of politics it was the 
      same, war without quarter, struggle for power and wealth. Factions and 
      subfactions were past counting, the thirst for vengeance 
      insatiable...Farce, drama, barbarity. Buffoons and dwarfs trailing along 
      after the gentlemen of noose and dagger, in conference with smiling 
      procuresses. Insolent leaders, inflamed with alcohol, taking whatever they 
      wanted at pistol point....A parade of stretchers with the wounded in 
      bloody rags, and all at once the savage pealing of bells and a thunder of 
      rifle fire... the cries of the crowd. Viva Obregon! Death to Villa! Viva 
      Carranza! &#8216;La Cucaracha&#8217; accompanied by firing.&#8221; (La Cucaracha is the 
      ribald revolutionary song about a drunk cockroach that can no longer walk. 
      Orozco&#8217;s cartoon of this title shows his scorn.) 
       
        



      3. Cruelty, c. 1913-1917 



      From Orozco&#8217;s point of view the revolution stopped half-way, betrayed by 
      its supporters. His feeling of futility, anger and sorrow pervades his 
      Preparatory School murals. In 1924 he lashed out at the corruption of 
      contemporary Mexican life with a series of cartoon-like frescoes that 
      include The Reactionary Forces, Political Junkheap, The Last Judgment, Law 
      and Justice and The Rich Banquet while the Workers Quarrel. 
      Rivera&#8217;s Education Ministry murals, painted between 1923 and 1928, reveal 
      a more sanguine view of post-revolutionary Mexican society. But Rivera 
      could poke fun too, as in his Wall Street Banquet, in which John D. 
      Rockefeller and Henry Ford dine on tickertape, or his Night of the Rich, 
      where a blue-eyed gringo clutches a moneybag. As a good dialectician, 
      Rivera naturally contrasted these views of privilege with views of the 
      people. In Our Bread and Night of the Poor, his poor people look peaceful 
      and worthy as if they were in a church (a Marxist church), whereas 
      Orozco&#8217;s fighting workers looked as evil as his banqueting capitalists. 
      Orozco&#8217;s murals offended conservative sensibilities, and he was fired from 
      the job until 1926, when he returned to finish his Preparatory School 
      murals. His frescoes of 1926 are no longer cartoon-like. Now simplified, 
      monumental figures contain all of the artist&#8217;s tenderness and compassion. 
      His pessimism has become more tragic than angry. Revolutionary Trinity 
      presents the urban worker, the soldier and the peasant joined together not 
      in triumph as the trio is always shown in Rivera&#8217;s Education Ministry 
      murals, but in despair. The peasant wrings his hands in anguish. The 
      soldier, all brute energy and muscle, seems to have lost his foothold on 
      the earth. He is blinded by a red flag transformed into a liberty cap. The 
      worker, who looks with a combination of horror and dismay at the 
      gun-wielding soldier, has lost his hands in war. He seems a particularly 
      conflicted and tortured figure; perhaps Orozco had a special sympathy for 
      him because Orozco himself had lost his left hand in a childhood accident 
      with gun powder. 
      By contrast, Rivera&#8217;s revolutionary duo seen in The Embrace of the worker 
      and the campesino on the first floor of the Education Ministry, is an 
      idealized image. The farmer even has a halo formed by his tipped back 
      sombrero, and the holiness of this revolutionary embrace is reinforced by 
      its association with the embrace of Joachim and Anna in Giotto&#8217;s Arena 
      Chapel in Padua. The alliance will, Rivera seems to say, bring about the 
      well-being seen for example in the fresco just to the right which shows 
      Indian women sitting together in the Mexican landscape. 
      As we have seen, Rivera wanted his Ministry of Education murals to &#8220;show 
      the masses the outline of the future.&#8221; He painted Mexicans at work in the 
      Court of Labour and at play in the Court of Festivals. In the former, his 
      scenes of miners entering and leaving the mine suggest that work is 
      enabling, but they have a mood of solemnity and oppression that is 
      augmented by the association of the image with Christ&#8217;s Road to Calvary 
      and Crucifixion. In the court of Fiestas, Rivera combined a peasant 
      meeting with the redistribution of the land. Upstairs in one of the 
      Ballads of the Revolution he depicted revolutionaries agitating for 
      political change. 
       
        



      14. Soldier's Wife, 1930 



      By comparison with Rivera&#8217;s optimistic view of social progress, we have 
      Orozco&#8217;s burdened workers in his Return to Work or his soldaderas (camp 
      followers) who move across the barren Mexican land as if they were 
      propelled, not by their own wills, but by fate. Orozco&#8217;s long-suffering 
      women have lost their husbands, their sons and their homes in the 
      revolution. In his contemporaneous series of lithographs entitled Mexico 
      in Revolution, women stand or wander amidst the rubble of war without hope 
      of finding the means to reconstruct their lives. 
      Orozco&#8217;s gravedigger of 1926 looks as if he were dreaming of his own 
      death. When Rivera painted the Liberation of the Peon or The Burial of the 
      Revolutionary, c. 1923 -1926, the scene is a solemn gathering of 
      like-minded people and we know that this death was not wasted, but was 
      rather a step along the revolutionary road. 
      Perhaps Orozco&#8217;s most poignant fresco in the Preparatory School sequence 
      is The Trench in which three fallen or exhausted soldiers form a secular 
      crucifixion with the gun between them becoming the top of a cross. Unlike 
      Rivera, whose classicizing compositions stress horizontals and verticals, 
      Orozco uses a diagonal thrust to bring the pain of his subject home. The 
      soldiers&#8217; heroic bodies make their defeat all the more tragic. Rivera&#8217;s 
      Barricade looks like a jolly party by comparison. 
      When he painted crowd scenes, Rivera&#8217;s people come together with 
      solidarity and purpose. The outcome of their gathering is likely to be 
      progress, for Rivera had faith in the masses. Or the outcome might be fun, 
      for Rivera enjoyed popular festivals, as can be seen in The Day of the 
      Dead in the City where a sombrero-clad Rivera appears with his wife Lupe 
      Marín just below the skeleton on the right. &#8220;Mexican muralism,&#8221; he said, 
      &#8220;for the first time in the history of monumental painting ceased to use 
      gods, kings, chiefs of state, heroic generals, etc., as central 
      heroes....For the first time in the history of art, Mexican mural painting 
      made the masses the hero of monumental art...[and] an attempt was made to 
      portray the trajectory of the people through time in one homogenous and 
      dialectic composition.&#8221; 
       
        



      17. Protest March, 1935 



      When, on the other hand, Orozco painted a crowd like that in his Hidalgo 
      in Guadalajara&#8217;s Government Palace, brutal energies are released. His 
      groups are always squeezed together in a seething mass. Orozco&#8217;s image of 
      The Masses in his 1935 lithograph and in his similar 1940 fresco at the 
      Gabino Ortiz Library in Jiquilpan consists of a cluster of stone-throwing, 
      flag-waving idiots who have no eyes to see and whose heads are huge, 
      toothy, yelling mouths. 
      In his crowd scenes, battling bodies run each other through with knives. 
      Indeed, Orozco seems to have had an appetite for violence even while it 
      appalled him. The dramatic cruelty of his bodies, faces, Oman eyes stabbed 
      with daggers or pierced with arrows makes Rivera&#8217;s battle scenes look 
      gentle. In Rivera&#8217;s images of conquest, for example at the National Palace 
      and at the Palace of Cortez in Cuernavaca, violence is frozen in a 
      timeless moment whose lyrical grace recalls Uccello&#8217;s Battle of San 
      Romano. For Rivera, violence is picturesque; for Orozco, it is enraging. 
      As a result, Orozco&#8217;s murals wound and incite to anger; Rivera&#8217;s delight 
      and try to set the viewer on the politically correct path. 
      Orozco, like Rivera believed he was painting murals for the people. As 
      usual he was contradictory. In 1923, the very year that he and Rivera were 
      founding members of the revolutionary painters Syndicate which published a 
      manifesto in favor of a mural art that would be of &#8220;ideological value to 
      the people,&#8221; Orozco came out with this query: &#8220;Painting for the People? 
      But the People do their own painting: they don&#8217;t need anyone to do it for 
      them.&#8221; In a different mood he wrote: &#8220;The mural is the highest, most 
      rational, purest, and most powerful form of painting....It is also the 
      most disinterested form since it can neither be turned into a source of 
      private profit nor hidden away for the enjoyment of a privileged few. It 
      is for the people. For EVERYBODY.&#8221; 
      Mexican murals may have been for everybody, but often nobody could 
      understand them. The ambiguities and contradictions in Orozco&#8217;s frescoes 
      bewildered many people, and Rivera&#8217;s murals are frequently so complex and 
      so erudite that even an educated viewer needs a guidebook to discern their 
      meaning. 
      Yet, even Rivera&#8217;s most elaborate and fantastical images like those he 
      painted in the Lerma waterworks in 1951, are always rooted in specific, 
      earthy (or in this case watery) details. For Rivera was an empiricist who 
      kept his feet on the ground. (Here his feet are actually below the ground, 
      in water.) In this hymn to water as a source of life and evolution he lets 
      his imagination run rampant, but it never leaves the wonderful dross of 
      palpable reality behinds. His hymn to the earth at Chapingo is similarly 
      earthy. Here a woman (actually Rivera&#8217;s current mistress, the photographer 
      Tina Modotti) may turn into a tree, but she does not sprout branches or 
      reach upward like Daphne. Rather she grows a trunk and remains rooted in 
      the earth. Even Rivera&#8217;s flames painted on the ceiling vaults look like 
      earthbound lilies or cacti, and the petal-like licks of fire that surround 
      the window in Zapata and Montaño Beneath the Earth blaze downward toward 
      the cornfield that is fertilized by the two revolutionaries&#8217; deaths. 
      Orozco had a more transcendent ideal. His Man of Fire in the cupola of the 
      Hospicio Cabañas, is the opposite of Rivera&#8217;s vision of life-generating 
      water. Orozco&#8217;s urge was to leave the dross of reality behind and to reach 
      upwards towards enlightenment. In Man of Fire all of human life is 
      condensed into one male figure ascending into a realm of pure flame. 
      With this image, Orozco fulfilled his mission to paint murals in which 
      &#8220;the only theme is Humanity and the only tendency is Emotion to the 
      maximum.&#8221; His mood is apocalyptic. Rising above the figures that represent 
      earth, air and water and that ring the base of the cupola, the blazing man 
      must stand for the one thing for which Orozco had undying respect&#8212;the 
      creative mind. His hope for the future resided in individual spiritual 
      liberation. &#8220;If the creative impulse were muted,&#8221; he said, &#8220;the world 
      would then be stayed in its march.&#8221; 
      For all his disillusionment with the world, Orozco never lost his belief 
      in the gifted individual&#8217;s capacity for freedom. No doubt Man of Fire is a 
      kind of self-portrait&#8212;an artist moving upward, immolating himself in the 
      artistic act, inspiration consuming itself as it burns. In the end, Orozco 
      believed, beauty could be redemptive. &#8220;All aesthetics, of whatever kind, 
      are a movement forward and not backward,&#8221; he said. &#8220;An art work is never 
      negative. By the very fact of being an art work, it is constructive.&#8221; 
      Unpublished lecture delivered November 16, 1990, 
      Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 
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