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Lot Essay
When José Clemente Orozco left Mexico for the United States on December 11, 1927 by train in search of new opportunities, he carried with him the violence, destruction, and corruption he had witnessed during his country’s long civil war, the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20 and the subsequent escalations between Church and State, known as the Cristero War (1926–29). In his autobiography he recounted his experience:
The world was torn apart around us... Trains were blown up. In the portals of churches wretched Zapatista peasants, who had fallen prisoners to the Carrancistas, were summarily shot down… Little towns were stormed and subjected to every sort of excess. Trains back from the battlefield unloaded their cargoes in the station in Orizaba: the wounded; the tired; exhausted, mutilated soldiers, sweating and tatterdemalion” (J.C. Orozco, An Autobiography, 1962, p. 58).
He further claimed, “I saw much brutality, devastation, betrayal….I was with the Carranza forces, and I saw defeated victims like the poor Zapatista peasants brought in to be executed….I don’t trust revolutions or glorify them, since I witnessed too much butchery” (A. Anreus, Orozco in Gringoland: The Years in New York, 2001, pp. 63-64). Orozco would spend seven years in self-exile from his homeland, residing primarily in New York City, committed to earning a living from his art and to support his wife Margarita Valladares (1898–1993) and their three children who had remained behind in Mexico City.
Prior to his departure, friend and promoter of the artist’s work, journalist Anita Brenner encouraged him to produce a series of drawings on The Horrors of the Revolution (1926–28), thirty-seven of which were later exhibited in New York City as Mexico in Revolution at Marie Sterner Galleries in October of 1928 (R. González Melo, “Orozco in the United States: A History of Ideas,” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934, 2002, pp. 28–31). Those, like the current lot Zapatistas, reflect Orozco’s bleak and tragic views of his country’s political and social upheaval in direct opposition to his contemporaries’ picturesque or celebratory descriptions of Indigenous Mexico. Insistent in his pessimistic commentary on the Revolution and the devastation it left, Orozco created dynamic compositions, using expressive, gestural brush and linework to capture the war’s dark reality.
The Three Greats (Los Tres Grandes) who rose to shape and dominate the Mexican mural movement in the immediate postrevolutionary decades did not represent a unified front; significant to the tremendous impact of their contributions was the diversity of their artistic, political, and social visions. Diego Rivera’s celebratory, optimistic, and baroque idealism contrasted with David Alfaro Siqueiros’ interest in technical experimentation, materialism, and the viewer’s phenomenological experience, while Orozco favored the apocalyptic, distortion, the grotesque, and often, dark humor.
Orozco’s particular approach must be weighed from his anarcho-syndicalist and anti-clerical stance; he believed in the labor movement and in workers’ rights. Moreover, he was critical of the pre-Columbian world, the Spanish Conquest, and the modern machine. A member of the anarcho-syndicalist union, the Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker, est. 1912) and a political cartoonist for the Casa’s newspaper La Vanguardia, as a Constitutionalist supporter of Venustiano Carranza, Orozco believed in the urban, the secular, and in scientific progress; he opposed the agrarian and religious forces of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. Orozco was not a Zapatista, or a sympathizer with Zapata’s cause of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Freedom).
Born in Zapotlán el Grande, Jalisco, Mexico in 1883, Orozco grew up during the Porfiriato, the long dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). Enrolled at Mexico City’s Academia de San Carlos beginning in 1906, he absorbed the teachings of Julio Ruelas, whose relentless Symbolism likely helped shape Orozco’s extreme treatment of women in his artwork as femme fatales or passive victims. A second influential teacher at the Academy was Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl), who Orozco aligned with in their shared Carrancista politics and Expressionist tendencies. Once Plutarco Elias Calles became president (1924–28), abandoned the Mexican Revolution’s agenda of agrarian reform, suppressed workers’ rights in favor of foreign investment, fueled the State’s conflict with the Catholic Church into a full-blown war, and replaced José Vasconcelos with a new Minister of Education, José Manuel Puig Casauranc, who favored only Rivera for government mural commissions, Orozco turned his sights to the north.
Orozco found a champion for his artwork in the journalist Alma Reed who opened Delphic Studios gallery in Midtown Manhattan in October of 1929 to promote the artist. Through Reed, Orozco met Stephen C. Clark, a prominent collector and trustee of the newly established Museum of Modern Art (A. Anreus, Orozco in Gringoland, p. 41). It is likely that the intimate Zapatistas was among the paintings that Clark viewed during his studio visit with Orozco in May of 1931 when he recommended to the artist that he increase the scale of his canvases from his typical 19 ½ x 24 and 24 x 30 inches, to a larger 45 x 55 inches, promising that if he did so, he would purchase five or six canvases for his private collection to later donate to MOMA (op. cit., pp. 42–49). Orozco wrote an enthusiastic letter to his wife commenting on the encounter and quickly complied with Clark’s advice, for within months, the collector had acquired three large-scale paintings, including a second version of Zapatistas, which he donated to MOMA in 1937 (op. cit., p. 64). The current lot must have returned with Orozco to Mexico for it was there that the Italian diplomat Count Guerino ‘Ghino” Roberti, while first secretary for the Italian Embassy in Mexico City from March 13, 1940 to July 18, 1942, acquired the work, later inherited by his second wife’s descendants.
In his close study of Orozco’s time in New York City, art historian Alejandro Anreus points out that in the 1930s Orozco’s artwork reflects a shift in his attitude toward Zapata from antagonism to sympathy. Whereas Orozco satirized peasant rebels in his early drawings for La Vanguardia diminishing them as agrarian, backward, and religious, in a canvas such as Zapata Entering a Peasant’s Hut (1930) he portrays Zapata as Christ-like, a martyr (op. cit., pp. 66–68). In Zapatistas, we can also read the dark-faced figure left of center seated on horseback as the leader Zapata looming large and imposing above the procession of peasant soldiers trailed by soldaderas, female camp followers. Their Indigenous, peasant status is made apparent in their heavy sombreros, white cotton clothing, and draped rebozo shawls. We know through Orozco’s damning narrative above that this scene is not one of victory for the Zapatista cause, but of acceptance of defeat, imminent death, and enduring faith.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
The world was torn apart around us... Trains were blown up. In the portals of churches wretched Zapatista peasants, who had fallen prisoners to the Carrancistas, were summarily shot down… Little towns were stormed and subjected to every sort of excess. Trains back from the battlefield unloaded their cargoes in the station in Orizaba: the wounded; the tired; exhausted, mutilated soldiers, sweating and tatterdemalion” (J.C. Orozco, An Autobiography, 1962, p. 58).
He further claimed, “I saw much brutality, devastation, betrayal….I was with the Carranza forces, and I saw defeated victims like the poor Zapatista peasants brought in to be executed….I don’t trust revolutions or glorify them, since I witnessed too much butchery” (A. Anreus, Orozco in Gringoland: The Years in New York, 2001, pp. 63-64). Orozco would spend seven years in self-exile from his homeland, residing primarily in New York City, committed to earning a living from his art and to support his wife Margarita Valladares (1898–1993) and their three children who had remained behind in Mexico City.
Prior to his departure, friend and promoter of the artist’s work, journalist Anita Brenner encouraged him to produce a series of drawings on The Horrors of the Revolution (1926–28), thirty-seven of which were later exhibited in New York City as Mexico in Revolution at Marie Sterner Galleries in October of 1928 (R. González Melo, “Orozco in the United States: A History of Ideas,” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934, 2002, pp. 28–31). Those, like the current lot Zapatistas, reflect Orozco’s bleak and tragic views of his country’s political and social upheaval in direct opposition to his contemporaries’ picturesque or celebratory descriptions of Indigenous Mexico. Insistent in his pessimistic commentary on the Revolution and the devastation it left, Orozco created dynamic compositions, using expressive, gestural brush and linework to capture the war’s dark reality.
The Three Greats (Los Tres Grandes) who rose to shape and dominate the Mexican mural movement in the immediate postrevolutionary decades did not represent a unified front; significant to the tremendous impact of their contributions was the diversity of their artistic, political, and social visions. Diego Rivera’s celebratory, optimistic, and baroque idealism contrasted with David Alfaro Siqueiros’ interest in technical experimentation, materialism, and the viewer’s phenomenological experience, while Orozco favored the apocalyptic, distortion, the grotesque, and often, dark humor.
Orozco’s particular approach must be weighed from his anarcho-syndicalist and anti-clerical stance; he believed in the labor movement and in workers’ rights. Moreover, he was critical of the pre-Columbian world, the Spanish Conquest, and the modern machine. A member of the anarcho-syndicalist union, the Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker, est. 1912) and a political cartoonist for the Casa’s newspaper La Vanguardia, as a Constitutionalist supporter of Venustiano Carranza, Orozco believed in the urban, the secular, and in scientific progress; he opposed the agrarian and religious forces of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. Orozco was not a Zapatista, or a sympathizer with Zapata’s cause of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Freedom).
Born in Zapotlán el Grande, Jalisco, Mexico in 1883, Orozco grew up during the Porfiriato, the long dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). Enrolled at Mexico City’s Academia de San Carlos beginning in 1906, he absorbed the teachings of Julio Ruelas, whose relentless Symbolism likely helped shape Orozco’s extreme treatment of women in his artwork as femme fatales or passive victims. A second influential teacher at the Academy was Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl), who Orozco aligned with in their shared Carrancista politics and Expressionist tendencies. Once Plutarco Elias Calles became president (1924–28), abandoned the Mexican Revolution’s agenda of agrarian reform, suppressed workers’ rights in favor of foreign investment, fueled the State’s conflict with the Catholic Church into a full-blown war, and replaced José Vasconcelos with a new Minister of Education, José Manuel Puig Casauranc, who favored only Rivera for government mural commissions, Orozco turned his sights to the north.
Orozco found a champion for his artwork in the journalist Alma Reed who opened Delphic Studios gallery in Midtown Manhattan in October of 1929 to promote the artist. Through Reed, Orozco met Stephen C. Clark, a prominent collector and trustee of the newly established Museum of Modern Art (A. Anreus, Orozco in Gringoland, p. 41). It is likely that the intimate Zapatistas was among the paintings that Clark viewed during his studio visit with Orozco in May of 1931 when he recommended to the artist that he increase the scale of his canvases from his typical 19 ½ x 24 and 24 x 30 inches, to a larger 45 x 55 inches, promising that if he did so, he would purchase five or six canvases for his private collection to later donate to MOMA (op. cit., pp. 42–49). Orozco wrote an enthusiastic letter to his wife commenting on the encounter and quickly complied with Clark’s advice, for within months, the collector had acquired three large-scale paintings, including a second version of Zapatistas, which he donated to MOMA in 1937 (op. cit., p. 64). The current lot must have returned with Orozco to Mexico for it was there that the Italian diplomat Count Guerino ‘Ghino” Roberti, while first secretary for the Italian Embassy in Mexico City from March 13, 1940 to July 18, 1942, acquired the work, later inherited by his second wife’s descendants.
In his close study of Orozco’s time in New York City, art historian Alejandro Anreus points out that in the 1930s Orozco’s artwork reflects a shift in his attitude toward Zapata from antagonism to sympathy. Whereas Orozco satirized peasant rebels in his early drawings for La Vanguardia diminishing them as agrarian, backward, and religious, in a canvas such as Zapata Entering a Peasant’s Hut (1930) he portrays Zapata as Christ-like, a martyr (op. cit., pp. 66–68). In Zapatistas, we can also read the dark-faced figure left of center seated on horseback as the leader Zapata looming large and imposing above the procession of peasant soldiers trailed by soldaderas, female camp followers. Their Indigenous, peasant status is made apparent in their heavy sombreros, white cotton clothing, and draped rebozo shawls. We know through Orozco’s damning narrative above that this scene is not one of victory for the Zapatista cause, but of acceptance of defeat, imminent death, and enduring faith.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio