Orozco's U.S. odyssey.

• Author: Wyels, Joyce Gregory
• Position: Jose Clemente Orozco, Mexican muralist - Brief Article

"THERE WAS LITTLE TO hold me in Mexico in 1927," wrote Jose Clemente Orozco in his autobiography, "and I resolved to go to New York, counting upon generous support from Genaro Estrada, Secretary of Foreign Relations, who found the money to defray my journey and stay of three months." Orozco's "stay of three months" stretched to nearly seven years, and proved a pivotal experience in the life and work of the Mexican master.

A new traveling exhibition, Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934, opens March 9 at the San Diego (California) Museum of Art. The exhibition contains preparatory drawings for the three murals that Orozco completed in the United States--at Pomona College in Claremont, California; the New School for Social Research in New York; and Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. But the 120 works on display also provide evidence of the master muralist's prodigious output in easel paintings, drawings, and prints.

Born in 1883, Orozco was already in his mid-forties when he embarked on his second journey to the United States, having previously visited San Francisco and New York in 1917-19. His career had stalled somewhat after his work on the murals of the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. Art critic and supporter Anita Brenner therefore enticed Orozco to New York, going so far as to invent a fictitious collector as a potential client. In 1928 she introduced him to Alma Reed, who would become his agent and later his biographer.

At first, Orozco continued to paint the Mexico in Revolution series that he was already producing upon his arrival. But New York scenes of bridges and skyscrapers began to surface among his revolution-themed paintings, and beginning in 1929 he recorded the harsh effects of the Great Depression.

His first lithographs likewise date from this period. Reed, meanwhile, introduced Orozco to intellectual societies, whose members showed up in subsequent murals and whose ideas influenced the themes of his work.

Orozco was invited to paint his first U.S. mural at a small campus in Claremont, east of Los Angeles. In 1930, in an alcove of the cavernous new dining...