José Clemente Orozco (1883 - 1949)

Private Collection, Madrid
Enrique Guerrero Galería, Mexico City
Private Collection, Mexico

The edges of the painting are scuffed and have some losses, most likely from rubbing in a previous frame. There is a o.3cm stain in from of a smoky white line coming out of upper right hand boarder of 3 cm Light pain loss on upper right hand corner white spec on center upper area. The painting is in good condition and ready to hang.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

During the turbulent decade of the 1930s, with the spread of economic chaos and totalitarian regimes across an increasingly interconnected world, José Clemente Orozco created some of the most compelling yet violent works of public art ever imagined. In the murals he painted in the United States early in the decade, Orozco focused again and again on heroic figures--gods like Prometheus and Jesus; historical leaders like Cortés and Gandhi--whose efforts to push human civilization forward had all too frequently met with skepticism, derision, or even martyrdom. Upon his return to Mexico, as dictators in Europe and Asia swept mass audiences into a frenzy, he painted Katharsis(1935), a fresco in Mexico City's newly-inaugurated Palacio de Bellas Artes, that signaled--as much as the work of any other artist of his time--the confusing, bloody, and horrific chaos about to engulf the planet.

Orozco's culminating achievement of the decade was the vast mural cycle painted between 1937 and 1939 for the former chapel of the Hospicio Cabañas, a neoclassical orphanage in the colonial center of Guadalajara. This was the third of a series of increasingly complex mural programs funded by Everardo Topete, governor of the state of Jalisco, who had brought the native son home to embellish civic buildings in the capital. Although difficult to summarize (his fresco cycle has no overarching theme), in many of the thirty or so individual sections--which conform to a preexisting architectural framework--Orozco explored mechanized violence and the exploitation of man, from ritual slaughter atop Aztec pyramids to the parade fields of Nuremberg, which were on everyone's mind at the time.

The present painting, created at the apex of Orozco's career, is closely related to the glorious Baroque composition that fills the dome above the transept of the chapel in the Hospicio, and that probably represents some resolution of the terrible forces below it. Here Orozco painted four nude male figures whose meaning is the subject of debate, reminding us that the artist often avoided didactic explanations that would resolve the ambiguity of his work. Against a rich red background, three of these figures, rendered in cool blues, grays, and greens but not easily identified by attributes, form a circle at the base of the dome: a bald man with prominent forehead, his knees bent, reaches towards the hands of another man with a particularly anguished expression, looking up in profile. A third figure faces the ground, with his bare torso twisted towards the viewer. Arms and hands link these three men. In the center, a separate figure, his body dramatically foreshortened and partly consumed by flames, floats toward the apex of the dome.

The two figures in the painting under discussion here are clearly related to two of the above figures, whose arms seem, yet are not, intertwined. The bald figure to the left of the canvas reclines against the horizontal body of his companion; his bent right arm is pressed tight against the latter's neck. The figure lying on the ground takes up most of the composition: his body appears emaciated; his right arm is twisted and his left reaches out. The steely gray palette echoes that of the mural, though here without the firey red sky to offset the forms. Orozco's typically expressionist brushwork only heightens the anxiety of the scene. It is unclear, however, whether this is an oil study that Orozco created to help with the actual design of the mural (like the pencil and charcoal sketches that are now housed at the Instituto Cultural Cabañas), or whether it is an oil painting derived from the mural, created at the same time but intended for sale to collectors. This was a strategy frequently employed by Orozco and his fellow muralists, who often earned little from their public projects. A closely related work in this regard is El Fuego, an equally polished canvas of 1938 that shows the so-called "Man of Fire" in the center of the dome, and that is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Despite the current and probably posthumous title, the figures in the painting present us with a puzzle that resists any definitive solution. Orozco called the entire composition of the dome "Fire," but failed to identify the figures or discuss their meaning. In an important study of 1953, MacKinley Helm identified the men in the dome as allegories of the Four Elements, apparently an extrapolation from the fact that the central figure does indeed represent "Fire." However, and notwithstanding the current title, neither of the figures in the present painting shows the figure that Helm labels in one illustration as the Man of Earth. If his interpretation holds, the bald man in the painting would have to be the Man of the Sea (or Water), resting against the Man of Air.[1] Yet Helm's reading now seems questionable, in part because of the lack of traditional attributes, and in part because it would have been strange for Orozco to connect "Air" so tightly to the ground rather than the sky.

Our understanding of the dome, and thus the painting, might be better served by turning to earlier sources that interpreted these figures more metaphorically. Writing just after Orozco had completed the mural, US art historian Laurence Schmeckebier read the ascending figure as leaping to freedom from the bonds of cramped and frustrated earthly limitations, and suffering the flames of his creative zeal.[2]Justino Fernández, the dean of Mexican art history and a close friend of Orozco, gave the scene a more metaphysical reading in 1942. He called the bald figure with the large forehead "homo sapiens," meaning "creative man or the architect," and found his pairing with the recumbent figure symbolic of a profound duality: man's active and creative side goes hand-in-hand with the mundane forces that seek to drag him down.[3]This may be the best interpretation of the figures in the present painting, but unless future research resolves such conflicting yet overlapping meanings, it might be best to leave the work, however extraordinary, simply untitled.

[1] MacKinley Helm, Man of Fire: J. C. Orozco (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1953), pp. 74.
[2] Laurence E. Schmeckebier, Modern Mexican Art (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1939), p. 109.
[3] Justino Fernández, José Clemente Orozco: forma e idea (Mexico City: Librería de Porrúa Hnos., 1942), pp. 88-89.

James Oles, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in Art, Wellesley College, 2013