José Clemente Orozco

José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), Mexican painter, who contributed to the revival of fresco technique, design, and subject matter, and who is regarded as one of the foremost mural painters in the western hemisphere.

Orozco was born in Zapotlán el Grande (now Ciudad Guzmán), Jalisco State, and educated at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 1922 he became one of the leaders of the Syndicate of Painters and Sculptors that sought to revive the art of fresco painting, under the patronage of the Mexican government. Orozco's most important early work was a series of frescoes for the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, commemorating the revolutionary uprisings of peasants and workers in Mexico. Between 1927 and 1934 he worked in the United States. There he executed a set of murals entitled The Dispossessed at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In Pomona College, Claremont, California, he painted a fresco on the theme of the Greek hero Prometheus. His mural panels for the Baker Library at Dartmouth College depict the history of America in the Coming of Quetzalcoatl, the Return of Quetzalcoatl, and Modern Industrial Man. In the 1930s he painted his great murals in Mexico City and Guadalajara, and in the 1940s he explored on canvas the unique style, marked by diagonals and neutral color, that he already had conveyed in his murals. In his later years, Orozco's simple, dramatic style became more expressionistic; his subject matter remained the suffering of humanity.

Orozco died in Mexico City on September 7, 1949.