José Clemente Orozco

José Clemente Orozco was one of the three great Mexican muralists, and the bleakest — where his contemporaries painted revolution as promise, he painted it as catastrophe. Born in Zapotlán el Grande, Jalisco in 1883, he studied agriculture and architectural drawing before turning to art at the Academy of San Carlos. At about twenty-one he lost his left hand and damaged his sight and hearing in an explosion while making gunpowder. He worked as a political cartoonist during the Mexican Revolution and travelled with Venustiano Carranza's forces, which gave him a direct view of the fighting. That experience produced a permanent scepticism: his work treats war and ideology as machinery that consumes people, and he distrusted the revolutionary optimism that his rival Diego Rivera made his subject. He joined the government mural programme launched by the education minister José Vasconcelos in the early 1920s, painting at the National Preparatory School — where students defaced some of the work — and later the Palace of Fine Arts. He spent 1927 to 1934 in the United States, and the American commissions are among his strongest. Prometheus at Pomona College in 1930 was the first modern fresco painted in the country. At Dartmouth College he produced The Epic of American Civilization in 1932-34, whose panels include a skeletal academic procession delivering a stillborn book — an attack on sterile learning painted inside a library. Back in Mexico he made the murals at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara in 1936-39, including the Man of Fire in the dome, generally taken as his masterpiece. He died in Mexico City in 1949 and is buried in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons.

• Lived: 1883 CE – 1949 CE
• Nationality: Mexican
• Roles: painter, muralist