José Orozco

Mexican painter José Orozco was considered the most important 20th-century muralist to work in fresco. He first became interested in art in 1890, when his family moved to Mexico City. He then apprenticed in the open workshop of José Guadalupe Posada (1851-1913), Mexico’s first great printmaker. When he was 17, however, Orozco lost his left hand in a laboratory accident, and abandoned his architectural studies. He re-entered the Academy of San Carlos in 1905 with a renewed passion for painting, and assiduously set about to become a competent painter.

Orozco conscientiously began to explore Mexican themes and to draw more directly from scenes of daily life. He became a caricaturist for an opposition newspaper and haunted the barrios, or slums, of Mexico City, painting a series of watercolors dealing with the lives of prostitutes that was collectively titled House of Tears. After negative criticism he then moved to the US in 1917, returning in 1920, but again moving to the US in 1927. In 1932 he made a brief trip to Europe, where he viewed the art of England, France, Spain, and Italy, and eventually returned to Mexico with a strong reputation. Orozco became a national hero in his later years, honored as the leader among those who raised Mexican art to a position of international eminence. He published his autobiography in 1945. In 1947 the President of Mexico awarded him the Federal Quinquennial Prize, which recognized him as the outstanding Mexican figure in the arts and sciences of the preceding five years.