This article about the work of painter José Clemente Orozco was written by the then-young writer Carlos Heredia Jasso, who enjoyed working in the biographical genre. He starts the piece with a portrait of the artist at work, seeking to decipher his painting and asserting a number of its intrinsic qualities. He discusses the importance of the muralist within the Mexican artistic milieu and also describes how Clemente Orozco first acquired a taste for the arts, mentioning his early education at the Academia de San Carlos. This is followed by a biographical tale that begins with an exceedingly detailed description of the artist’s physical appearance: his hair, his body, his face and all its traits, including his eyes. Heredia Jasso also analyzes the painter’s physical attributes one by one, giving a very specific idea of his contours and even describing the artist’s body: his lame left hand, his back, and his manner of walking. The result is an extremely vivid depiction of the artist, and the writer also attempts to communicate his subject’s character and his jocular approach to the world around him. All of the above serve to frame a description that brings the reader a bit closer to the living, breathing person Orozco was, in a vivid attempt to offer a grasp of what made this painter sublime. In the third section the author begins the biographical chronicle with Orozco’s place and date of birth. Then, through a succession of chronological events relating to his childhood and adolescence, the author tells the story of Orozco’s professional evolution, recounting his wanderings from one vocation to the next until finally receiving an education as a painter alongside the master Fabrés at the Academia de San Carlos. Brimming over with anecdotes, the essay gives a close and personal account of a number of the adventures the master Orozco experienced on the road to becoming an integral part of modern Mexico, and also tells us of his political-ideological stances. At the end of his biographical essay, Heredia Jasso presents the maestro’s most significant works, commenting on the chronological sequence in which his most renowned murals were created. Herdia Jasso enumerates the works from the first mural, created for the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in 1922, to the most recent (1944) on the walls of Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice. Finally, this story also includes periodic mentions of Orozco’s residences and works undertaken in the United States as well as on trips to Europe.
