This article centers on two events: Orozco’s participation in the student exhibition at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos during the critical year of 1910 and his start as a caricaturist for opposition newspapers. The government planned a great exhibition of contemporary Spanish art (works by Zuloaga and Sorolla, among others) to celebrate the centennial of the Independence Grito de Dolores and this caused a wide student protest. José Clemente Orozco began taking night classes at the Academy. (He had already studied at the Escuela Agricultura of San Jacinto and had become an expert on agriculture; he had also spent four years at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria with a vague idea of studying architecture). At that time he was simply one of the young men who would never achieve recognition or stature as a painter and would be condemned to end up working at a workshop. In his own judgment, he was also confined to mediocrity, “having entered at the age of 15 and leaving at 40 without knowing whether shadows were painted with smoky black or blue black. The Academy was, and appears still to be, a warehouse of mummies and fossils.” Dr. Atl headed a group of fifty painters (Orozco among them) and ten sculptors. They managed to raise the funds to mount a collective exhibition in September that met with conspicuous success. Dr. Atl proposed the creation of a society called Arts Center whose only objective would be “to obtain from the government walls on which to paint in public buildings.” The Mexican Revolution interrupted the project and prompted Orozco to look for work as a caricaturist for opposition newspapers.

This article (1 of 11 total, published from February 17 to April 8, 1942) states: “never before has this celebrated muralist, according to his own words, agreed to tell the story of his life.” José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) was nearly 60 years old when he decided to do so through a series of articles. More accurately, it was a broad compilation of ironies, paradoxes, verbal descriptions, and a collection of political, historical, and cultural anecdotes. As the antecedent of this autobiography, Justino Fernández mentions articles that Orozco wrote in 1945 about his childhood in Guadalajara, articles which Orozco destroyed years later. The group of students headed by Gerardo Murillo (1875–1964)—known as Dr. Atl, a person whom Xavier Moyssén considered to be fundamental to Orozco’s life—managed to win the commission for murals at the newly constructed Escuela Nacional Preparatoria amphitheater from the Secretaría de Instrucción. The revolution officially began on November 20, the same month in which the students were to exhibit their works. In the catalogue to the exhibition 1910: el arte en un año decisivo; la exposición de artistas mexicanos [1910: Art in a Decisive Year–the Exhibition of Mexican Artists] (1991), Pilar García de Germenos argues that Orozco and his colleagues were perhaps about to use their paintbrushes in service to the Porfiriato as they painted the murals at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. The revolution interrupted their plans; as such this cannot be considered a precursor to muralism. Certainly, Orozco would have to work as a caricaturist for El Hijo del Ahuizote, a publication that was opposed to the Maderista regime. He clearly defines his attitude toward the revolution in this publication.