The Frescoes

" 'This is no imitation,' proudly writes Orozco of his Dartmouth frescoes, 'this is our own effort to the limit of our own strength and experience, in all sincerity and spontaneity.'

'Orozco thinks a revolution is necessary before we shall achieve the goal of great mural beauty. But this revolution need not be sanguine. It will be enough to forget smugness, to feel the fresh tide of ideas, to entertain these ideas bravely and boldly and to portray them with fertility of imagination and aesthetic courage."

-From The Trend of Affairs, TechnologyReview, December, 1933.

The artist has .... been accused of Propaganda—which is true to a certain extent. But it is not in the interest of any one party—Orozco has nothing to do with any party-the interest is rooted in an ideal, and that !s a return to simple Elements, herein lie the 'Elements'? In the dignity the individual. It is this dignity which governs man's relationship with his fellowbeings, whether it be in the family, the nation, or the universe."

—From Trend; a Quarterly of the Seven Arts, June, 1932.

"Of Orozco it may be said without being guilty of exaggeration, that he is a Goya but more tormented and realistic. A Goya of the last epoch, the Goya of the 'Villa of the Deaf Man,' and of the 'Caprices,' only that in Orozco, the vindicating social sense which informs all his work is portrayed with a cutting intensity. Perhaps, because of this, it penetrates more deeply. It is, of course, intimately tied up with the vigorous ideology that we have agreed in calling 'post-war.' They are pictures that speak to the soul, expressions that synthetize an enormous unrest. There is something in the atmosphere they create that causes the hand to go up in a gesture of sincere and human admiration."

—From Mexican Folkways, October-December, 1928.

"Jose Clemente Orozco. Slightly younger than Diego Rivera, in career, character, outlook and style his antithesis. The Opposition in the Syndicate and always. Training chiefly in revolutionary army papers, cartooning, lampooning, winning plenty of real victories and making hundreds of enemies. Most violent, most passionate of the mural decorators, smashes the walls with his planes and welds them together again by sheer emotional force. At his best, sublime; at his worst, bitter."

—From Your Mexican Holiday, by Anita Brenner, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1932.

Orozco's design is intuitive. By this I mean it grows out of the necessities of his feeling for subject instead of being imposed on subject by knowledge or of growing out of subject function. In the face of the deep self-effacing sincerity of this man the authority of his conceptions as a whole, in spite of weaknesses in the means, is invulnerable to critical attack.-Creative powers of mind nourished by deep feelings for life and things authenticate works of art. The work of Benton and Orozco, as I see it, wins-such authentication.

—Ralph M. Pearson in Experiencing Pictures, New York, 1932?