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oil on canvas

signed and dated 1944 lower left

Orozco was perhaps the most severe of the Mexican Muralists. His vision contained no hint of sentimentality, and his caustic drawings leave little to the imagination. Orozco had no sympathy for the weaknesses of the flesh, and he portrayed scenes with an almost clinical detachment.

Throughout his life, Orozco painted a series of self-portraits and applied the same critical eye to his own person as a subject. In this allegorical Self-Portrait (1944) a mature Orozco depicts himself and gives us a synopsis of his artistic life - the past, the present and the future. The blank canvas is on an easel waiting to be filled, his energetic hand on the left is waiting to paint, and one of the many figure drawings for which he was famous floats below. On the right, the mysterious bust could be one of the many that filled a classical artist's studio, but Orozco has made it into an anonymous modern head of the machine age - a head whose eyes are bound and covered by the blank canvas. The visions of this modern mannequin will fill the canvas.

There is a striking resemblance in the stark geometry of Self-Portrait (1944) and of Autorretrato (1946), which belongs to the collection of Museo de Arte Alvar y Carmen T. Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. The artist is once again next to the canvas, his past work on the wall behind him and a new work being created.
PROVENANCE

Acquired from the artist
Irving Richards, New York
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Latin American Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture and Prints, November 23, 1992, lot 51, illustrated in color
EXHIBITED

New York, Huntington Hartford Museum, José Clemente Orozco, September 7-October 7, 1965
Monterrey, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, May-August, 1994; Mexico City, Antiguo Colegio San Ildefonso, November, 1994-January, 1995, Jalisco: Genio y Maestría, no. 137, p. 123, illustrated in color
Roslyn Harbor, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, The Latin Century: Beyond the Border, August 18-November 3, 2002, p. 49, illustrated in color
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

José Clemente Orozco, Mi Vida, 1944, illustrated