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Lot Essay
This introspective palette, bathed in bluish-green light, departs from the fiery red seen in his Self-Portrait of 1940 and projects a gravity—even, a sense of equanimity—befitting Orozco in the end, at the pinnacle of his career. “I remember what a little, what a frail main Orozco seemed to me when I visited him in his modern apartment-studio house in Mexico City in 1947,” recalled art historian Alfred Neumeyer Yet Orozco’s physical frailties paled next to the alacrity of his mind, at the time pondering Heidegger and German Expressionism, and Neumeyer was left only to conclude, “He seemed to me the very embodiment of the triumph of the creative spirit over physical limitations” (“Orozco’s Mission,” College Art Journal 10, no. 2, Winter 1951, p. 121). The present Self-Portrait depicts Orozco in the year before he died, his gaze as penetrating and pensive as ever. Hailed as one of “Los Tres Grandes,” alongside Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Orozco was fully ascendant by the 1940s and his reputation cemented as one of the most outstanding painters of the Americas. Mexico honored his achievements with the prestigious Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes in 1946 and a retrospective exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes the following year.
Orozco continued to dedicate himself to mural work in the 1940s, in the wake of his extraordinary mural cycle at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara (1935-39), but he also produced important easel paintings—portraits among them—in the 1940s. “The new and lively interest that Orozco displayed in portraiture during his last years resulted in a score of distinguished works in oil and synthetic materials,” noted his longtime friend and patron, Alma Reed. “Among the most sensitive likenesses are those of his greatly esteemed friends, the Guatemalan author and diplomat, Luis Cardoza y Aragón and Dr. Justino Fernández, his devoted biographer” (Orozco, New York, 1956, p. 301). Other subjects included the film star Dolores Del Río, the architect Mario Pani, the American artist Annette Nancarrow, and President Miguel Alemán.
Orozco painted himself a number of times in the last decade of his life, and these portraits betray the righteous indignation, crippling self-doubt, and formidable erudition that had long shaped his practice. Like an earlier Self-Portrait from 1938, the present work portrays an unsparingly self-examined life: from behind his thick, round glasses, Orozco directly engages the viewer, evincing a deep, visceral humanity born of a lifetime of struggle and hard-learned success. Dark shadows encroach upon the planes of his face, tensed and impastoed; their lines mirror the angles formed by his shirt and dark collar and tie, painted in warm, gleaming tones of cobalt blue.
Orozco dedicated this work to Nancarrow (1907-92), a “cultural boundary-breaker” and an artist “whose work was fundamentally shaped, and life radically altered, by her encounters with the Mexican masters,” in the words of her grandson, the journalist Bret Stephens. “Mexico transformed my grandmother—or rather, it allowed her to become most fully herself,” he continues. “‘She swung into the dining room with a mambo rhythm,’ Anaïs Nin, my grandmother’s longtime friend, recalled in her published diaries of their first encounter at Acapulco’s Hotel Mirador in the winter of 1948. ‘When I met her she had become so international, so well-traveled, so multilingual, so at ease with all kinds of people, that no one could imagine her childhood, her origin.’” Nancarrow had earlier worked alongside Orozco on his ceiling mural, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1940), in the Templo de Jesús in Mexico City, and he painted her portrait around the same time. “Perhaps most striking, for me,” Stephens concludes, “is the contrast between Orozco’s famous portrait of Annette and her self-portrait . In the first, she is confident, alluring and glamorous; in the second, vulnerable, unadorned. The gap between the woman seen through the gaze of an infatuated man and the way that woman saw herself could hardly have been wider” (“Lessons from my Grandma on Art, Sex and Life,” New York Times, 21 March 2020).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Orozco continued to dedicate himself to mural work in the 1940s, in the wake of his extraordinary mural cycle at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara (1935-39), but he also produced important easel paintings—portraits among them—in the 1940s. “The new and lively interest that Orozco displayed in portraiture during his last years resulted in a score of distinguished works in oil and synthetic materials,” noted his longtime friend and patron, Alma Reed. “Among the most sensitive likenesses are those of his greatly esteemed friends, the Guatemalan author and diplomat, Luis Cardoza y Aragón and Dr. Justino Fernández, his devoted biographer” (Orozco, New York, 1956, p. 301). Other subjects included the film star Dolores Del Río, the architect Mario Pani, the American artist Annette Nancarrow, and President Miguel Alemán.
Orozco painted himself a number of times in the last decade of his life, and these portraits betray the righteous indignation, crippling self-doubt, and formidable erudition that had long shaped his practice. Like an earlier Self-Portrait from 1938, the present work portrays an unsparingly self-examined life: from behind his thick, round glasses, Orozco directly engages the viewer, evincing a deep, visceral humanity born of a lifetime of struggle and hard-learned success. Dark shadows encroach upon the planes of his face, tensed and impastoed; their lines mirror the angles formed by his shirt and dark collar and tie, painted in warm, gleaming tones of cobalt blue.
Orozco dedicated this work to Nancarrow (1907-92), a “cultural boundary-breaker” and an artist “whose work was fundamentally shaped, and life radically altered, by her encounters with the Mexican masters,” in the words of her grandson, the journalist Bret Stephens. “Mexico transformed my grandmother—or rather, it allowed her to become most fully herself,” he continues. “‘She swung into the dining room with a mambo rhythm,’ Anaïs Nin, my grandmother’s longtime friend, recalled in her published diaries of their first encounter at Acapulco’s Hotel Mirador in the winter of 1948. ‘When I met her she had become so international, so well-traveled, so multilingual, so at ease with all kinds of people, that no one could imagine her childhood, her origin.’” Nancarrow had earlier worked alongside Orozco on his ceiling mural, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1940), in the Templo de Jesús in Mexico City, and he painted her portrait around the same time. “Perhaps most striking, for me,” Stephens concludes, “is the contrast between Orozco’s famous portrait of Annette and her self-portrait . In the first, she is confident, alluring and glamorous; in the second, vulnerable, unadorned. The gap between the woman seen through the gaze of an infatuated man and the way that woman saw herself could hardly have been wider” (“Lessons from my Grandma on Art, Sex and Life,” New York Times, 21 March 2020).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park