The art & anger of Juan O'Gorman: recent retrospective exhibitions reveal both the bristling socialism and Mexican soul of this great architect and painter.

A restless spirit, uncompromising socialist, fierce environmentalist, Juan O'Gorman was an mist, first and foremost. Whether he was painting a mural in tempera, designing a mosaic on a library facade, or building his own house by hand, O'Gorman approached the task with painstaking attention to detail that awed many and likely unnerved others. Last year marked the centenary of the artist's birth. It was his fate to belong to a generation that followed and labored beneath the shadow of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. But unlike peers of La Ruptura, who strove to break with the tradition of narrative, historical art, O'Gorman preferred to operate within inherited boundaries. He produced a large body of work equal in quality to that of the Big Three muralists, and which in recent years has enjoyed renewed attention. In 1999, the Grupo Pinanciero Bital, which owns an important mural by the artist, issued a stunning, full-color monograph, edited by Sandro Landucci Lerdo de Tejada. O'Gorman contains an introduction by Elena Poniatowska and definitive essays by people who knew the artist well. Six years later, to coincide with the centenary, the Fomento Cultural Banamex and the national cultural foundation, Conaculta, sponsored a sweeping retrospective exhibition of easel-sized works, murals, sketch books, preparatory cartoons, and architectural drawings. This spectacular show, held at the Palacio Iturbide In the historic district of the capital, emerged as the cultural highlight of the year and reinforced, once again, O'Gorman's stature both as an architect of considerable vision and an immensely gifted painter of murals, portraits, and landscapes.

O'Gorman inherited the impulse to paint from his father, Cecil Crawford O'Gorman, a Dublin-trained mining engineer, who came to Mexico in 1898 to work for a British mining company. Soon after his arrival in Mexico, the young engineer married his cousin, Encarnacion O'Gorman, by whom he had four children: Juan, Edmundo, Margarita, and Tomas. For a time he pursued his profession at mines near Pachuca and Guanajuato, but in the wake of the Mexican Revolution he turned to painting. He succeeded in making a decent living doing watercolor and tempera portraits of prominent members of Mexican society as well as landscapes and interior murals, including one at the family home in the San Angel district of Mexico City. He periodically showed at local galleries and posthumously received the honor of a solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Cecil O'Gorman was a stern disciplinarian in the Victorian mold. He conversed with his children in English, insisted on home schooling them until age ten, and meted out corporal punishment for the smallest infractions. Young Juan, by nature a precocious, free spirit who loved to play the piano, read history books, and demonstrate his prodigious memory, came to detest his iron-willed father but nonetheless absorbed a great deal from watching him paint. By his teenage years, he was able to produce meticulous likenesses of near-equal quality. Despite the considerable guidance he received from his elder, out of resentment, O'Gorman later made a determined effort to credit others as his teachers. He often identified Antonio Ruiz, a neighbor and professional artist, as the source of his knowledge of tempera painting. And even though he'd witnessed his father execute frescoes, he would claim that Ramon Alba Guadarrama, a Rivera assistant, had shared with him the intricacies of that demanding technique. And then there was Rivera himself who, by example, conveyed to the young man the full potential of narrative painting executed on a grand scale. Over the years, O'Gorman never failed to identify Diego as "mi gran maestro."

O'Gorman attended La Veronica, a preparatory school then known as the Colegio Franco-Ingles. At this Jesuit school he received his first exposure to anarcho-syndicalist ideas from a professor who had his students read Proudhon on the sources of poverty. The young man continued to absorb socialist notions when, at age seventeen, he enrolled in the School of Architecture within the National Academy of Fine Arts. After classes he sometimes frequented the nearby National Preparatory School where, in the early twenties, Minister of Education Jose Vasconcellos had commissioned promising artists to execute murals dealing with revolutionary themes. It was during the years 1921-22, while Rivera was completing his first public mural at "La Prepa," that O'Gorman met the great painter. El Sapo, as the students liked to call the corpulent master, enjoyed discussing his work as he painted away on his scaffold. In time, a lasting friendship developed between O'Gorman and Rivera and by extension with Frida Kahlo as well.

As an architecture student, O'Gorman fell under the spell of functionalism as espoused by the Bauhaus architects and especially Le Corbusier. At the time, a hybrid "Hollywood-Hispanic" style was much in vogue. Well-to-do families clamored for houses in Las Lomas de Chapultepec that featured a California take on the colonial traditions of Mexico. As a recent convert to socialism, O'Gorman found these ostentatious pastiches offensive and instead espoused the construction of inexpensive, spare, elemental structures that could be made available to the masses. After graduating, O'Gorman entered into a professional partnership with one of his professors, Jose Villagran Garcia, a fellow alumnus twenty-three years his senior. In short order O'Gorman began to put theory into practice by designing and building numerous minimalist residences. Curiously, his first client proved to be his father, for whom he did a small studio at Palmas 81, close to the family home. (A painting by Cecil O'Gorman of his son at his drawing board suggests he took considerable pride in the young man's practical profession.) In the late twenties and early thirties, O'Gorman designed several more minimalist residences of exposed concrete for such enlightened clients as anthropologist Frances Toor, astronomer Luis Enrique Erro, art historian Manuel Toussaint, and fellow artist Julio Castellanos. Through Dr. Francisco Bassols, for whom he did a house, he also gained a string of commissions from the secretary of public education to design inexpensive rural schools throughout the republic.

O'Gorman's reputation, as an architect worthy of attention, probably benefited most when, in 1931, the recently married Frida and Diego hired him to design separate but adjoining house-studios. He came up with a daring design that joined the two structures with an elevated bridge. Upon completion, Diego embraced the new facility with enthusiasm, but Frida resisted working in such close proximity to her problematic husband. Instead, she mostly worked in a separate studio overlooking the garden within the famous Casa Azul complex in Coyoacan. Today, the two studio-houses, near the corner of Calles Altavista and Palraas in San Angel, still survive. Recently renovated, they now serve as a museum in memory of the three artists.

But O'Gorman never abandoned his interest in drawing and painting. In 1924, while still a student, he did frescoed friezes and a small mural at a cantina called Salon Bach, which was on the ground floor of an architectural office where he worked as a part-time draftsman. At about the same time he decorated three pulquerias, which no longer survive. At one, called Los Fifis, he began to express a nascent socialist viewpoint by portraying members of three social strata: aristocrats drinking from crystal goblets, intellectuals lost in political debates, and moneyless workers just making music. In 1931, in a painting competition sponsored by the Toltec Cement Company, he canoe away with first prize at the expense of Rufino Tamayo, the runner-up. Forever after, the two competitors would maintain a feuding enmity.

Despite his considerable success as a socially conscious architect, by the late thirties O'Gorman essentially abandoned his practice in favor of painting fulltime. This decision came on the heels of a successful albeit controversial, tripartite mural for Mexico City's old air terminal, the antecedent of Benito Juarez International Airport. For the central section (measuring ten feet high by forty feet long), O'Gorman decided to use tempera, despite the demands of such a painstaking technique. To fulfill the requirements of the assigned theme--the history of aviation--he laid out an imagined landscape populated by groups of notables associated with the conquest of the skies. At the far left he paired the Aztec emperor Netzahualcoyotl, who is said to have envisioned a glider modeled after a bat, with Leonardo da Vinci, who designed flying machines inspired by the physiognomy of birds. In a section devoted to balloons, he depicted the Montgolfier brothers with their hot-air version and Pilatre de Rozier with his hydrogen-filled model. Sequentially, from left to right, O'Gorman managed to pay homage to many other pioneers, including the Wright brothers, Santos Dumont, Henri Farman, Louis Bleriot, Glenn Curtiss, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, and Beryl Markham. To aid in identifying his players he inserted labels, a device he would use increasingly throughout his career. To express his solidarity with Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas's decision to expropriate the holdings of foreign petroleum companies, he devoted a prominent central section of the mural to his country's burgeoning oil industry.

While the central section met with favor, two overtly political side frescoes, measuring thirteen feet by thirteen feet, did not. In scenes called Los mitos religiosas and Los mitos paganos, O'Gorman ridiculed the ruling class, church, military, and foreign capitalists by portraying them as villainous caricatures. Despite their obvious identity he hammered home his message with bitter labels alluding to flight in a social context. In one instance he placed a sign reading "Castigo de muerte a quien trate de volar" next to a post from which flyers in pre-Conquest times would have leaped in imitation of feathered deities. (He depicted the column as a gallows from which native people hang above piles of burning codices.) Needless to say, none of this settled well with a sponsor hoping to engender good will among travelers transiting the waiting area. Nor did O'Gorman's inclusion of Hitler and Mussolini as serpents meet with approval at a time when Mexico still maintained full diplomatic relations with the Axis countries. When the German ambassador lodged a formal protest, O'Gorman was denied access to the nearly finished work. Instead, over the vehement protests from the likes of Rivera and other prominent artists, a military engineer with little patience for artistic license ordered the immediate destruction of the two offending panels. In 1947, O'Gorman replicated Los mitos paganos but never found time to repaint the companion panel, which is only known through photographs and the original cartoon.

During the uproar of the airport project, O'Gorman met and married a sculptor from the United States named Helen Fowler, who had come to Mexico to work with Rivera. About a year after their 1938 wedding in Chicago, they took up residence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to pursue a Jewish cultural center mural project at the invitation of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., whom they'd met at Rivera's studio. Kaufmann's philanthropist father, famous for his Frank Lloyd Wright--designed home, Fallingwater, had agreed to pay the bill. During his five-month residency O'Gorman executed more than a dozen, full-sized cartoons strongly critical of modern civilization. In that Edgar Kaufmann, St., had made his fortune through the application of capitalist principles, O'Gorman's mostly Marxist version of events received a frosty reception. Although the murals were never realized, the senior Kaufmann eventually sent him a check to subsidize a future mural installation of his own choosing back in Mexico.

Not long after O'Gorman identified just such a project the convent church of San Agustin in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, which, during the Cardenas administration had been converted into a library to honor Gertrudis Bocanegra, a heroine of the independence movement. For an enormous but still vacant wall within the nave, he proposed a pictorial narrative devoted to the history of Michoacan. On the basis of some preliminary sketches, the government agency overseeing the renovation, accepted his proposal. Thereafter, during the better part of two years, he frescoed a forty-by-forty-five-foot area with a series of densely populated scenes with Lake Patzcuaro and regional volcanoes in the distance. O'Gorman's depictions of mostly violence and suffering from pre-Conquest times to the present ultimately reflected his own dim view of humankind, but his use of lively color and richly imagined details leavened the message. In keeping with a Renaissance tradition, O'Gorman inserted himself on the far left at the very bottom standing next to his wife who, during much of the project, read to him aloud to relieve the boredom of his arduous task.

A fifteen-year hiatus from mural painting followed, during which O'Gorman worked mostly at a minimalist studio-house he'd built for himself at Calle Jardin 88 in San Angel. He pursued a wide range of easel-sized projects that reflected both diverse influences and frequent pessimism regarding the world around him. Among portraits from this period is a respectful homage to Orozco and a stiff likeness of his wife that hints at the troubled marriage that would follow. (Due to clashing personalities they, like the Riveras, would twice marry and divorce.) He also received a steady stream of portrait commissions from wealthy society women. As a landscape artist he took some cues from the nineteenth-century Mexican master Jose Maria Velasco, whose careful attention to detail coincided with O'Gorman's own need to scrutinize every aspect of his subject matter. Painting in plein air was not for him. Instead he usually sketched the scenes in a notebook and made notations as to color before completing the work in the studio. Some landscapes like Recuerdo de Chalma (1942), Recuerdo de Los Remedios (1943) and Paisaje de Patzcuaro (1948) celebrate the natural beauty of places he loved. Others involved historical commentary. For example, the large cityscape, La ciudad de Mexico (1947), with its banner reading "Viva Mexico" and a bricklayer building the new metropolis, employs a trompe l'oeil device: two hands holding a 1540 map for comparison. Decidedly more pessimistic are such works as Paisaje con llamas (1943) and De unas ruinas nacen otras ruinas (1949), which convey his belief that human greed, mindless violence, and disregard for the environment were destroying the world. A work like Proyecto funebre at capitalismo industrial (1943) identifies, in the artist's opinion, the culprits: refineries, factories, smelters, and power plants that eventually supplant the natural setting upon which all life depends. Equally moving is a tempera painting called Los mitos, done just before the end of World War II, which appropriates Bosch-like details to depict so-called civilization sliding into an inferno.

Interest in the Flemish school of painting, with its attention to detail, optical games, and trompe l'oeil effects, also appears in O'Gorman's Autoretrato multiple (1950). In this complex, visual conundrum, a brush in the artist's hand from beyond the picture plane paints the artist seen from the rear painting a portrait of himself in the company of his mirrored reflection. As if that Borgesian sequence of creation were not enough, O'Gorman also portrays himself as architect, holding the actual preliminary drawing for the entire work. Under the word Esquizofrenia, a little red devil perched on his shoulder seems to taunt him regarding his two identities. While passing wind, he, too, paints with a tiny brush and palette while from his tail hangs a sign reading, "Voy mas a mi." O'Gorman scattered other messages throughout the painting, including a monstrous insect whose note reads, "Soy de la academ/a" and a frog's that says, "Pinta a mi." Most moving is the note in the beak of a yellow bird that reads, "Ensename pintar y te ensenare a volar.

It was not by chance that O'Gorman decided to include his architectural self in his masterpiece. During the previous year he had begun work on a new house with studio spaces for himself and his wife. Rather abruptly he decided to abandon the severe functionalism he'd espoused for years in favor of an organic approach suggested by Wright and Gaudi. O'Gorman himself admitted he took many of his cues from the autodidactic postman, Ferdinand Cheval who, during the late nineteenth century, at Hauterives, France, spent thirty-three years building his Palais Ideal out of stone, mosaic chips, glass, and reinforced concrete. O'Gorman decided to do something similar by incorporating a natural grotto within a wildly fantastic concrete confection that he personally assembled on Avenida San Jeronimo in the capital's lava-capped Pedregal district. He, too, encrusted the exterior surface with mosaics of mostly colored stones to create motifs and sculpted figures reminiscent of pre-Columbian structures. His wife, who had become an authority on Mexican flowers (years later she published a book of watercolors on this topic) laid out a garden of dense foliage to give the complex the flavor of an overgrown rain. Not surprisingly, the project attracted considerable attention within Mexico and beyond. In the late fifties, Life Magazine featured the O'Gorman house in an article entitled: "Houses Architects Live in: Mosaic-Mad Grotto near Mexico City."

The use of mosaics of natural stone had actually begun with Rivera who, with O'Gorman's assistance, had decorated the exterior of his Anahuacalli museum with pre-Conquest motifs. Before tackling the demands of his own unusual house, O'Gorman further experimented with the technique on a 1947 house for the composer Conlon Nancarrow. He went on to utilize this method for the exterior decoration of the Secretariat of Communications and Transport (1952-53), the Hotel Posada de la Mision at Taxco (1955-56), and the Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas (1966-67). Most famous, though, are the immense expanses of mosaics he designed for the four sides of the central library on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). From high on a scaffold, for three years (1949-51), O'Gorman labored mightily to bring into being nearly forty-eight-hundred square yards of mosaics in natural stone. Years later Poniatowska likened his Alegoria de Mexico to a "giant codex" of Mexican culture.

The success of these projects brought O'Gorman considerable fame and a measure of contentment, as did the adoption in 1956 of a little girl whom he and his wife christened Maria Elena O'Gorman Fowler. The artist did several portraits of her, including a pencil drawing from 1964, which identifies her by the nickname Bunny. Despite the joy she brought him, during much of the fifties O'Gorman suffered great sadness due to the passing of Frida Kahlo, with whom he had marched in support of many leftist causes. Three years after her death, in 1954, O'Gorman was hit equally hard when Diego succumbed to a heart attack. In 1958, in homage to his mentor and friend, O'Gorman did a beautiful tempera painting based on a photograph of the great master standing next to his easel.

In 1960, O'Gorman received a commission to execute an enormous (fifteen-by-fifty-two-feet) mural for the National Museum of History at Mexico City's Chapultepec Castle. Originally Rivera had accepted the project but with his passing, the museum director, Antonio Arriaga Ochoa, asked O'Gorman to take it on. He spent at least a year and a half thoroughly researching Mexico's struggle for independence, the assigned theme. He mined archives to obtain likenesses of the principle players. He also sought information about costume styles, architectural details, weaponry, flags, and banners and the precise wording of key documents of the period. O'Gorman worked for nearly two years on his so-called Retablo de la Independencia. With the sort of miniaturist fidelity one associates with Italian Renaissance masters like Benozzo Gozzoli or Fra Angelico, he painstakingly replicated more than a hundred historical individuals or figures representing specific types set against a band of landscape typical of different regions of the republic. In the early seventies he returned to Chapultepec Castle to do two more frescoed panels in the Sala de la Revolucion. Each measures about fifteen by twenty-one feet. One covers the reign of Porfirio Diaz as a prelude to the revolution; the other deals with the revolution itself. Between these two massive projects, he undertook yet another: the commission by the Banco Internacional, S.A. (Bital) devoted to the theme of credit transforming Mexico. As was his habit, he used small brushes to generate minute brush strokes as he replicated every detail of this generally positive depiction of capitalism at work. He must have felt good about the outcome because he decided to portray himself in overalls at the far right of this eighty-five-feet-long panel. Standing at his side is his daughter, who holds a paper sheet upon which he acknowledges help received from two assistants.

Frequent marital strife characterized the last decade of O'Gorman's life, as did health problems exacerbated by prolonged fasting, which the artist believed would relieve his body of toxicity. When financial problems obliged him to sell his beloved house in the Pedregal, he had to suffer the added indignity of seeing it demolished by the new owner. He retreated to the old house on Calle Jardin, where he executed portrait commissions to make ends meet. The paintings he did for himself embraced mostly troubling themes about which he would rage by means of bizarre, surreal visual language. In the mid-seventies, he did three caustic indictments of modern civilization entitled Nuestra civilizacion maravillosa; Neofascismo imperialista, corrupcion y polucion en nuestra maravillosa civilizacion; and La humanidad: Cancer del mundo organico. Despite the clinical depression from which he was suffering--he was under the constant care of a doctor for whom he did a painting in appreciation of his efforts--in better moments he found the courage to paint late tributes to such heroes as Gaudi, Cheval, and the Renaissance illusionist Ginseppe Arciboldo. In anticipation of his own end, he called one of his last paintings, Retrato necrofilico en mi vejez. A photograph from the same time shows O'Gorman deep in thought, holding a cane, and looking old beyond his years. After repeated threats to do so, he committed suicide, in January 1982. Just as his life was defined by conflict on many levels, so too were his depictions of humankind's struggle to coexist upon an overcrowded and much-abused planet. More than ever, his work remains relevant to our times.

Caleb Bach is a former teacher of Spanish and art history and a longtime contributor to Americas. He would like to thank Rommel Scorza Gaxiola, of Fomento Cultural Banamex, for providing research materials, and to acknowledge the book O'Gorman, edited by Sandro Landucci Lerdo de Tejada, as a valuable source of information on the artist.